Page 25 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 25/146
Henry Peach Robinson: Bringing Home the May 1862.
Composite/combination print from several negatives. With his contemporary Oscar Rejlander, Robinson was a pioneer of ‘pictorialist’ photography. The ‘May’ in this case is the blossom of the
Hawthorn - a symbol of free love, of May Day festivals, a celebration of Spring.
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Peach Robinson and Oscar Rejlander were the first to explore the potential of making multiple indi- vidual negatives of a scene and then reconstructing it by compositing each printing together in one final positive print. Except in this case, and in Rejlander’s spectacular The Two Ways of Life (1857), the artist-photographers were composing an imaginary image, casting, styling and setting the component poses before making the final artwork. David Octavius Hill, the Scottish pioneer (also a painter before he discovered photography) had made individual photographic portraits of the 474 sitters in his gigantic First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland (1843), but had then composited them using traditional oil-painting techniques (using the indididual photo-portraits as reference). Rejlander and Peach Robinson then were the first to realise the true advantages of pho- tography as a compositing medium - some 130 years before such compositing became common- place in tools like Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Even before these two brilliant software apps, this kind of digital compositing was available in early industrial reprographic paintboxes and elec- tronic page-make-up and compositing machines like the Crosfield (Crosfield Lasergravure Electron- ic Page Composition system c1979) and Scitex (Scitex Response300 1979) - very expensive mini- computer based systems. Back in the 1860s Rejlander and Peach Robinson were making expos- ures on glass plates (using the wet-collodion process) then presumedly making prints on paper, assembling these into their intended composition by careful cutting and pasting, then re-photo- graphing the resulting image to make a final print. Armed with this experience - and his most suc- cessful composite Bringing Home the May - Peach Robinson went on to write The Pictorial Effect in Photography (1867), his manifesto for the Pictorialist movement that he founded. This was a