The following story was written and submitted by local photographer Clelia Jane Sheppard. For more information about Clelia and her work, visit her website Clelia Jane Photography.
We face a daily barrage of photographs from people of every imaginable background. The ease of technology in the form of incredibly advanced digital cameras and smartphones has allowed the average passerby to momentarily transform into a photographer with the simple ease of a sleek iPad touch screen or the gentle press of a Canon digital camera. Anyone can be a photographer, but does that mean it is a lost art? From the first daguerreotype to emerge in the 1840s to the advent of Kodak, the first consumer-friendly camera, to the cascade of convenience-based innovations thereafter, it is easy to forget the stylistic significance found in the roots of photography itself. Although we may not realize it, we are in constant pursuit of styles and techniques long forgotten to the masses but nonetheless influential to our photographs today, in all their modern glory.
In this paper we shall examine how the history of photographic styles, though constantly in transience, has dramatically influenced the styles in which we take photographs today, proving that a new name and technology does not change the relevance of the historical process. In order to understand the realm of photography today, we have to understand the progression of photographic purpose, the people who influenced photography, inventions and processes and finally how different styles of photography remain influential today, despite the modern facade.
The purpose of this paper is not to thoroughly investigate the history of photography, but rather how the image of the real, relative to the state of technology, evolved into the type of photos we know today. Furthermore, each technical limitation came with a style that we are drawn to as a sort of nostalgia for ages begone. Understanding the limits and advantages of each technical style helps us take better photographs today, even though we no longer have to go through the painstaking ritual of the daguerreotype, calotype or wet collodion process of former days.
Historically speaking, photography is a concept developed slowly over time, with the input of various great thinkers. From Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek Mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid who described a pinhole camera in the 4th and 5th centuries, to Isaac Newton’s analysis of the color spectrum, and Joseph Nicephore Niepce’s first permanent crude photograph in 1826, the journey to “Kodak Moment” and iPhone direct uploading to Facebook has been a rewarding albeit arduous task (Alistair). It is interesting to compare the difference of photographic process today and the labor-intensive processes from over a century ago. Photography was more of a physical process; involving cumbersome equipment, eager assistants, scratching negatives, bleaching and toning prints, and manual extraction of prints. An important revolution in the realm of photography was the daguerreotype method, discovered and refined by French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre in the 1830s (Crawford). Daguerre discovered that exposing an image onto a copper plate coated with iodized silver would produce a lasting image if it was simultaneously exposed to mercury vapor and fixed with a common salt solution (Barger). The daguerreotype produced a superior quality of photograph, suited for portraiture, and was able to last forever if properly conserved. However, this process was also labor-intensive, expensive, complicated and subjects had to remain absolutely still. Another important contributor and figurehead of the photographic process was William Henry Talbot. Talbot developed a similar photographic process to Daguerre in England around 1840. In Talbot’s “Calotype” process, photographic paper was brushed with a salt solution, dried, brushed with a silver nitrate solution, and exhaustingly dried again in order to create a silver chloride. Talbot then added gallic acid, increasing the paper’s sensitivity to light photons. After exposure, the image was fixed with yet another iodized solution. To make a physical print, the negative was placed on top of more photo paper, laid flat in a glass frame, and allowed to develop in sunlight. (Baxter). To say these processes were complex would be an understatement. The greatest advantages of the calotype process were readily achievable copies and easy handling for the more amateur demographic of budding photographers. Unfortunately, the calotype was of inferior detailed quality, required slower exposure time, and easily faded over time.
The Daguerreotype and Calotype processes were soon rendered obsolete by the collodion process invented simultaneously by Frederick Scott Archer and Gustave Le Gray around 1850 (Upton,&.,). The Collodion process produced a negative image on a transparent support glass. This was an improvement over the calotype process of Talbot which relied on paper negatives and the daguerreotype which produced a unique and unreplicable positive image. The collodion process involves the dissolution of bromide, iodide or chloride into a collodion which is then poured onto a clean glass plate where it must be developed when moist by other additional chemicals. (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The collodion process combined the desirable qualities of both processes enabling the photographer to theoretically produce an unlimited number of prints from a single negative with the sharpness and clarity of the daguerrotype. Although this process was relatively inexpensive and fast, it was extremely difficult to finish before the plate dried. The photographer had no more than ten minutes to complete the whole process and it required a “portable” darkroom. Furthermore, the silver nitrate bath was a source of problems because it lost effectiveness over time. The wet-collodion process was sensitive only to blue light, so warm colors appeared dark and cool colors appeared light. Many inventors dried to develop a dry collodion process, which could be shot and developed sometime after coating but none of them were ever ruly practical and consistent in operation. Many worked to an extent, but regardless of the process used they rendered the plate extremely slow requiring three to ten times more exposure than a wet plate (Wood).
Certain aspects of photos today are reminiscent of each of these processes: the dark contrast of the daguerreotype, the overexposure of a kodak, the beauty of still landscapes and portraits of the calotype process, or the chemical imperfections along the edges that coincidentally provide excellent frame. With every flaw came an inherently beautiful result that we are obsessed with replicating today on our iPhones via Instagram or with Photoshop filters. For instance, the work of Roger Fenton, a British pioneer of war photography from the latter part of the nineteenth century, created astounding images. Fenton was limited to his choice of motifs because of the cumbersome size and nature of his photographic equipment. He could only take pictures with long exposures, so his products were of unmoving objects and mostly posed pictures with a sprinkling of landscapes. His most famous work was a series of photos called The Valley of the Shadow of Death, considered by modern photographers to be a seminal piece of war photography (Suellentrop). In the sepia-tone photo depicting a field of cannonballs strewn about after the ravages of the Crimean War in 1855, the slightly disturbed frame and chemical imperfection overall add to a certain stillness and timelessness to the piece. There is, of course, another black-and-white version of the photo, equally stunning and capable of instilling the gravity of the war situation. In a subtle and peaceful way, he was able to convey the gravity of the wreckage that is inevitably wrought from war. Today, if one peruses the vast array of photographic options on our sleek technology, we find many options for photographic effects. Fenton’s photo was taken in 1855, using the waxed paper calotype process, a process of extreme dexterity. Although we have changed the methodology of taking the photo, we can see now that the effect on his photos from the technical imperfections of the calotype is something we strive to recreate today.
Regardless of our awareness, every modern consumer of photographic equipment is impacted by the history of photography. Our love for the effects each technical limitation produced is obvious in our obsession with the popular interface Instagram. The arbitrary label of “Earlybird” a type of Instagram filter produces faded, blurred colors with an emphasis on yellow and beige (Garber). There is another effect called “Toaster” with corner vignetting or “Inkwell” that produces a black-and-white high contrast reminiscent of Gustave Le Gray’s combination printing for The Great Wave, Séte. Even with the ease of our technology today, we want to have signs of a highly intuitive approach to the physical process of making a photograph, including scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and an actual hands-in-the-chemicals printing technique. The influence of the daguerreotype, calotype, and wet collodion process are extremely important to the styles of photos we casually capture today.
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