First Photography of War

Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) Crimean War (1853-1856)

Mathew Brady (American, 1823-1896)

American Civil War (1861-1865)

How has the camera transformed the way war is perceived?

Documentary realism versus romantic idealismPhotography versus painting

Propaganda versus truth (Can the camera lie?)Commercialism and photography

Orientalism, Imperialism, Manifest Destiny

“Art-Progress,” Punch Cartoon, London, 1858

Mockery of photography’s claims to “art” status because of commercial competition and mass popularity of photography

“Now, Mum! Take Orf Yer ‘Had for Sixpence, or Yer ‘Ole Body For A Shellin’!”

Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869) The Queen and the Prince, wet plate1854

Britain’s Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901Her name and values identify the Victorian era in Europe

Edwin Landseer (British), Windsor Castle in Modern Times, 1841-5, oil on canvas44 x 56” Victoria and Albert “at home”

Top: Joseph Paxton (British, 1801 - 1865), The Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London, 1851

Bottom: A. W. N Pugin (British, 1812-1852) Houses of Parliament, LondonGothic Revivalism begun 1840

Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, 1851

Compare bed and new railroad cars exhibited at Great Exhibition of 1851 (Crystal Palace)

William Holman Hunt (British, 1827-1910), The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4 o/c, shaped canvas (arched top), 30/22” Tate Britain

William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd, 1851, Pre-Raphaelite passion for descriptive detail and moral messages

Roger Fenton Self-Portrait as French Zouave Soldier (left), 1855Pasha and Bayadere, 1858, albumen print

Orientalism

Roger Fenton, Orientalist Group, 1858Albumen silver print from glass negative

Roger Fenton, Still Life with Fruit, 1860, albumen silver print from glass negative, 14 x 17” Fruits of the world (the British Empire) with “oriental” tapestry fringes

Roger Fenton, Photographic van with Fenton’s assistant, Crimea, 1854 Salted paper print from wet collodion negative

The Crimea extends into the Black Sea between Russia and Turkey

Fenton, Balaklava Harbor, Ukraine (Crimea) 1885 , salt print from wet plate

Fenton, Encampment of Horse Artillery, near Balaklava harbor, Crimea1855, salt print from wet plate

Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, site of the suicidal charge of the light brigade, salt print, April 23,1855

Christian Bible and Alfred Lord Tennyson poem

Compare the effect of photography versus painting in representations of war:Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death

(right) William Simson, Charge of the Light Brigade, 1855

Compare the effect of photography versus oil painting in representations of war:(right) Roger Fenton, Survivors of The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1885, with

(left top) Richard Caton Woodville, The Light Brigade, 1856

1936 Hollywood movieWar heroes

Fenton, Survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade, 1885

Florence Nightingale (English, 1820-1910). Crimean war and first modern nursing - reduced the mortality rate for the wounded from 50% to 3%

Mathew Brady (American, 1823-1896)Mathew Brady’s Picture Gallery, New York

“Brady of Broadway”

In 1839 Brady met, and became a student to Samuel Morse. That same year he met Louis Daguerre in Paris and went back to the United States to capitalize upon the

invention of the Daguerreotype, establishing a highly successful Gallery.

Mathew Brady, Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1864

"Make no mistake, gentlemen, Brady made me President!" (Lincoln)

Mathew Brady, Portrait of General Grant, 1864

Battle Between the C.S.S. Virginia and the U.S.S. Monitor Hampton Roads, VA, March 9, 1862

The Civil War was an “unprecedented assignment—as new to photography as the military actions employing new long-range weapons were new to warfare. The first

modern war in its scale of destruction—close to half a million casualties— and in the use of mechanized weaponry, including steel-plated naval vessels, trenches, and, in

Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864, a scorched-earth policy…. Alan Trachtenberg

Brady’s “Outfit for War”1862: The process Brady's team used was the collodion one, invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The limitations of equipment and materials prevented any action shots, but the photographers brought back some seven thousand pictures portraying the realities of war.

Brady, Dead at Antietam Church, 1862

Brady, Dead at Antietam Battlefield, 1862

Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July, 1863

Compare: Mathew Brady (Studio of), Confederate Prisoners, Gettysburg, July 1863Winslow Homer (American, 1836 -1910), Prisoners from the Front, 1866

Oil on canvas; 24 x 38 in

Timothy O’Sullivan, Dead Soldier, 1863

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770

Compare war photography with war painting

Compare: Emmanuel Leutze George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 Timothy O’Sullivan, Dead Soldier, 1863

Mathew Brady (studio of), Ruins of the Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, Virginia, 1865 Albumen silver print, 7 1/8 x 8 13/16 inches

Brady, Ruins of Richmond, Virginia, albumen silver print, 1865

Mathew Brady (studio of), Ruins of the Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, Virginia, 1865 Albumen silver print, 7 1/8 x 8 13/16 inches

Compare with Thomas Cole, Desolation, oil on canvas, last in Cole’s prescient series The Course of Empire, 1936

Set of stereoscope cards with images of war

Modern visuality: War in 3-D as living room entertainment

Stereoscope – hugely popular after presentation at the Crystal Palace, 1851

“Judging from the revival of [Civil War] images starting in the 1880s, the public relished the terror—or found ways to deny it.” (Trachtenberg)

Documenting Imperialism:

Manifest Destiny (United States)

and the

World Empires of Europe

Will Soule (U.S., 1836-1908)Indian Gallery, 1870-75

Documenting Manifest Destiny

Soule was a young Civil War veteran who took a job on the frontier and made an important series of Native American portraits at Fort Sill, Oklahoma from 1869 to 1874.

Cheyenne Indian Camp, 1870-75

Will Soule, Scalped Hunter near Fort Dodge Kansas, 1868 Albumen print on calligraphic mount, 6 x 7.75”

Albert Bierstadt (German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902) Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867

Manifest Destiny

Edward Curtis (U.S. 1869-1952) Canyon de Chelly, Navajo, 1904

Note: You are responsible for the information on Edward Curtis presented by Professor Listopad

Curtis published The North American Indian in installments between 1907 and 1930

Thomas Hill (American, born England 1829-1908), Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite, 1871, oil on canvas, 72 in. x 120”, The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento

Curtis, Canyon de Chelly (Arizona) Navajo, 1904

How do the history of painting and the history of photography intersect?

Charles Christian Nahl, American (born Germany, 1818-1878), Sunday Morning in the Mines, 1872, oil on canvas, 72 x 108”

Anonymous photographer, California Gold Rush, 1850s

Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) El-Eachas or Three Brothers, Yosemite, c.1861, 16 x 21” albumen silver print

Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Valley, from "Best General View“ c. 1865, albumen silver print from glass negative

Came West to photograph the California Gold Rush

Carleton Watkins, Grizzly Grove, 1861

Timothy O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882), Steamboat Springs, Washoe, Nevada, 1867, Albumen silver print

After the Civil War, O’Sullivan became a photographer for the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, the first survey of the American West. He returned to Washington, D.C. in 1874 and made prints for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Maxime du Camp, The Colossus of Abu Simbel, Nubia, 1850, salted paper print, published in L.d. Blanquart-Evard’s Egypt, Nubia, Palestine et Syrie, Paris, 1852, which contained 122 calotypes

Francis Frith (British 1822-1899), The Sphinx and Great Pyramid Geezah, 6.5 x 9”, albumen silver print, published in

book, Sinai and Palestine, c. 1862

William Holman Hunt,Nazareth, 1855, watercolor, Pre-Raphaelite. European fascination with “Holy Lands”Orientalism

John Beasly Greene (American, 1832-1856), Bank of Nile at Thebes, 1854, c. 9 x 12”, salted paper print. Pictorial effect achieved with calotype’s granular look visually uniting

sky and water

Casper David Friedrich, Monk by The Sea, o/c, 1809, German Romanticism John Beasly Greene, Bank of Nile at

Thebes, 1854

Nineteenth Century Photography & PaintingAcademic aesthetics

From the beginning, photography has been discussed in the language and values of academic art,

not the language of avant-garde painting.

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, calotype, 1843one of 24 photographic images in The Pencil of Nature

“Calotype” was derived from the Greek kallos, “beauty”

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-75) The Two Ways of Life, 1857composite photograph

Victorian high-art photography

Reading: “An Apology for Art Photography,” an excerpt, 1863

Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847, French Academic history painting

Rejlander (1813-75) The Two Ways of Life, 1857

Compare photography andacademic paintingin compositionand content

"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 base and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject.... and to correct the unpicturesque....A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial in a picture."

Robinson, "Pictorial Effect in Photography" (1867)

Henry Peach Robinson (British 1830-75), Fading Away, 1858, composite of five negatives

Reading: “Idealism, Realism, Expressionism”

Henry Peach Robinson, When the Day’s Work is Done, 1877, albumen print from six negatives, 22 x 29 5/16 in

Jeff Wall, Image for Women, 1979. Cibachrome light box. 224 x 162 cm.Postmodern pastiche, combination photography, and appropriation

Edouard Manet, Bar at theFolies Bergere, 1881

Peter Henry Emerson, Gathering Waterlilies, 1886, platinotypefrom Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads

Reading: “Hints on Art”

Emerson extended this Helmholtzian idea of "vision as impression" to photography

Peter Henry Emerson, Poling the Marsh Hay, 1886, platinotype,from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads.

Camille Pissarro, (French Neo-Impressionism), The Gleaners, 1889

The Artifice of Candor Impressionism and Photography Reconsidered

Photography and French Avant-Garde Painting

Eugène Delacroix, Odalisque, 1855. Oil on wood, and photographic study

(left) A.Houssin, Boulevard in Paris, 1863, stereoscopic photograph Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (Vicomte Lepic and His Daughers), 1875, oil on canvasThiebault, View of a Boulevard, 1858, stereoscopic photograph

H. Jouvin, Place de la Concorde, 1863, stereoscopic photograph

Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (Vicomte Lepic and His Daughers), 1875, oil on canvas

Benedict, Rome, 1867, stereoscopic photograph

Adophe Braun, La Pont des Arts (detail of panoramic view of Paris), 1868Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880, oil on canvas

(left) Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-74, oil on canvas(right) Edgar Degas, Miss LaLa at the Cirque Fernando, 1879, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet, At the Café, 1878, oil on canvasLefort, Café Scene, 1867(?), stereoscopic photograph

Charles Baudelaire byEdouard Manet

From reading, “The Modern Public and Photography,” what were Baudelaire’sComplaints against photography?