camera-salon

camera-salon

Tags :: R:art, R:salons

  • Most memorable encounter with doctored photography

  • Earliest forms of camera trickery - Snow White and the seven drarves

  • Calvert Richard Jones, Capuchin Friars Malta 1846 - earliest known doctored pictures
    • Cameras were still crappy - needed a few minute of exposure
  • 1851 - French Govt sends a guy to click pictures of relevant cloisters

  • Carleton E Watkins

  • Gustave Le Gray 1856-1857

    • People used to take pictures of the sky and sea and merge them together
    • Gustave was pretty successful commercially with his landscapes
      • He would take pictures of a nice looking cloud and add it to all pictures

  • Pictures or it never happened

  • Pictures tend to communicate a deeper truth

    • If manipulation is in service of that, is it probably okay?
  • Cyanotypes of algae on the British Isles
  • At what point does a photograph become a relics and bear the essence beyond just it’s ability to show it
    • If an old picture of your grandma faded away to the point of being illegible, would you throw it away?

Documentary Photographs

  • Images from 1864 - General Ulysses S Grant, pictures of Confederate Prisoners

    • Levin Corbin Handy presented a picture General Ulysses Grant at City Point (1902), which was a composite of multiple images

      • An example of composite doctoring that is in service of the essence of the image

    • Horace W Nicholls - Rainy Day Derby

  • 3 months after Fall of Paris Commune

    • Ernest Eugen Appert 1871 - he staged images with models and direction
    • There was public outrage around the staging, even though the image went on to serve as documentation
      • An example where the image wasn’t doctored, but the scene itself was
  • Even news today about social distancing
    • The lens can be used to make people appear closer than they are, creating a whole narrative around whether or not they’re social distancing
  • Forensic Architecture

  • 1947 - Moscow River channel

    • Image of Stalin with his sidekick that was responsible for a lot death during the revolution between 1924-1938
    • By 1940, Stalinw as concerned about this guy’s rise to power. So he was ERASED from the 1940 edition of photos of them together by the river

  • Soviet art - new soviet aesthetic -

    • Images that look impressive from an aesthetic POV, but also pushes a propaganda that furthers

  • London Stereoscopic Company - The Ghost In The Stereoscope - 1856

    • Photography is in its infancy. The London Stereoscopic Company created a stereo photographs, adding the illusion of depths
    • These were usually perspective landscapes, but there was a demand for staged/dramatic pictures
    • The most popular themes then were the same as the one today - courtship, unrequited love, chilren, fortune telling, spirits, ghosts etc

  • William H Mumler, 1860s - capitalized on people’s relationship with the deceased by adding a layer of spirits in pictures

  • Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away 1858 - Young lady dying of tuberculosis - but everything is staged in the picture. But the emotional depth of this image, including the perceived intrusive nature of a photographer + danger to them

    • Once the fact about staging was public, criticism went on to be about the implications of photographic trickery and dishonest nature of it

  • Photomontages

  • Universality of experiences

  • Horshoe nature of manipulating photography
    • There were cases where camera couldn’t render specific things (like flame of a candle), which would later be filled in by the photographers (who also were painters, often)
    • The abundance of tools to manipulating photos have brought us to a similar point where certain amount of manipulation has been accepted/manipulated