Critical Studies - Lecture Notes: Industrialization and innovation. - Part 3

| INTRODUCTION:

Everyone knows that the final part of a Triology is the best part - unless we're talking about Star Wars, where the best movie was clearly Empire Strikes Back.

But here we are at the end of my notes for Critical Studies with standard warnings re accuracy, spelling et al.
PART 1: Industrialization and innovation
PART 2: 19th Century New Zealand
PART 3: 19th Century Photography

THE 19TH CENTURY:
PART 3: 19TH CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY

1. GENERAL:“From today painting is dead!” (attrib: Paul Delaroche) - The observation was probably made in 1839, when Delaroche saw examples of the Daguerreotype, the first successful photographic process.  (from Wikipedia)
   Although it sounds rather pompous the statement is mirrored in these modern times by people who claim that the traditional methods of acting are dead each time a movie comes out which utilises CGI in a new way – I cite the news stories surrounding the Final Fantasy movie Final Fantasy: the spirits within.
2. Camera Lucida:The camera lucida performs anoptical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure. This allows the artist to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, thus aiding in the accurate rendering of perspective. (from wikipedia)
3. Camera Obscura:An optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen and was one of the inventions that led tophotography and the camera. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, rotated 180 degrees (thus upside-down), but with color and perspectivepreserved.   (From wikipedia)
4. HISTORY:19th century photography and the way colonisim.Big question is why it wasn't developed soonerThe technology aspect managed to come together.  A combination of tech, social revolutions.As soon as it became known people demanded it for their own purposes.
   
5. PEOPLE OF NOTE:
   1. Thomas Wedgewood (1771 – 1805)The first person known to have thought of creating permanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light sensitive chemical.  His practical experiments yielded only shadow images (photograms).2. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)Created and developed images using paper coated with silver iodide.  This was patented as The Calotype 3. John Herschel 1792 – 1871 (Properly Sir John Frederick Willam Hershel, 1st Baronet.)Worked with the Camera Lucida and experimented with colour reporuction and different mediums and applied the terms of negative and positive to photography in general.
   4. Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre 1787 – 1851Invented the the daguerreotype process of photography which worked with Bitume of Judea and required an exposure which lasted for hours or days.  His image “Boulevard du Temple is an example of this.  It only had a ten minute exposure time which meant that the moving traffic was littereally going too fast for the camera to capture it.  The only people who stayed motionless long enough to be captured are a man and a bootblack.5. Frederic Scott Archer (1813 – 1857)Invented the photographc collodion process which preceeded the modern gelatin emulsion (photographic film as we know it today)
   
6. TRAVEL:
   With the developing technologies of the cameras they were able to be taken to more extreme and remote locations.  This allowed for the first photographs of battlefields and from this we can see that the first faltering steps of photo journalism.
   Roger Fenton (1819 – 1869)A pioneering British photography and one of the first war photgraphers during the Crimean War.  Due to the size and cumbersome nature of his photographic equipment Genton was limited in what he could take images of.  His images were mostely posed and he avoided taking pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers.
   2. Questions to be answered:“You supply the pictures.  I'll supply the war” - William Randolpha Hearst attrib (really citizen kane – although the character of Citzen Kane was based on Hearst)
   Does the camera record impartilally? - short answer yes.Does the photographer? Short answer - sometimesHow do cutlural beliefs shape the making of images? - short answer if you're out to photograph the 'quote unquote' noble savage then that's what you'll come back withHow do these question concerns complicate ideas of photographic truth?
   Photographers are experiementing continously with different kinds of photographic techniques. Short answerThe ancient types of cameras are still very much in use.  We now have digital cameras which means that anyone can snap a picture.  The development and techniques involved in the film photography”
   
7. TOHUNGA (TREASURES)William Henry Thomas PartingtonIn a nutshell:William Partington took photographs of Wanganui Maori.These photographs werer sold to the Auckland Museam.Over the course of time the negatives for these photographs, done on glass, were lost.Said negatives were found in the estate of a family buried deep in that most kiwi of structures, the back shed.The owners (of the property) decided to put the glass negatives up for auction rationialzing that, since these things were theirs to do with as they liked.Wanganui Maori objected to this saying that because the images were of their ancestors they had a claim/connection to the glass negatives.The cultural view of these glass negatives is that they are a treasure which belongs to the people rather than whoever stumbles across them.  The families at the center of all this were not trying to say.
   “We don't want you to sell them because then we won't get any money”
8. The images are about their ancestors whom they felt were being sold and/or given away as nothing more than commodities.  This harkens back to the spirit being trapped inside the image or carving. 
   As the pieces are taken and given away we begin to lose the meaning of each of them.