Alvin Langdon Coburn

c1909
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966)
Photogravure
Museum of London

I just read the blurb on this from the Musem of London, and it compared Coburns’s work to that of James McNeill Whistler. You can see it, but, if you’ll indulge me here, just use your cursor to highlight the picture – hopefully it will go blue, and tehn you *really* see the similarity. I love the grain and the darkness of this, all the heavy water and sky. Its oppressively but still gently beautiful.

Coburn was an American photographer who settled in London in 1912. He learnt the photogravure process in London before then, and was a ‘leading member of the international pictorialist movement, which had considerable influence over the status of photography as an art-form during the first quarter of the twentieth century’ (Museum of London). He was apparently (and clearly positively) influenced by the impressionists.

Explanation of photogravure here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogravure - it seems to have been an early printing process developing alongside the different ways of developing photographs, and providing a way of making a quality permanent image of them (presumably before the days when it was possible to fix negatives for the long term).

Making photographic images

A rough timeline of photographic technique history, as I’ve read it so far, to fix it in my own brain as much as anything. If you’re up for a bit of fixating, read on.

Lifted once again from Wikipedia: ‘The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by a French inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, building on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): that a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Niépce and Louis Daguerre refined this process. Daguerre discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapor, before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image; bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes the image. These ideas led to the famous daguerreotype.’

These were announced in 1839, and in the same year, William Henry Fox Talbot finds a way of coating paper with silver iodide and developing it in ‘a gallo-nitrate of silver solution’ (before this, he used to use tiny pictures treated with wax, which he could use as negatives and which took very long exposure times). The new type were called ‘Calotypes’.

It looks like various people were working on improving exposure times and improving the photographic process at the same time, and patenting everything they could. It must have been really exciting; the first time you capture good images on a surface, without your poor subject having to sit as still as possible for very long amounts of time! And of course, amazing in itself.

After this came the collodion process from 1848, where a glass plate was coated with a combination of potassium iodide, and colloidon, a transparent sticky material. The plate was bathed in silver nitrate to make it sensitive to light and then exposed. Prints could be made on albumen paper, and I believe this process wasn’t patented by the ‘inventor’ (Archer) so everyone got to use it for free.

Something else called a Verreotype also seemed to supercede the daguerreotype, being faster and more usable in poor light, and less prone to fading.

But the next big deal was the gelatine process from 1871, introduced by R.L. Maddox. Again lifted from wikipedia: ‘A suspension of silver salts in gelatin is coated onto acetate film or fiber-based or resin coated paper and allowed to dry (hence the term dry plate). These materials remain stable for months and years unlike the ‘wet plate’ materials that preceded them.

This is basically what is used in Black and white films and papers today apparently. More detail (same source): ‘When small crystals (called grains) of silver salts such as silver bromide and silver chloride are exposed to light, a few atoms of free metallic silver are liberated. These free silver atoms form the latent image. This latent image is relatively stable and will persist for some months without degradation provided the film is kept dark and cool.

Films are developed using solutions that reduce the free silver atoms. An ‘amplification’ of the latent image occurs as the silver salts near the free silver atom are also reduced to metallic silver. The strength, temperature and time for which the developer is allowed to act allow the photographer to control the contrast of the final image. The development is then stopped by neutralizing the developer in a second bath.

Once development is complete, the undeveloped silver salts must be removed by fixing in sodium thiosulphate or ammonium thiosulphate, and then the film or paper must be washed in clean water. The final image consists of metallic silver embedded in the gelatin coating.’

That appears to be the basics of the process, but it looks like lots of different processes came from those early intensely creative periods of discovery, and I would love to think that a hardy band of enthusiasts or artists or both will continue to use them creatively and successfully (although how long the materials to do so will last is anyone’s guess). Also, there are some other processes out there also.

Cameraless photography

Okay so scanners, photocopiers, photograms, all fine and beautiful. But look at this..

by Carole Pfeffer, https://www.cap.ca/CAP/aop/birefringenceAndCameralessPhotography.html

That’s not some kind of abstract Klee-like jungle, it’s apparently ‘birefringence’…erm, polarised light is shone through a transparent plastic object – no shortage of those about the place in this day and age, and the more ways of making decent art with them, the better – which is put under stress (that’s physical, not emotional).

Then the distorted (refracted?) light is captured with a colour photogram – which I guess you do using a colour enlarger, and using whatever more careful processes you have to use to produce colour prints. These seem to involve more chemicals, accurate temperatures and time, and currently do not seem to suit someone about to move house, both from and to a location with a very small bathroom. One for the future.

I’m sure it isn’t, but the fact that this looks like a fabulously undiscovered hugely successful Klee keeps nagging at me – something as artistic as this from pure physics! But then isn’t all photography, and you could argue, painting and sculpture and so on too?

Note – further explanations:

http://www.asci.org/artikel539.html further on carol pfeffer

Canadian art and physics competition https://www.cap.ca/CAP/art.html

Other biorefringence as art http://www.grad.ucl.ac.uk/comp/2006-2007/research/gallery/index.pht?entryID=068 and also http://ttbphoto.com/birefringence.html

The earliest (surviving) photograph

From Wikipedia (a straight lifting job I’m afraid): By Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, entitled “View from the Window at Le Gras,” captured on 20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. Due to the 8-hour exposure, the buildings are illuminated by the sun from both right and left. This photo is generally considered the first successful permanent photograph.

The Daguerreotype.

Taken by Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre in 1838; that in itself is enough for me to respect it, but adding to that what it actually is – without being nostalgic this truly is an opportunity, a view directly into the past. Those houses might still be there, and they look like houses you can see now but in so totally a different context.

It reminds me of how preoccupied you can be, and that’s ‘you’ very much including me, and not really take in what’s around you. Then, on the first day of your holiday, say, or when you go to the beach at the weekend, or go to a new city and step out of the train station (different again to what you feel when you’ve lived there a while), whatever it might be; it’s like all that is taken away and your are free again to experience a place with your whole concentration and sense. The particular smell of a particular town, how it feels to be there, how light the air is and what you can see; sounds easy to say but it adds up doesn’t it? It’s the smell that most does it for me, sometimes a smell can take me back decades and then it takes ages to work out where, which house or town, and when.

And then a photograph like this appears and it makes me wish I could feel what people in this city felt then. According to Wikipedia  this is the first ever photograph of a person. The pavements are full of them and the traffic is moving, but the picture took ten minutes to expose so all you can see are two people; the man getting his shoes cleaned and the person cleaning them, and the blurriness of the figures even shows you what they were doing. Motion revealed too. A true window into the past.

I like the way this early photograph looks scratched and bleached to pieces; god knows people spend long enough trying to recreate the same effect in photoshop today (I know I have, but these effects didn’t make sense until I started with the paper negatives and home development). It isn’t superficially about how it makes you respond, as if the presentation of the negative and the print in a battered form somehow makes it more ‘real’ and earthy, and I don’t think it’s merely that it’s more difficult to produce a flawless image when chemicals and trays and cameras and film or paper are involved (although certainly more can go irreversibly wrong that it can with PS). Maybe it really is that these battered images are more linked to the past than their seamless ‘modern counterparts’. There’s the history of photography like the opening of the eyes and more intense self-awareness (examination?) as the industrial history of the world moves on, and then I guess there actually *is* the way so many things can go wrong; if you do a film image these days you have to really mean it, and work hard for a good one. I don’t mean that you can be lazy in using PS, it’s working hard in a different way; different cumulative steps are involved, and if the element of chance and/or prediction is less, perhaps you end up planning and previsualising more to make up for it.

Anyway, according to the bloke in the camera shop nearby there’s this new invention which might catch on soon; it’s a round thing called ‘the wheel’ – I’ll keep you posted :)..meanwhile, more on daguerrotypes here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Daguerre

This guy makes his own, and very beautiful too http://www.shinyphotos.com/

Southern UK daguerreotypes http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/DShistoryindex.htm

Dagguereian Soctiety http://www.daguerre.org/