Camera-less photographs occupy an important yet underappreciated place in the history of photography. While still considered an experimental medium, the photogram, or camera-less image is a photograph produced by the action of light on a light-sensitive surface without the aid of a camera and lens. Camera-less photographs engage the core of the photographic process —…
Category: History of Photography
Edward Weston—At the Oceano Dunes
Edward Weston — The Thing Itself Photography in the decades just after the First World War joined modernist innovations underway in architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature. Modernist photography embraced an aesthetic of simplification, stripping away ornamentation to reveal the texture of paint or stone, to expose the steel structures of buildings, and distilling form to…
Locating Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother
Social Documentary Photography / Farm Security Administration The term documentary is of relatively recent origin, first appearing about 1900, and was loosely used by film critic John Grierson in 1926. This term is now applied to a particular response in photography and film to the cultural upheavals following World War I and into the present…
Negative Portraits In Silver
In a box of photographs collected at junk stores, I discovered a long-forgotten package of silver gelatin dry plate portraits. Likely created in the early 20th century, the photographer, the location, creation dates, and the subjects of the photographs are unknown. These many unknown only add to the haunting visual qualities of these silver gelatin…
Found Photograph, Varanasi, a Story.
Experimental photography asks questions: What is it? What process was used? But most importantly, what is a photograph? Some of the first responses to photography spoke of the magical powers of the photograph to capture traces of the world with unbelievable accuracy. Something of the divine seemed to appear in the first photographs, and early…
Matching Color From a Vintage Stereo Card
The stereo camera coupled with the stereoscope is one of the 19th century’s most unique inventions. The stereography extended the visual reach of photography and unlike any other photographic process or invention, through the vivid illusion of three-dimensionality, “captured the visual essence of nature.”[1] In the presentation above, I demonstrate how to use Photoshop’s Match…
Death Valley, Painted Landscapes
The mediums of painting and photography have intersected at many times. With the invention of photography, painters began to work from photographs. Eugene Delacroix created nude studies based on daguerreotype photographs by Eugene Durieu. Praising the effects of photography, Delacroix wrote in 1850 “A daguerreotype is the mirror of the object, certain details almost always…
Frank Hurley, Antarctica, the Kodak Vest Pocket
The Australian photographer, Frank Hurley is a unique case, and inexplicably his achievements remain largely unreported in many current histories of photography. Although primarily known as a still photographer, Hurley would pioneer techniques first seen with his Antarctic expedition photography to create a wholly new entertainment form known as the “travelogue” or the “travel-adventure documentary” film.[1] Although his best work was completed one hundred…
Borrowed Sources
Thoughts on Walter Benjamin, Appropriation, Technology and Landscape Walter Benjamin Published in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is the first commentary on the ways in which technology changes the conditions of art. Benjamin’s tightly written essay continues to generate debate and has spawned thousands of critical interpretations. In…
Pinhole Photographs: Baja Missions and Roadside Shrines
Pinhole Photography. The first written records of the optical properties of pinholes come from Mo Ti in China during the 5th century BC and in Aristotle’s Problems XV written in 330 BC. Dappled sunlight viewed under trees on clear days is evidence of the optical properties of pinholes. The crescent projections of the sun seen…
Experimenting with the Square Format: Using the Spartus Full-Vue With Tungsten Film
Many notable photographers used twin-lens cameras: Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus. The first twin-lens reflex camera appeared in 1880 as a specially built camera for the Kew Observatory in England. The first production twin lens camera appeared in 1882, introduced as the Academy by the British firm, Marion and Company. The camera,…
Experimenting with Box Cameras: Brownies at Mono Lake
In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company headed by George Eastman, introduced the Kodak camera, a wooden box “neatly covered in black leather”[1] which became the most significant event in the history of the medium since the invention of photography. The camera was loaded with a 100-exposure roll of silver gelatin film attached…