SHARING A SUNSET WITH LOUIS AND LEON
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY HAS NEVER BEEN DEFINED BY A SINGLE TECHNICAL BREAKTHROUGH. It is, of course an invention, but one which is evolutionary, unlike a “eureka” moment in which a single inventor, an Edison, say, solves a problem and generates a product. The making of pictures unfolded in a much slower fashion, with many “little edisons” adding this technique or that method along a protracted timeline. Photography is never “finished”; it is always on the way to being finished.
This means that assigning authorship to a particular development or stage in photography is difficult. The art has so many co-creators that we find it hard to nail down who was the first to do or try a particular thing. The first days of the craft saw many different people all trying to portray very basic elements of the world, with very little documentation as to who was first across a given finish line. As we find in our own time, if you think up a great idea for a picture, chances are that a zillion other people have had the same “original” notion at the same time, given how universal some of our life experiences are.
Moonstone Beach, Cambria, California, August 29, 2026, 7:40pm
By this time, for example, nearly everyone who has picked up a camera has made some kind of image of the sun. Our primal connection to nature was documented in photos almost as soon as the arrival of photos themselves. Ah, but who was the first to try such a picture? Some credit the first solar photograph to Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault, a pair of French physicists who were experimenting in 1845 with the relatively new daguerreotype method, one of the first photographic systems to boast sharp resolution and fine detail. Their exposure was amazingly fast for the time (1/60sec.) and the resulting image was small, just 4.7 inches big, but it reportedly recorded spots on the sun’s surface and so was regarded as a scientific milestone. Okay, that’s the accepted version of history. But can we really attribute “firsties” in any photographic history with any certainty? It’s been argued that several people invented the telephone at about the same time as Alexander Graham Bell, but he was just the one who got to the patent office first. The same is likely true of most advances in photography. They have so many fathers that they are community property.
Which points to the fact that almost any subject has, by now, been photographed to death, or at least beyond the point of novelty, with the only crucial ingredient one’s own approach or experience. Even then, it’s hard to approach the hyper-familiar in a fresh way. Still, it’s the degree to which we refuse to accept that “there is nothing new under the sun” that makes us, well, photographers.
LUMIERE’S PHOTGRAPHIC HAT TRICK
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ALL HISTORIES OF THE EARLIEST DAYS OF MOTION PICTURES rightfully credit brothers August and Louis Lumiere as twin titans in the creation of some of the medium’s most important technical advancements. Their first breakthrough came when they refined Thomas Edison’s earliest motion picture cameras and devised a more uniform method of moving film through them, with the simple but elegant invention of sprockets. Their second, and substantially bigger win involved the creation of the cinematograph, which combined photography, developing, and projection within a single device. Both innovations helped the Lumieres become the first true producers of motion picture content and the very concept of “movies”, years ahead of Edison and the rest of the field. Ironically, they believed that the cinema was a dead-end fad, a novelty that would play itself out in time. That mistake would eventually lead them back to their beginnings in still photography, and their third fundamental miracle: color.
Auguste Lumiere, captured by the Autochrome process he developed with his brother Louis, just after 1900.
Attempts at a natural, stable color process had begun very nearly at the start of the photographic era, but nearly all were what we’d now called coloration processes, with either special filtration or hand-drawn hues added after a positive monochrome print was achieved. The Lumieres built color into the very act of making a photograph with their chemically complex Autochrome system, an “additive” process, versus the “subtractive” methods which would later characterize the first true color films such as Kodachrome.
Near the turn of the 20th century, just a few years after roll film was popularized by George Eastman, the Lumieres built Autochrome on existing glass plate technology. coating a plate with a random mosaic of microscopic grains of potato starch, dyed red-orange, green, and blue-violet, with each grain hue acting as a color filter. Lampblack was mixed in with the colored grains and an over-layer of silver halide emulsion was applied over that. The exposed plate would produce a color negative, which was then re-exposed after the removal of most of the plate’s silver content to result in a positive transparency. The result was extremely natural in its reproduction of the existing color spectrum but dark in tone, so that a backlight of some sort would have to be shone through it for sufficient illumination. Special carrying cases were produced to make this process easier and more consistent.
Autochrome became the first complete process for in-camera recording of a colored image, but, due to its required longer exposure times, it became a medium for mostly portraiture and still-life work. Accordingly, many historic figures “sat” for Autochromes, including President William Howard Taft, the first president to be photographed in natural color. The Lumiere’s system, short-lived though it was, kicked open the door to color photography, taking it from an afterthought craft to a living art. Every one of us are standing on their shoulders.
AND NOW, THIS WORD…
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WITHOUT ANY CONCRETE EVIDENCE, I’m willing to bet that the most common name for a photograph, globally, is the simple word “untitled”. And I’m pretty okay with that, truly. Titles are an attempt to identify, classify, or qualify the image to which it’s attached. And I wonder, in the majority of cases, if that’s even important.
One of the first reasons to title or caption photos was to train the first generation of photo observers how to decipher the contents of a picture, or, in the merely journalistic, record-making sense, to anchor the image to crucial content. The first pictures of the Great Pyramids originally needed the context, for most people, of telling you what you were seeing, where it could be found, a little history, etc. Then, for about a century, photos printed in the emerging print media used verbiage as a guide to the picture-as-illustration. The image only existed to make the content more comprehensible or concise.
But now, as photographs become more of a purely visual experience, not tied to a specific explanation or reference point in the viewer’s eye, do titles and captions add to their impact? If a photo is meant to engage the senses on a truly instinctual level, do they, like a verbal narrative, have to be “about” anything at all? Certainly many images are created to tell an A-to-B-C linear story, but, unless they are in service of a story, do we really need words to tell us what we are seeing, or what it ought to be named, or what it has set out to accomplish? Does a title render anything valuable to a photograph?
Either an image has impact, that is, makes a connection with its audiences, or it does not. Spinning sentences about how it was taken, what it’s supposed to show, what you should think about it….all these can be said to be excuses for the picture not having effectively made that connection. And yet, so many photo sharing sites are rife with what can only be termed explanations of pictures, when, in a visual medium, that job should fall to the photograph alone.
Museums (often the worst possible people to entrust art to) are famous for captioning their exhibits into submission, with weary essays of what you’re seeing and what you are supposed think about it tugging many soaring pictures earthward. Some of the most talented curators in the world, learned people with an eye for excellence, often choose images that are wonderfully compelling and then litter them with captions so ponderously pretentious that the viewer is tempted to think he is not intelligent enough to like the images without being “educated”. This subverts what makes photographs eloquent, because it tells us not to trust what we feel, but rather what the prevailing expert consensus is. It’s nonsense. And it’s wrong.
So call your image “Abstruse #7” or “Bellicose Eclipse” or just plain “untitled”, but don’t allow yourself to try to show in words what the photos didn’t show emotionally. Be a photographer or be a clever writer, but be one of those things all the way. And if you don’t want to explain anything, don’t. A photograph isn’t justified because of its reference to anything else. Like all art, it just is. Trust your vision. Show the lily…just don’t gild it.
RICH, TALENTED BOY MAKES GOOD
Jacques Henri Lartigue chronicled the gauzy, gay world of upper-class France in the early 1900’s.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE MOST APPEALING FEATURE OF EVERY NEW ART is that, for a while, everyone participating in it is an amateur. Because a new art has no history, it has no history-makers….no professionals, no celebrated artistes, no one who is doing it better. Everyone is, briefly, in the same “how-do-you-work-this-thing?” boat.
Of course, eventually, some ornery cuss or another begins to figure out how to progress from stumblebum to star, and then everyone’s off to the races. Photography, like other infant arts, began as a tinkerer’s toy, sprouting an occasional outlier genius here and there, until the pool was fairly crowded with People Trying To Make Their Mark. And one of those first mark-makers was not yet out of short pants when his pictures began to be the embodiment of the phrase “and a little child shall lead them.”
His name was Jacques Henri Lartigue, and, whatever else formed his strong visual sense, it certainly wasn’t the nobility of poverty, born, as he was, in 1894 in France to upper-class wealth and the privilege that went with it. His photographic muse thus contained none of those inspiring Lean, Hungry Years or Hard-won Real World Experiences that we associate with mature art; the kid was just born with an instinctually strong knack for composition, and what he chose to compose just happened to be the activities of the Rich and Famous….in other words, everyone he hung out with.
Lartigue’s social set were the racers and aviators of the sleek new century.
Lartigue’s social set was the class every other social set in France aspired to; the people who seasoned at the Rive Gauche, the people who competed in lawn tennis tournaments, the country’s first race car drivers and aviators. Armed with a simple gift camera, and taught processing by his father, Jacques began snapping the world around him at age seven, maintaining journals that contextualized the images, bookmarking his family’s gilded role in the newborn twentieth century.
Gifted with an eye for photographic narrative, Lartigue nevertheless segued into painting, where he spent virtually his entire adult life. In fact, it was not until a friend showed some of Jacques’ photos to John Szarkowski, director of photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art, that Lartigue had his first formal photographic exhibition, in 1963, when he was sixty-nine.The show led to international recognition of his untutored yet undeniable talent, as well as a few prize portrait commissions and a second social career with the same elite one-percenters with whom he had rubbed elbows as a boy. One of his final collections, Diary Of A Century, was published in cooperation with Richard Avedon in 1978. He died a late-blooming “overnight success” at ninety-two.
What began for Jacques Henri Lartigue as family snapshots became one of the most important chronicles of a vanished world, and thus the best kind of photojournalism (or sociology, depending on your college major). For shooters, this boy of privilege remains the romantic ideal of the talented amateur.
Share this:
January 4, 2017 | Categories: Commentary, History, Photo-journalism | Tags: Lartigue, MOMA, photographic history | 1 Comment