Not only did Robinson popularize the emulation of paintings, but he encouraged artificiality. At the very time when painters were moving their easels outdoors, Robinson was building nature under the skylight: shrubbery was mounted on a rolling platform; a brook was improvised from the darkroom drain; clouds were painted on backdrops. He told the beginner that:
Any “dodge, trick, and conjuration” of any kind is open to the photographer’s use. . . . It is his imperative duty to avoid the mean, the bare and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject, to avoid awkward forms, and to correct the unpictur-esque. ... A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial in a picture.
The professional artist’s approach was brought to photography by the French sculptor Antony Samuel Adam-Salomon. He posed his models under
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| eucene durieu: Odalisque, about 1855. Eastman Historical Photographic Collection. Rochester, N.Y. |
the high side light which has ever since been called “Rembrandt lighting." He swathed them with velvet drapery to make the effect more painterly. And he mounted his prints on blue cards printed with the legend “composed and photographed by the sculptor Adam-Salomon.” Alphonse de Lamartine, who had called photography “a plagiarism of nature,” confessed that
after admiring the portraits caught in a burst of sunlight by Adam-Salomon, the emotional sculptor who has given up painting, we no longer claim that photography is a trade — it is an art, it is more than an art, it is a solar phenomenon, where the artist collaborates with the sun.
When some prints of Adam-Salomon’s were shown at the Photographic Society in Edinburgh, an argument broke out: was the effect due to retouching? It was settled only by a microscopic examination of the prints: Adam-Salomon had indeed retouched them.
Retouching had become controversial ever since Franz Hanfstaengl of Munich showed at the 1855 Exposition Universelie in Paris a retouched negative with a print made from it before and after retouching. It was, Nadar recollected, the beginning of a new era in photography. So difficult was it to be-
ADAM-Salomon : Portrait, about 1867. Collection V. Barthelemy, Paris
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| robinson: Frontispiece to Pictorial Effect in Photography, 1869rejlander: “Child Registering PatheticExpression.” Illustration for CharlesDarwin’s Expression of the Emotions, 1872 |
lieve that modifications had been made to the negative rather than to the print that one of Hanfstaengl’s prints was even tested by the somewhat extreme method of bleaching out the silver image entirely with potassium cyanide; no trace of India ink was found.
Not all the work of these self-styled artist-photographers was artificial, sentimental and pretentious. Robinson produced charming genre scenes, such as the simple study of two little girls reading a book, used as a frontispiece to Pictorial Effect. Rejlander pioneered in instantaneous photography with a series of photographs showing the most fleeting facial expression for Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions (1872).
There was a curious duality apparent in the writings and work of artistphotographers. Robinson on one page wrote that beautiful photographs could be made “by the mixture of the real and the artificial,’’ and on another page praised “this perfect truth, this absolute rendering of light and shade and form . . . beyond the reach of the painter and sculptor.” C. Jabez Hughes, while praising Rejlander’s and Robinson’s work, strongly rebelled against combination printing.
When an artist conceives a brilliant thought, and hastens to put it on canvas, how he sighs that he is obliged to work piecemeal — that he cannot, with one sweep
| Cameron: Summer Davs. East-man Historical Photographic Collection. Rochester. N.Y. |  |
of his brush, realise the thought in his mind. It is the proud boast of photography that it can do this.
This ambivalence is characteristic of the work of Julia Margaret Cameron: her dynamic portraits are among the most noble and impressive vet produced by means of the camera: her genre pictures, on the other hand, drip with sentimentality and lie within the stylistic idiom of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
At Freshwater Bay, in the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Cameron, whose husband was a British civil servant, entertained illustrious friends: Tennyson, Herschel, Carlyle. Darwin, Browning, Longfellow. She took up photography when she
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| cameron: Thomas Carlyle. Carbon print, 1867. The Museum of Modern Art |
was fifty: a portrait titled Annie, My First Success is dated 1864. She trained her camera on her friends: by the sheer force of her personality she seems to have intimidated them into co-operation. In her autobiographical Annals of My Glass House she describes the intensity she brought to portraiture.
When I have had such men before my camera my whole sold has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.
She blundered her way through technique, resorting to any means to get desired effects. It did not matter if the subject moved — she wanted that spirit which defines a personality, not accidental details. She used badly made lenses to destroy detail, and appears to have been the first to have them specially built to give poor definition.
By accident or design, Mrs. Cameron gave her photographs that breadth and simplicity which was characteristic of early calotypes. Her compositions, undoubtedly inspired by her friendship with the painter George Frederic Watts, are for the most part costume pieces. She admired the work of Rejlander and invited him to Freshwater Bay “to help her with his great experience.” Tennyson tells of the tedious hours of posing for the Mad Monk; her children are to be seen in such pictures as Fenns Chiding Cupid and Removing his Wings. Without the challenge of interpreting great personalities, her work tended to become lost in sentiment and to echo painting.
More and more laymen found photography a stimulating avocation. Writers seem to have been especially attracted: Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, Oliver Wendell Holmes were all amateurs. The French poet Auguste Vacquerie accompanied Victor Hugo to Jersey and, with Charles and Francois Hugo, produced in 1852 an album documenting the poet’s life in exile. An eerie romanticism pervades these pictures; details seem selected for their symbolism: the gnarled logs of the breakwater, Hugo's resting place under the flowering vines on the conservatory, Vacquerie dozing on a grassy bank. A series of hands alone — Hugo’s and his wife’s — appear, a novel idea in photography.
Perhaps the excellence of the work of these amateurs is due to the very difficulties which must have intimidated all but the more intrepid. They rebelled against the handicaps, against sensitizing their own plates on the spot, against lugging about the heavy equipment for immediate development, and against the caustic silver nitrate which blackened their fingers and ate into