12. EXPERIMENTS IN ABSTRACTION 201
Coburn’s abstractions, 1917 — Photograms, 1921—Man Ray — Solarization, other control devices — Validity of abstract photography — Moholy-Nagy exploits distortions — Scientific photography displays esthetic by-products
13. FOR THE PRINTED PAGE 219
Daguerreotypes transformed to printing plates — Talbot’s photogravure process — Woodburytype — These processes not suited to newspaper and magazine work — Photographs reproduced by wood engravers until introduction of halftone process in 1880 — Growth of news photography — Famous spot news pictures — The photo-essay: Paul Nadar's “photo-interview,” 1886 — Magazines relying on photography for illustrations: Illustrated American (1890), Life (1936) —The “mind guided camera” — War coverage — Fashion — Portrait
14. IN COLOR 241
Niepce and Daguerre dream of fixing colors —Hill’s putative color process — Lipp-mann’s interference process — Theory of color separation demonstrated by Clerk Maxwell, 1861 — The additive processes: Ives’s Kromskop, 1892; Joly’s screen plate, 1893; The Lumieres’ Autochrome, 1903 —The subtractive processes: Ducos du Hau-ron, 1869 —Color prints: carbro, dye transfer — Monopack transparencies and negatives — Esthetics of color photography — Conclusion
1 THE ELUSIVE IMAGE
Camera pictures have been made ever since the Renaissance. Artists turned to mathematics and optics for assistance in solving perspective problems, and they found the phenomenon of the camera obscura (literally “dark room”) a mechanical aid of the greatest value. Leonardo da Vinci described the principle: light entering a minute hole in the wall of a darkened room forms on the opposite wall an inverted image of whatever lies outside. The first published account — Leonardo’s description lay hidden in his private notes — appeared in Giovanni Battista della Porta’s book, Natural Magic, of 1553. In 1568 Danielo Barbara showed that a more brilliant image could be produced by substituting a lens for the pinhole:
Close all the shutters and doors until no light enters the camera except through the lens, and opposite hold a sheet of paper, which you move forward and backward until the scene appears in the sharpest detail. There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colors and shadow and motion, the clouds, the water twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it and delicately color it from nature.
The camera, at first actually a room big enough for a man to enter, gradually grew smaller. The windows of sedan chairs were covered and the camera could be taken into the countryside. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a lens was fitted into one end of a two-foot box, and the other end covered with a sheet, of frosted or ground glass. The image cast on the ground glass by the lens could be seen outside of the camera. A perfected model, resembling the modern reflex camera, had the ground glass flush with the top of the box, the image being thrown upon it by a mirror placed at an angle of 450. It had the advantage that the image was not upside down, and the artist could trace it by laying thin paper over the glass. Cameras became standard equipment for artists. Count Francesco Algarotti, in his Essay on Painting (1764) devotes a chapter to the camera: “The best modern painters among the Italians have availed themselves greatly of this contrivance: nor is it possible they should have otherwise represented things so much to life.”
But the ancients had already observed that light not only forms images,
but changes the nature of many substances. The chlorophyll of vegetation becomes green on exposure to it; colored fabrics fade. Among the substances radically altered by light are the salts of silver: the combining element is liberated, leaving pure metallic silver which, because unpolished, is dark in tone. The light sensitivity of these salts was first scientifically established by the German physicist Johann Heinrich Schulze in 1727.
He filled a glass bottle with a mixture of chalk, silver, and nitric acid which, after he had thoroughly shaken it, combined to form whitish silver salts. When he put the bottle in bright sunlight, the mixture turned to a deep purple color. As exposure to the heat of a fire produced no such change, Schulze deduced that the reaction had been caused by the sun’s light rather than by its heat. To prove his deduction, he pasted stencils of opaque paper on the flask. After exposure to light the stencil was removed, and images of the figures or writing which had been cut out of the paper were clearly visible on the surface of the mixture within the flask, traced by the dark color of metallic silver.
All unconsciously, Schulze had indicated a way to trap the elusive image of the camera. What we know as photography is but the combined application of optical and chemical phenomena long known to man.
The incentive to work out a practical technique was stimulated by the unprecedented demand for pictures from the rising middle class of the late eighteenth century. Reproductions in quantity were in order: lithography was invented and wood engraving revived, so that pictures could be almost endlessly duplicated. The middle class wanted cheap portraits; mechanical devices to eliminate the need for lengthy artistic training were put in its hands, so that every man could become something of an artist. The silhouette required merely the ability to trace a cast shadow; the physionotrace, invented by Gilles Louis Chretien in 1786, asked no more of the beginner, with the advantage that a miniature engraved copper plate was produced, from which duplicates could be printed. The sitter’s profile was traced on a sheet of glass with a stylus connected by levers to an engraving tool which recorded in reduced scale its every movement on a copper plate. The instrument was immensely popular; six hundred physionotrace portraits were exhibited at the 1797 Paris Salon alone.
Still another mechanical substitute for artistic skill was the camera lucida, invented by the Englishman William Hyde Wollaston in 1806. Drawing paper was laid flat. Over it a glass prism was suspended at eye level by a brass rod. Looking through the prism the operator saw at the same time both the subject and the drawing paper; his pencil was guided by the virtual image. The
An artist using a camera obscura. From an engraving by C. Hoschel, 1769
camera lucida, which resembled the camera only in name and function, could easily be carried about and was widely used by travelers. With it Basil Hall documented his American travels; in the preface to Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828 (Edinburgh, 1829) he praised the instrument which freed the amateur “from the triple misery of Perspective, Proportion and Form,” and concluded that although Wollaston, its inventor, had not discovered the “Royal Road to Drawing,” he had "at least succeeded in Macadamising the way already known.”
But to many amateurs “Macadamising” was not enough. Even the camera lucida demanded a modicum of skill in drawing.
In all history the experimental amateur has not been the one to accept either his shortcomings or the difficulties which block the professional. The fever for reality was running high. The physical aid of camera obscura and camera lucida had drawn men so near to an exact copying of nature and the satisfaction of the current craving for reality that they could not abide the intrusion of the pencil of man to close the gap. Only the pencil of nature would do. The same idea burned in many at once, and the race for discovery was on: to make light itself fix the image in the camera without having to draw it by hand.