Making Pictures, Then and Now
In 2002 as I prepared for a trip to England with a group of University students, I came across several references to the Picturesque style of landscape design and became intrigued by the usage (and meaning) of the word in a context disconnected (or so I thought at the time) to photographic pictures. I was looking at landscape parks such as Stowe, Stourhead, Prior Park, and a number of smaller urban parks in London that had been designed by Humphry Repton or Lancelot "Capability" Brown. Following this new tangent led me to the early or pre-Romantic period and its close association with Picturesque beauty and tourism. Many consider Gilpin's Picturesque tour of the Wye in 1770 as the beginnings of tourism as we know it today -- as a leisure pursuit.
Looking into this new form of social venture I discovered the tourist's use of the Claude Glass, named for the 17th century French landscape painter, Claude Lorrain. Very little modern literature discusses this phenomena or how wide-spread was its usage. Well known (in its time) as both an artist's tool and the tourists' portable picture-in-a-frame, the Claude Glass was an immediate, but temporary hand-held picture. It's use was probably made more common by the many journal accounts praising its effects. Most famously, Thomas Gray, well-known poet of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard wrote to his friend Mason in 1769 (extracts from his daily journal)
Gray's and Talbot's wish was for a more permanent image; photography offered that, but with a fairly large investment in equipment, chemistry, and time. At best, the image was still several painstaking steps away from that moment when the magic shimmered on the glass surface. For the better part of its history photography has been touted as instantaneous, but the reality was most often a mild disappointment. This has also been one of the driving forces behind the continued evolution of inventions within the medium. George Eastman's frustration with the chemically-complex nature of photography led him to first develop roll film, then a camera easy enough for a child to use, with the promise of "just push the button and we'll (Eastman Kodak) do the rest." Even Polaroid's "instant film" processes took sixty seconds to deliver the goods.
Today, probaly for the first time in photographic history, composition, exposure, and viewing are a seamless, unified event.
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In my own experience with a wide variety of camera styles, from my childhood toy camera to my first digital camera, composing a view, scene, picture (...whatever) is a very basic creative act. Whether holding a Claude Glass, digital camera, camera phone or the latest pda, we make pictures by adhering to a set of visual conventions most people take for granted. To my thinking, we've just arrived at that point of fixing and transmitting that picture Gray viewed back in the fall of 1769.
Here's looking at looking.
In 2002 as I prepared for a trip to England with a group of University students, I came across several references to the Picturesque style of landscape design and became intrigued by the usage (and meaning) of the word in a context disconnected (or so I thought at the time) to photographic pictures. I was looking at landscape parks such as Stowe, Stourhead, Prior Park, and a number of smaller urban parks in London that had been designed by Humphry Repton or Lancelot "Capability" Brown. Following this new tangent led me to the early or pre-Romantic period and its close association with Picturesque beauty and tourism. Many consider Gilpin's Picturesque tour of the Wye in 1770 as the beginnings of tourism as we know it today -- as a leisure pursuit.
Looking into this new form of social venture I discovered the tourist's use of the Claude Glass, named for the 17th century French landscape painter, Claude Lorrain. Very little modern literature discusses this phenomena or how wide-spread was its usage. Well known (in its time) as both an artist's tool and the tourists' portable picture-in-a-frame, the Claude Glass was an immediate, but temporary hand-held picture. It's use was probably made more common by the many journal accounts praising its effects. Most famously, Thomas Gray, well-known poet of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard wrote to his friend Mason in 1769 (extracts from his daily journal)
"...From hence I got to the Parsonage a little before sunset & saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmit (sic) to you & fix it in all the softness of its living colors, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds".Other more modern notices include a short essay by Rebecca Solnit, A Small Piece of Somewhere Else: The History of the Rearview Mirror; six or so pages in Geoffrey Batchen's Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography; also Each Wild Idea, and a recent publication by French author, Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass : Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art. I was disappointed and delighted simultaneously by this last book. The disappointment came from its lack of any specific connection with photographic history (except the act of composition) and my delight came from the same thing -- I still have plenty of unclaimed workspace on the Claude Glass! I'd contend it has been largely overshadowed in the history of photography by other optical devices, namely the camera obscura and the camera lucida. The cultural desire to create well-composed pictures was certainly a part of the interest in all things Picturesque, as evidenced in the many journals with drawings from the period. W. H Talbot and Sir John Herschel both executed drawings of landscape. In fact Talbot's opinion of the camera lucida provided him with an additional incentive for fixing images in a more permanent form, with less demand for traditional drawing skills.
Gray's and Talbot's wish was for a more permanent image; photography offered that, but with a fairly large investment in equipment, chemistry, and time. At best, the image was still several painstaking steps away from that moment when the magic shimmered on the glass surface. For the better part of its history photography has been touted as instantaneous, but the reality was most often a mild disappointment. This has also been one of the driving forces behind the continued evolution of inventions within the medium. George Eastman's frustration with the chemically-complex nature of photography led him to first develop roll film, then a camera easy enough for a child to use, with the promise of "just push the button and we'll (Eastman Kodak) do the rest." Even Polaroid's "instant film" processes took sixty seconds to deliver the goods.
Today, probaly for the first time in photographic history, composition, exposure, and viewing are a seamless, unified event.
______________________________
In my own experience with a wide variety of camera styles, from my childhood toy camera to my first digital camera, composing a view, scene, picture (...whatever) is a very basic creative act. Whether holding a Claude Glass, digital camera, camera phone or the latest pda, we make pictures by adhering to a set of visual conventions most people take for granted. To my thinking, we've just arrived at that point of fixing and transmitting that picture Gray viewed back in the fall of 1769.
Here's looking at looking.
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