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Edgar Degas: use of photography + The Blue Dancers 1877. London (from 1873 - 1904).
Aaron Scharf and others have noted the important impact of photography on the pictorial compositions of Degas from around the 1860s. Scharf mentions ‘the peculiar dencentralised compositions’: “Placed at the edge of the picture space, the figures seem to communicate with something outside, enhancing the fortuitous character of the subjects, and creating an implied space external to the paintings - ‘in the wings’, so to speak. These are entirely germaine to snapshot photographs of the time, or for that matter any time.” (Scharf: Art and Photography 1966, p187). Several of Degas’ own photographs survive from this period, and in many of his paintings the ‘cropping’ of the picture is akin to the sometimes arbitrary cropping or framing of a camera lens. Courbet and others had used photographic reference as early as 1853 (see Courbet: The Bathers 1853, and compare with Julien Vallou de Villeneuve: Henriette Bonnion (photograph commissioned by Courbet, 1853), but Degas is inspired by the chance nature of the photographic composition as well as the reference value of the photograph. Scharf also points to the lens-aberrations of rational perspective that were adopted by Degas - resulting in the flattening of perspective in paintings like The Blue Dancers (above). The impact of photography was to occasion a rethinking of painterly perspective - and indeed the role of the artist - in the late 19th century, preparing us for the radical pictorial revolution of Cubism in the early 20th century.
The actuality of the effect of lens aberrations on photographs had been highlighted by Jules Duboscq’s experimental Grimatiscope (1870) - a device with mechanically adjustable lens designed to exaggerate distortions in the photograph. But of course, here Degas is obviously attracted to the chance nature of the framing of an image that results from what John Herschel christened the ‘snap shot’. Concentrating on capturing an image, we point and click often without considering the background or the viewfinder framing of the subject. And there is no doubt that for a painter, this ability to jump into the modern (respond to the zeitgeist) is very attractive - indeed the camera introduces a new, non-canonical set of compositional possibilities. Later in the 20th century other artists - especially those working in comics, began to adopt and remediate camera-lens effects in their drawings - for example Winsor McCay in Little Nemo in Slumberland (1907), and Jack Kirby in Thor and Silver Surfer (1960s).”