Page 20 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 20/146
framing and arbitrary capture of a scene in a snap-shot. The ability to superimpose a frame - a picture frame no less - on any aspect of our field of vision - like holding two hands out with fin- gers and thumbs making a rectangle - to do this with a camera - and make a permanent recording of the scene - must have seemed miraculous for everyone at first - a recording of your selectively framed vision, a permanent record of your vision, as carefully selective or as randomly arbitrary as you wanted. A function also of our attention - we are focussed on the most interesting aspect of the scene, but the photograph is not selective - it captures everything we see, relevant to our attention-focus or not.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: Cliché verre prints c1854.
Along with his contemporary Charles Francoise Daubigny, Corot enjoyed the reprographic freedom of the Cliché verre (glass-picture) well into the mid-century. Cliché verre was a method of making photographic contact-prints of drawings. The artist would make a sketch on a glass plate that had been covered with a thin layer of light-proof varnish (or smoked with a tallow candle). The sketch was made with a pen, needle, hat-pin or other sharp implement, then the plate was placed over a photo-sensitised sheet of paper and laid in the sunlight. The resulting image - black lines and shad- ing appeared where the artist’s sketch had made the ground transparent - was a print - a hybrid of drawing and photography, that could be made in multiples. The central image above gives some idea of the mark-making freedom of this frictionless drawing medium, and the image on the right (from 1854) is a fragment of a larger landscape with horses. Corot was a master at combining clas- sical allegorical themes with the spirit and practice of drawing and painting outdoors in the open air (en plein air) - a practice that was adopted by the Impressionists and eventually became a normal practice alongside studio-painting.
Cliché verre or 'Glass Pictures' are one of earliest reprographic technologies spun-off from photo- graphy - from the heliograph, or direct Sun contact-print discovered by Thomas Wedgwood, Nice- phore Niepce, William Henry Fox Talbot, John Herschel and others (1800 to 1860s). The joy of cliche verre is the flexibility and ease of use of the technique, once the glass plate has been prepared - drawing through the varnish or other light-proof layer was as easy as drawing with a pencil, and a multiple of prints could be made from the same plate - and you didn't need a printing press.
https://onthisdateinphotography.com/2017/07/16/july-16-cliche-verre/