Page 70 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 70/146
Emil Otto Hoppé: Vaslav Nijinsky as Rose in Le Spectre de la Rose 1914.
This startling portrait of the world famous Vaslav Njinsky reveals something of the dancer’s com- plex character. His diaries, edited by Joan Acocella and published in 1995, are a further revelation of this enormously self-obsessed genius, who became famous for his performances with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and signed his poems and missives as God Njinsky. The Anglo-German Hoppé was, during this period, the most famous photographic portrait artist, working in London, (making por- traits of Einstein, Marinetti, Ezra Pound etc); but it is this trans-gender full-frontal of Nijinsky - the dancer who helped make the Ballets Russes world famous, that pierces with its acuity and insight into his character. ‘Self-portrait’ by Hoppe (1910), coloured by Loredana Crupi.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/215401/vaslav-nijinsky-in-le-spectre-de-la-rose-m-nijinsky-le-spectre-de-la-rose
Several historians of the art of the photograph have pointed out that Hoppé was certainly as famous as most of his sitters in this period, and this remarkable image of Vaslav Njinsky in makeup for his role in Le Spectre de la Rose (1911) stands as a tribute to Hoppé’s talents - it's a very modernist photograph - a portrait stripped to its essence, with no pictorialist effects, no contextual trappings such as those deployed by de Meyer, Cecil Beaton and others at this time.
But exactly what impact did the Movies have on Photography? and vice-versa? This period - c1905- 1930 - was a most dynamic period in media-art developments. Of course the expansion of photo- graphy into stop-motion and motion-tracking techniques in the 1870s and 1880s - by photographers like Muybridge, Marey, Demeny and Eakins - had played a seminal role in developing cinemato- graphy, so ‘motion pictures’ derived from rapidly and sequentially projected still images were, it seems in retrospect, partly a product of photography. The Film Industry - rapidly developing in the teens of the 20th century - soon established new roles for the still photograph, specifically in con- tinuity, and in publicity and promotion. In early cinema it was George Albert Smith who had made the first Big Close-Ups (BCU) in 1900, followed by Edwin Stanton Porter in his Great Train Robbery of 1903. Cinematographers were re-inventing photography too. It was the Futurists - both painters and photographers - who began to tackle some of the ‘visual effects’ of capturing motion in a single image.