6.5 — Photography and Early Modern Media
Photography reshaped how people saw, recorded, and shared the world. From daguerreotypes to mass-reproduced halftones, new media blurred art, science, journalism, and personal memory—setting the stage for modern visual culture.
Invention and Early Processes
- Daguerreotype (1839): Single, highly detailed image on silvered copper; sharp but not reproducible.
- Calotype (Talbot): Paper negative/positive system enabling multiples; softer tonal range.
- Collodion Wet Plate (1850s): Glass negatives with fine detail; required portable darkrooms.
- Albumen Prints: Egg-white coated paper for glossy positives widely used in the mid-19th century.
Definition: Halftone
A printing method translating continuous tones into dots of varying size, enabling photographs to be mass-printed in newspapers and magazines.
Portraits, Science, and Empire
Photography democratized portraiture (carte de visite), aided scientific classification (astronomy, botany), and served colonial surveys and ethnographic projects—often shaping perceptions of distant peoples and lands.
Art or Mechanical Reproduction?
- Pictorialism: Soft focus, gum bichromate, and hand manipulation to emulate painterly effects (Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz early period, Gertrude Käsebier).
- Straight Photography: Sharp focus, tonal clarity, and unmanipulated prints championed by Stieglitz later, Paul Strand, and the Photo-Secession’s evolution.
Networks and Circulation
Studios, salons, and journals (e.g., Camera Work) debated photography’s status. Halftone printing fed illustrated weeklies, while picture postcards and stereographs carried images globally.
Motion and Media Crossovers
- Chronophotography: Muybridge and Marey decomposed motion, influencing science and artists (Rodin, Duchamp).
- Early Film: Magic lanterns and zoetropes led to the Lumière brothers’ projections and Méliès’s cinematic fantasies.
Note: Photography and Painting
Photography’s challenge pushed painters toward new strategies—Impressionist light effects, Symbolist inwardness, and later the structural experiments of Cézanne and Cubism.
Legacy
By 1900, photography was both personal keepsake and mass medium. Its languages of framing, cropping, and seriality permeated modern art, while its reproducibility reshaped how images circulated and were believed.