Page 6 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 6/146
the artist to see a virtual image of the sitter or the scene through one eye, while drawing normally, using the lucida image as a guide - a bit like the modern augmented reality technology, which supe- rimposes a virtual (usually computer-generated) image over our normal sight, by means of a mono- cular screen like Google Glasses. The artist David Hockney has made an in-depth study of how ar- tists from the Renaissance onwards may have used convex mirrors and other optical devices - in- cluding the 19th century camera lucida - to aid their drawing. He cites Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding in this thesis, and pays especial attention to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and his likely use of the camera lucida in his later portrait drawings. See David Hockney: Secret Knowledge: Re- discovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters (2001).
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/oct/20/highereducation.news
Coincident with the emergence of the art-science of photography is the modernisation of some ar- chaic optical tools - drawing aids - like the camera obscura (pinhole camera), and the development of new tools like Wollaston’s Camera Lucida - a pocket-size prismatic device that artists could use to check the precision of their drawing. The idea of a personal aide to capture aspects of visual real- ity (starting with the humble pencil and paper) of course eventually resulted in the development of Kodak’s Brownie Box Camera (by 1900), the Leica and other 35mm cameras by the 1930s, digital camcorders like the Flip (2007) and of course the ubiquitous camera-equipped smart-phones that we use now. Projecting forward, we must assume that soon we will all have numerous minuscule wearable pin-head cameras, tracking and recording reality in 2d - and in 3d - and across the elec- tromagnetic spectrum. Making coherent movies and other art-works with these kind of resources will be the challenge of the next few decades.
Nicephore Niepce: Heliographs 1827. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce
Niepce was above all an inventor - he invented the ‘velocipide’ - a kind of early bicycle, and he and his brother had invented the first internal combustion engine (c 1837) but weren’t successful in productivising it. From c1816, Niepce had been experimenting (like Wedgwood a few years before him) with light-sensitive materials. Niepce was impressed with the new printing technique of litho- graphy, and perhaps imagined how he could somehow use the camera obscura to capture an image and print it as a lithograph. It was around 1816 that he began using silver-chloride (as a photo-sen- sitive solution coated onto paper), but - again like Wedgwood - could not find the means to fix the image on an exposed plate - as soon as the paper was viewed in daylight, the image turned a uni- versal black. Niepce went on to experiment with light-sensitive bitumen of Judea - where sunlight hardened the bitumen and the unexposed areas could be washed away with a solvent - leaving a masked area that could be etched with acid, to produce an etched printing plate. (He called this new process heliography or sun-drawing). Between 1824-1827 Niepce succeeded in fixing the exposed litho-stone and making the first photograph. The earliest surviving camera heliograph of the real world is this View from the Window at La Gras (1927), and from the period 1822 - 1823, we also have a copy he made of an older etched or engraved print of Cardinal d’Ambrose - one of the earliest ca- meraless contact prints. From 1826 onwards Niepce replaced