Light Extracts

“in 1902 the art critic D.S. MacColl”

“No one… who thinks about it, denies that photography is an art in various degrees of fineness.”

Page 7

“As the photographer George Davison (no.95) observed in 1891: ‘photography has come later in the day, it would be difficult for it to avoid likeness to something that had preceded it.”

Page 8

“Davison listed the aspects that were amendable to additive effort: ‘colour of pigment or image, depth of printing combination and modification, local or general, relative tone or emphasis’, appealing to every photographer who has an artistic feeling to be satisfied’.

“The studio’s special issue on colour photography described auto-chromes as presenting the ‘effect of a sharpened and acidulated nature, curiously tense and glittering, almost metallic.”

Page 9

“John Ruskin promoted a natural philosophy that emphasised observation.”

“Central to this was natural theology, a belief, expressed in the writings of Ruskin’s and others, that the natural world was ‘already a work of art’, manifesting material and spiritual truth.”

“We never see anything clearly,’ Ruskin wrote, adding that even ‘photographs never look entirely clear or sharp’. He praised photography that did not seek sharpness at all costs, but revealed to the eye ‘the absolute infinity of things’, be it dissolving distances or confusion of foreground detail; for Ruskin it was here that the mysteries of nature began. Painters and photographers explored the implications of focus and indistinctness, atmospheric effects, the appearance of movement, form dissolved by darkness or by glare, and the discrete shapes of highlights and shadows.”

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“Daguerreotypes, small but extremely precise images on polished silver plates, were available to view, commission and buy from 1840. Ruskin had examples sent from France that year and had his valet, John Hobbs, experiment with them soon after. In 1845 he wrote to his father from Venice, where he had been drawing and photographing the architecture. It is a noble invention – say what they will of it – and anyone who has worked and blundered and stammered [at drawing] as I have done for four days, and then sees the thing he has been trying to do so long in vain done perfectly and faultlessly in half a minute won’t abuse it.”

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“The botanical exactitude of many of Ruskin’s drawings dramatizes his ideals of observation: ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain… To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”

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“John Ruskin”

“Ruskin employed photographs as preparatory studies for paintings and drawings, and collected photographs of old masters and other subjects. They informed his writings on art and architecture, and were included in his lectures and a library of teaching materials created for and a library of teaching materials created for the Ruskin School of Art, which he founded in 1871.”

“In contrast with his admiration of daguerreotype detail, Ruskin appreciated the qualities of mystery in the more tonal characteristics of the albumen print. His notes for the School of Art collection advised students to observe and copy the exaggerated shadows of the vine, and included two examples in sepia. For Ruskin this inconsequential shadow exemplifies the purpose and poetry to be found in art and nature, expressing a ‘mingling# of the ‘declining shadows of the past and the hardships of the present day’ that he saw in the photograph as a whole:”

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“By the 1850s many British photographers were making experiments with woodland scenes. The immersive composition was helpful in excluding skies that were incompatible with the long exposures needed to capture the monochrome complexities of green foliage and filtered light. Stereoscopic photographs which appeared three-dimensional when looked at through a views, enhance the effect.”

Page 31

“Ruskin mentored John Brett, a younger associate of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and encouraged him to paint in the Alps, Brett, too, drew on photographic sources, amassing a large collection by the end of his life. Hamerton described the difficulties thrown up by studying photographic ‘memoranda’ of Alpine subjects: the whitest flake white is not so white as snow… When not illuminated by direct sunshine the snow is in many instances darker than the sky; darker even than grey clouds. And yet I know that the flake white I have to imitate snow in sunshine with is, in reality, darker than the snow in shadow. Our whitest white is darker than many of Nature’s ordinary blues and greens and reds.

And our blackest black is lighter than many of Nature’s greys.”

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“The critic Philipi Hamerton compared Hunt’s seascape effects to the celebrated photographs of Gustave Le Gray. Le Gray’s seascapes had been read as moonlight views and were considered the most painterly landscape photographs of the time. Hamerton admired them but believed Hunt was able to get more into his picture ‘because painting is… an art of compromise… capable of moderation’. He analysed the limitations of the photograph: In the photograph the blaze of light upon the sea is given with perfect fidelity; but in order to get this, and the light on the edges of the clouds, all else has been sacrificed: the shaded sides of the clouds, in nature of dazzling grey, brighter than any white paper, are positively black in the photograph, and the pole splendour of the sunlight sea- except where it flashes light 0 is heavy and impenetrable darkness.”

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Architecutral Geometry & Light

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“Oliver Wednell Holmes”

“James Robinson The Death of Chaterton 1859”

“He declared. ‘The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture.. The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with; there will be ‘incidental truths which interest us more than the central object of the picture’.”

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“The prolific, photographer Clementina, Lady Hawarden won success after taking up the camera in 1857.”

“She adapted the drama of light and dark and the compressed, shallow spaces that were fundamental to the woodblock medium.”

“Clementina, Lady Hawarden Clementina Maude, 5 Princes Gardens c.1862. Photograph, albumen print on paper 10.8 x 8.9 Victoria and Albert Museum given by Clementina, Lady Tottenham.”

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“In 1862 Henry Peach Robinson exhibited the Lady of Shalott, a large photograph based on Alfred Tennyson’s 1832 poem.”

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Portrait & Landscape Long & Tall View

“The artists explored a new approach to art which became known as ‘aestheticism’, one influence was the French critic Charles Bauderlaire who argued that photographic exactitude left no room for imagination and that art should aim, instead, for ‘intimacy, spirituality, colour. Aspiration to the infinite’,”

“Painters and photographers selected elements that appealed to the senses, attending to touch and textures of cloth or loosened hair, for example, the sound of voices and music and the scent of flowers. The approach foregrounded formal effects and possibilities of art: colour and surface, composition and shape of the frame. Cameron achieved a photographic equivalent of Rossetti’s colour and design with pattern and tone. She manipulated the light and focus of her photographs, and Watts and Rossetti employed chiaroscuro and broken brushstrokes to soften and blur their subjects. Where Rosetti enriched his hues to jewel-like intensity. Watts and Cameron discussed tonal drama and diffuse focus, which especially suited her monochrome photographic medium. Rossetti experimented with this more subtle approach in chalks which looked forward to softer, more monochrome oils such as Proserpine 1874 1874 (no.114).

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“Unusually, Cameron staged the photograph in a narrow windowed space rather than in her glass ‘hen house’ studio.”

“67 Julia Margaret Cameron”

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“Whistler inspired photographers to explore the poetry of atmospheric, indistinct views. In 1885 Ernest Chesneau noted that NEAC artists were dispensing with the figure, their aim directed at ‘arousing our emotions only by the sentiment which natural scenery awakens in us’ thought the representation of nature as ‘a magical spectacle, exhibiting… splendid effects of light, colour and form.’ Photographers, too, explored unpeopled landscapes to try, as Frederick Evans advised, ‘for a record of an emotion rather than a piece of topography’. Such exchanges underpinned the distinctively aestheticist approach of British painters and photographers to ‘naturalism’, and a sophisticated attention to composition, tonal values and atmosphere.”

“In 1904 Clausen returned to the Royal Academy Schools. His second lecture considered photography: Until the invention of photography, there was only one way of seeing things – through the human eye… Yet the painter, for a time, tried to rival the camera in minuteness and detachment, forgetting that tit is just this human quality of attention and selection that makes a painting a work of art… and we find photographers occupied today in arranging the tones and concentrating the lights of their pictures.”

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Landscape – Long View

Sky – Tall View

“Emerson later sent whistler a copy of marsh leaves, whose photographs evoke ethereal, schematic effects of that artist’s paintings, as Emerson understood the aesthetic in 1892. ‘Whistler… holds pure a simple that the whole aim & subject of a picture is to seek a decorative scheme or pattern either of line or colour.”

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“Whistler apparently told Grimshaw that he had thought himself the inventor of ‘nocturnes’ until he saw Grimshaw’s moonlit pictures’. Grimshaw’s London nocturne was painted directly onto a photograph, using his established technique of thinly applied paint coated with quick-drying copal oil varnish. This was a valuable short cut for an artist who produced quantities of canvases to sustain precarious finances. Grimshaw would have used a daytime view, for night-time photographs were not feasible until the mid-1890s.”

“Some photographers did shoot ‘day-for-night’; here George Davidson made a short exposure to deepen the tones of the image and emphasise the contre-jour effect of the cab silhouetted against the light. He explained that this turned a ‘prosaic’ photograph into one whose ‘special atmospheric conditions’ made ‘very pictorial effects’, Grimshaw effectively used the same approach, darkening the scene and painting in areas of artificial light. HK”

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“Paul Martin’s innovative nocturnes were made at a time when city nights were getting brighter, as gaslights gave away to brighter electric lighting and faster photographic plates registered lower levels of natural and artificial light, Martin incorporated reflected light off rainy streets to shorten his exposure time. He also experimented with halation, in which the source of illumination – here the lamps of the Empire Theatre – refracts outwards in a halo of scattered light.”

“93 Alvin Langdon Coburn Leicester square (The Old Empire Theatre)”

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“In the later nineteenth century photographers began to show ‘pure’ landscapes without figures, George Davison credited an interest in atmospheric effects, which were now more accurately represented with new orthochromatic plates: ‘landscapes with marked character call for no figures, nor do the wide range of subjects in which the sky makes the chief attraction with its delicate gradations and forms fanciful or reposeful,’”

“This is one of Dudley Johnston’s best-known works, a Turneresque study that illustrates his ethos that ‘subordination of detail is the chief means to an imaginative end’, it is a splendid example of gum platinum printing, in which a platinum print is overprinted by the gum bichromate process, here providing a blue-grey tint and deepening the shadows.”

“96 John Dudley Johnston”

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“Dew-Drenched Furze was perhaps Millais’s most abstract work. It was painted on a location in the Murthly estate, and the title quotes Tennyson’s in Memoriam (section 11, 1850): Calm and deep peace on this high wold, And on the dews that drench the furze, and all the silvery gossamers that twinkle into green and gold.”

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Thickness & Thinness/Threshold Photography

“As George Bernard Shaw noted, aesthetic nudes appeared more frequently on the walls of exhibitions, transformed into art by exquisite composition and lighting. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was one of a number of nude motifs with symbolist overtones that enjoyed creative re-treatments in art. Watts’s first version explored the aesthetic themes of mourning current in the Holland Park circle in the 1860s. Orpheus, son of Apollo, seeks Eurydice in the underworld and persuades Hades to let her go. He is instructed not to look back at her as they leave, but she stumbles and as he twists to catch her, she returns to the shadows. Watts represented the turn and the last embrace.”

“He returned to the subject repeatedly and also commissioned many photographs of his paintings. In 1880 he tried out new modifications on a print by Frederick Hollyer (Watts Gallery). The motif was well known through exhibitions and prints and was reprised in a sculptural version by Charles Ricketts in 1906. Watts’s death two years before gave the mourning theme an extra significance. Stewart’s title Ex Umbris translates as ‘out of the shadows’. The Orpheus and Eurydice narrative of emerging from shadow to light and back into shadow suited the aesthetic interests in indistinctness and was resonant for photographers. Both versions play on the way light and shadow reveal and dissolve the human form. CJ”

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