Portraiture and Photography

Antecedents: miniature painting and silhouette

François I of France
Jean Clouet (c.1535, oil on panel)
(Louvre)

Miniature portrait painting evolved in the Renaissance from the art of illuminating books.

Beethoven as a boy,
18th century silhouette portrait

Machine for drawing silhouettes.
From the 1792 English edition of
Johann Kasper Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy

Daguerreotype portraits

Daguerreotype of a young man
by T.H. Newcomer, Philadelphia.
Split leather case with the photographer's imprint on velvet mat.

source: http://www.antiquephotographics.com/Format%20Types/dags&ambros.htm

With rapid developments in the daguerreotype's materials, equipment and technique, portraiture, formerly a privilege of the powerful and the very wealthy, gained popularity and soon developed into a large industry providing a new commodity for mass consumption.

Prestige, utility, the human passion for the mimetic, narcissistic investment and the human desire for the kind of immortality conferred by memory come together in portraiture and in photographic portraiture. Photography can be understood as both an instrument of emotional attachment and the very index of human finitude. Thanks to photography, Zeno’ s paradox of time and distance turns into a description of the existential structures of individuality, a description of the temporal condition of the human subject.

Unknown photographer. Jabez Hogg making a portrait in Richard Beard' s Studio, 1843, daguerreotype

A daguerreotype describing the relationship between photographer and sitter, both immobilized, suspended in the extended instant, during the time of the exposure. The daguerreotype camera is seen in its role of mediator at the center of the composition. The photographic act can only be represented by momentary, real in-action.

Marcelo G. Lima

Comments

Group f/64 Manifesto (1932)

Ansel Adams by Dorothea Lange Group f/64 Manifesto The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group. The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group. Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group. Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those worke

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946): photography and modernity

The Steerage, 1907 "There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage.... I longed to escape from my surroundings and join them.... A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right.... round shapes of iron machinery... I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that, the feeling I had about life..." source: http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/stieglit.htm Portrait of Georgia O' Keefe, 1918

Calotype process

"The calotype negative process was sometimes called the Talbotype , after its inventor. It was not Talbot's first photographic process (introduced in 1839), but it is the one for which he became most known. Henry Talbot devised the calotype in the autumn of 1840, perfected it by the time of its public introduction in mid-1841, and made it the subject of a patent (the patent did not extend to Scotland). The base of a calotype negative, rather than the glass or film to which we have become accustomed, was high quality writing paper. The sheet of paper was carefully selected to have a smooth and uniform texture and, wherever possible, to avoid the watermark. The first stage, conducted in candlelight, was to prepare what Talbot called his iodized paper. The paper was washed over with a solution of silver nitrate and dried by gentle heat. When nearly dr

Introduction to the History of Photography

Search This Blog