Rollfilm

I’m reading M. W. Marien’s great book “Photography. A cultural History” and i am amazed by the photographs the pioneers of photography created.

Nicéphore Niépce

“View from the Window at Le Gras”- 1826 - The photograph which is considered to be the first one.

Louis Daguerre

“Boulevard du Temple”- 1839 - The first photograph to depict a person.

William Fox Talbot

“Leaves of Orchidea” - 1839 - Photogenic drawing negative

Southworth & Hawes

“The use of Aether for Anesthesia” - 1847

David Octavius Hill

“Mrs Elizabeth Hall, Newhaven fishwife” - 1843/46

A contemporary of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey was not a photographer. His field was physiology, a relatively new science of the human body that allowed him to indulge his love of physics and engineering. Marey considered the body an animate machine, subject to the same laws as inanimate machines, and he dedicated his life to analyzing the laws that governed its movements.

The publication of Muybridge’s photographs in Paris started Marey on a quest to make a camera that would picture movement as well as chart it. Muybridge’s multicamera system wasn’t scientific enough for Marey. By 1882, he developed a single camera method that he called chrono-, or time-, photography. Objective and precise, chrono-photography allowed Marey to make images from which scientific measurements could be taken.

Early in his career, Marey modified graphing instruments used in physics to chart movements inside the body such as the heartbeat, as well as the body’s external motions.
Marey’s camera was the forerunner of the motion picture camera. A high-speed version of his camera was devised by his last assistant, Lucien Bull, to photograph projectiles such as this bullet piercing a soap bubble.

Marey used dry photographic plates, faster than the wet plates Muybridge used, and an ordinary camera with its lens left open. Behind the lens, Marey put a rotating metal disk that had from one to ten slots cut into it at even intervals. As the subject moved in front of a black background, the rotating shutter exposed the glass plate, creating a sequence of images. Marey’s chronophotographs were the first images that promised to explain exactly what happens when the body moves. [text:Smithsonian Institution]

More Photos: Étienne-Jules Marey: movement in light

The introducer into Britain of the fine art of photogravure is son of a late member of the well-known firm of photographers of which he is now a partner. He was born at Hamilton in 1864, educated at Hamilton Academy and Anderson’s College, Glasgow, and took to photography by a natural process of heredity. In 1883 he went to Vienna to learn the new and then secret process of photogravure, and was the first to practise the art in this country. At the first exhibition of the Photographic Salon in 1893 he shewed some of his work, and as a result was forthwith elected a member of the select international body of artistic photographers known as the Linked Ring. Since then he has, by special invitation, exhibited in nearly every country in Europe, as well as in America. In 1900 the Royal Photographic Society decided to hold a series of “one man shows” in their new rooms in Russell Square, London, and they invited him to furnish the material for the first of the series, which he did. In 1904 he was appointed, along with Sir William Abney, K.C.B., by the Royal Commission for the St. Louis Exhibition, to represent this country on the International Jury for Photography, Photo-process, and Photo-appliances. To Mr. Annan’s artistic taste and technical skill is to be attributed much of the beauty of many volumes issued by his own and other firms, which have effected so signal a revolution in the whole art of book illustration within the last twenty years.

Glasgow Digital Library

I was browsing the George Easman House Archive and found these great photographs of New York in the 1940ies by Andreas Feininger. More information about Feininger can found on the introduction page on geh.org or here

While some photographers at the beginning of the photographic age tried to mimic the visual aesthetics of painting to establish their “technical images” as another art form, it’s interesting to see how photography had an impact on painting. The technique of painting with the help of tools like the camera obscura or different ways of using projections has been established before the first daguerreotype was created. But photography could be seen as the perfection of these kind of helping tools.

There is an interesting blog post which lists several examples of paintings by Gaugin, Cezanne, van Gogh, Lautrec & Degas which have been produced with the help of a photographical template. See for yourself:

Gaugin:

Cezanne:

Lautrec:

van Gogh:

Degas:

For more examples and information follow this link