The Daguerreian Annual
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13:
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Photography and Failure
Author: Kris Belden-Adams
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-06
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 100021320X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThroughout photography’s history, failure has played an essential, recurring part in the development and perceived value of this medium. Exploring a range of failures – individual and institutional, technological and historiographical – Photography and Failure asks what it means to fail and considers how this narrative of failure has shaped our understanding of photography. From the trial-and-error beginnings of photochemistry to poor business decisions influenced by fickle public opinion and taste, the founders and early practitioners of photography frequently faced bankruptcy and ignominy. Alongside these individual ‘failures’, this collection of essays examines the role of museums in rediscovering, preserving and presenting photographs within institutions, as well as technological limitations, such as the problematic panoramic lens or the digital, archival failures of Snapchat. Moving beyond the physical photograph and these processes, the book also investigates the limitations of photographs themselves, as purveyors of truth, time, space, documentary realism and social change, whether these failures are used to effect or not. Finally, the book probes the historiographical failures affecting the discipline, drawing on key debates, such as the perceived over-emphasis on European and American photography, and the place of photography theory in contemporary art practice. Blurring the boundaries between traditional binaries of art and non-art photography, amateur and professional practice, and individual and corporate perspectives, Photography and Failure presents a new approach to understanding and evaluating photographic history.
The Camera and the Press
Author: Marcy J. Dinius
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-03-15
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 0812206347
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBefore most Americans ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this visual form through written descriptions, published and rapidly reprinted in newspapers throughout the land. In The Camera and the Press, Marcy J. Dinius examines how the first written and published responses to the daguerreotype set the terms for how we now understand the representational accuracy and objectivity associated with the photograph, as well as the democratization of portraiture that photography enabled. Dinius's archival research ranges from essays in popular nineteenth-century periodicals to daguerreotypes of Americans, Liberians, slaves, and even fictional characters. Examples of these portraits are among the dozens of illustrations featured in the book. The Camera and the Press presents new dimensions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville's Pierre, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave. Dinius shows how these authors strategically incorporated aspects of daguerreian representation to advance their aesthetic, political, and social agendas. By recognizing print and visual culture as one, Dinius redefines such terms as art, objectivity, sympathy, representation, race, and nationalism and their interrelations in nineteenth-century America.
Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees
Author: Stephen Gencarella
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2018-05-01
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 1493032674
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIncredible Stories of the Prophets, Vagabonds, Fortune-Tellers, Hermits, Lords, and Poets Who Shaped New England New England has been a lot of things—an economic hub, a cultural center, a sports mecca—but it is also home to many of the strangest individuals in America. Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees explores and celebrates the eccentric personalities who have left their mark in a way no other book has before. Some folks are known, others not so much, but the motley cast of characters that emerges from these pages represents a fascinating cross-section of New England’s most peculiar denizens. Look inside to find: Tales of the Leather Man and the Old Darned Man, who both spent years crisscrossing the highways and byways of the northeast, their origins and motivation to remain forever unknown. The magnificent homes of William Gillette and Madame Sherri, famed socialites who constructed enormous castles in the New England countryside. William Sheldon’s apocalyptic prophecies and wild claims including that the American Revolution had hastened the end of the world and that he could—through his mastery of the “od-force”—prevent cholera across the eastern United States. The mysterious fortune-teller Moll Pitcher whose predictions, some say, were sought by European royalty and whose fame made her the subject of poems, plays, and novels long after her death. Stretching back to the colonial era and covering the development and evolution of New England society through the beginning of the twenty-first century, this book captures the rebel spirit, prickly demeanors, and wily attitudes that have made the region the hotbed for oddity it is today. *All Royalties Donated to the Education and Youth Programs at the Connecticut River Museum*
The Early American Daguerreotype
Author: Sarah Kate Gillespie
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-02-12
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 0262034107
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe American daguerreotype as something completely new: a mechanical invention that produced an image, a hybrid of fine art and science and technology. The daguerreotype, invented in France, came to America in 1839. By 1851, this early photographic method had been improved by American daguerreotypists to such a degree that it was often referred to as “the American process.” The daguerreotype—now perhaps mostly associated with stiffly posed portraits of serious-visaged nineteenth-century personages—was an extremely detailed photographic image, produced though a complicated process involving a copper plate, light-sensitive chemicals, and mercury fumes. It was, as Sarah Kate Gillespie shows in this generously illustrated history, something wholly and remarkably new: a product of science and innovative technology that resulted in a visual object. It was a hybrid, with roots in both fine art and science, and it interacted in reciprocally formative ways with fine art, science, and technology. Gillespie maps the evolution of the daguerreotype, as medium and as profession, from its introduction to the ascendancy of the “American process,” tracing its relationship to other fields and the professionalization of those fields. She does so by recounting the activities of a series of American daguerreotypists, including fine artists, scientists, and mechanical tinkerers. She describes, for example, experiments undertaken by Samuel F. B. Morse as he made the transition from artist to inventor; how artists made use of the daguerreotype, both borrowing conventions from fine art and establishing new ones for a new medium; the use of the daguerreotype in various sciences, particularly astronomy; and technological innovators who drew on their work in the mechanical arts. By the 1860s, the daguerreotype had been supplanted by newer technologies. Its rise (and fall) represents an early instance of the ever-constant stream of emerging visual technologies.
Exposing Slavery
Author: Matthew Fox-Amato
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-01
Total Pages: 420
ISBN-13: 0190663952
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWithin a few years of the introduction of photography into the United States in 1839, slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass had come to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype studios of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph. Exposing Slavery explores how photography altered and was, in turn, shaped by conflicts over human bondage. Drawing on an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, free African Americans, and abolitionists, as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, enslaved people to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to pictorially enact interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a political tool over only a few decades. This creative first book sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, while also revealing a key moment in the relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.
An Early Album of the World
Author: Christine Barthe (ed.)
Publisher: Art Book Magazine / Louvre Abu Dhabi
Published: 2019-04-24T00:00:00+02:00
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 2821601263
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFeaturing a broad selection of photographs from Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and other French partner museums, the exhibition catalogue explores the circumstances in which photography was introduced in Europe since 1839 and then practiced around the world, including the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas by leading photographers like Jacques-Philippe Potteau, Isidore van Kinsbergen, Auguste Bartholdi, Désiré Charnay, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, Lala Deen Dayal, Abdullah Brothers and Timothy O’Sullivan. It also features a selection of historical texts on photography by prominent theologian and philosopher, the Emir Abd el-Kader.
John Brown
Author: Louis A. DeCaro
Publisher: INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780717807420
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmpire, Early Photography and Spectacle
Author: Elisa deCourcy
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-23
Total Pages: 199
ISBN-13: 1000209873
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJames William Newland’s (1810–1857) career as a showman daguerreotypist began in the United States but expanded into Central and South America, across the Pacific to New Zealand and colonial Australia and onto India. Newland used the latest developments in photography, theatre and spectacle to create powerful new visual experiences for audiences in each of these volatile colonial societies. This book assesses his surviving, vivid portraits against other visual ephemera and archival records of his time. Newland’s magic lantern and theatre shows are imaginatively reconstructed from textual sources and analysed, with his short, rich career casting a new light on the complex worlds of the mid-nineteenth century. It provides a revealing case study of someone brokering new experiences with optical technologies for varied audiences at the forefront of the age of modern vision. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and visual culture, photography, the history of photography and Victorian history.
First Exposures
Author: Steffen Siegel
Publisher: Getty Publications
Published: 2017-08-01
Total Pages: 452
ISBN-13: 1606065246
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn exact date for the invention of photography is evasive. Scientists and amateurs alike were working on a variety of photographic processes for much of the early nineteenth century. Thus most historians refer to the year 1839 as the “first” year of photography, not because the sensational new medium was invented then, but because that is the year it was introduced to the world. After more than 175 years, and for the first time in English, First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography brings together more than 130 primary sources from that very year—1839—subdivided into ten chapters and accompanied by fifty-three images of significant visual and historical importance. This is an astonishing work of discovery, selection, and—thanks to Steffen Siegel’s introductory texts, notes, and afterword—elucidation. The range of material is impressive: not only all the chemical and technological details of the various processes but also contracts, speeches, correspondence of every kind, arguments, parodies, satires, eulogies, denunciations, journals, and even some poems. Revealing through firsthand accounts the competition, the rivalries, and the parallels among the various practitioners and theorists, this book provides an unprecedented way to understand how the early discourse around photographic techniques and processes transcended national boundaries and interconnected across Europe and the United States.
