Magazine stuffs

I like these front covers because I would like to put Bina on the front, wearing something she's made, so I looked at covers that have 1 person, fairly close to the camera.

http://www.fashionising.com/pictures/p--Fashion-Magazine-covers-for-April-2010-6234-90670.html

I really liked these layouts - they're interesting, vibrant, different. If I can, I would like to use all of them in my final magazine piece. I like the dark 2 page spread (6 Brands for summer) and the polaroid-esq spread the most (both further down)

http://www.topdesignmag.com/20-magazine-design-layouts-for-your-inspiration/

http://www.amylampdesign.com/2009/03/213/

http://www.touchey.com/post/15395830073/10-awesome-fashion-magazines-layouts

essay hist. art and photography

Art and photography are intimately intertwined. Photography is, for the most part, a branch of art. Using the same techniques and styles to create a beautiful, meaningful picture, or just get the message across.
However, art in the traditional sense has also been irreversibly changed to accommodate this new medium. While for many centuries pencil, paint and stone were some of the few mediums available to capture the world and events as accurately as possible, Photography was suddenly able to do this much faster and more accurately than anything before it - however carefully drawn. This meant that artists were much less necessary for deliberately capturing an image, they were therefore more able to express themselves in which ever way they saw fit. This extra freedom led to the copious art movements of the late 19th century and much of the 20th.

Before the camera, battles had to be drawn after the event, coronations, weddings (if drawn at all), children, anything moving, had to be drawn from memory or imagination, and so were often flawed. Portraits would take several days, and the subject would have to sit very still for hours on end, meaning many portraits often looked rather stiff. Paintings and sculptures, however, could be changed, photographs were often stuck in the form they was taken in, difficult to edit, and always black-and-white. There was, it seemed, still room for art in commercial works.

The changes seen in art became gradually more radical, from the Impressionists onwards. The changes ranged from incessantly busy pieces, to 'minimalist' pieces of art by the 1960's. The industrial revolution had an equally impressive impact on art as photography - though there is a good chance that it was the combination of the two that made the changes so fast paced.

While the whole world had been trudging along working as best it could with nature, heavy industry was making everything faster, better, stronger than many traditional methods and pushing the little guy out. It led to the widespread rise of cities, and the shrinkage of rural communities. Many people were often brought up in wildly different surroundings to their forefathers, and that included many artists. Some found greater solace in open spaces, others wanted to fill them. This meant that some artists became more fascinated, however less 'in touch' with the countryside when they visited it, while others couldn't successfully accustom themselves to the quietness and peace,  and the lack of people.
The advent of the Box camera - a camera that had 100 exposures in it, and once all used, would be sent back to the factory, where the film was developed and returned to the owner - also meant that, as well as making the camera more a accessible to a wider audience, it again helped to make artists redundant.

Photography, coupled with the continually advancing world pushed against art for capturing things; art became a source, not for depicting what was happening as accurately as possible, but purely for depicting what the artist saw, how they saw it - such as Picasso and his painting 'Guernica'. Instead of showing everything as it was, his jagged, Cubist style showed more pain and suffering than the traditional art styles. In short, art became art for arts self.


Cubism opened the door for more experimental works, such as Surrealism and Dadaism. Both new styles found photography a helpful element, where they could take a photograph and then draw from it, instead of from memory and getting the details they wanted to include in the pieces wrong.

Photography was a fairly quick (if not yet easy) way to remember the world around the artist. capturing things of interest and storing the information safely. Unlike memory, the images remained accurate in a way the memory cant. It thus made accuracy easier for the detailed, life-like drawings of some artists, and, through tearing, folding, moving, easy to distort the image (whether to make an abstract image, or a simply more interesting one).

This easy to tear, distort etc image helped artists such as Dubliner Francis Bacon who torn images up to make new images. Taking several photographs of the subject and then taking a Cubist approach, trying to show as much of the subject as possible in the one image, tearing the photographs up and placing them together in a new and, to him at least, exiting order, or folding them to make a new image. Photography made it easier for this artist to abandon the traditions and restraints of traditional art and the reality of what he could see.

Photography also changed advertising, often being easier to make prints from, and, during the 1950s, the source of many prints designed to sell drinks, food, soaps and other domestic or luxury items and appliances. In old non-fiction books, there were often adverts for related items throughout, with a mixture of photographic and drawn prints; which over the next few decades became more and more photo based, leading to pop art (art based on old advertising styles) becoming an actual art movement, spawning Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstien.

Artist interview

Ian Judd - sculptor:
Reading the description of what is wanted by the company/person offering work. After thinking of some initial ideas, He looks at ways he could put them together or expand them - if making a sculpture of a train - for example - he will look at train books and visit railway stations (especially if a steam train). He has his own style - which generally is obvious in much of his work, but he is not afraid to work in a different style or exactly to employer specifications. He works mostly in metal concrete and stone - often making maquettes out of polystyrene and wax, any gates are a bit more difficult to make a maquette for and hundreds of diagrams will be drawn up before settling on a final piece. he does much of his casting himself, so he can also advise contractors/employers on what sorts of materials would be best to use and how - for example a gate he's working on at the moment he has been asked about making the gate by casting it with cast iron - which he says is too weak and would cost much more than the methods he would like to use.
For his own work, he makes a figure relating to an idea he has had using wax or clay and continually reworks it till he feels that it suits his personal brief. Once made his maquette, he will either make another version, using again, clay or wax, but also carved polystyrene to make a mould from - and make a mould and statue from that using plaster, cement, or a metal - or he will carve the figure into stone
Arist is a family member : http://studiosculpture.eu/stone.htm
 

essay hist.art

Neo-Classical Art was a revival, in the  mid 1700's, of Classical Art from 500BC Greece onwards, combined with new philosophical thinking. It was a backlash against the Rococo and Baroque art styles before it. They were both extravagant styles that artists decided to move away from. This was due to, David and Ingres wanting to depict recent heros of the French revolution to the Greek heros, such as Heracles and  Theseus, also seen in Renaissance art work.

The Romantic movement was simply a reaction to the disillusionment of the Enlightenment period. It emphasised emotions and imagination, using 'classic' fairy tales and myths as the basis for much of their work. A central idea to Romanticism is the originality of the artist, making them the main feature, rather than the model

Realism  was the accurate objective description of the ordinary, or real, world, and was especially evident in painting. Realism artists tried not to imitate artistic achievements already achieved, but show an accurate depiction of nature and contemporary life the artist saw around them. "The artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism in the academic art was unanimously rejected, and necessity to introduce contemporary to art found strong support."

http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c19th/realism.htm

The Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it, they are slightly blurred. Their pictures are outdoor scenes, they tend to be bright and vibrant. The artists liked to capture the images with colors, rather than detail.

Post Impressionism actually started before the end of the Impressionist era. The term 'Post-Impressionism' was coined by a Mr. Roger Fry as he prepared for an exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1910; he called the exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists", a clever marketing campaign to pair a 'brand' name with European artists whose work was not so well known, if at all, in England. The exhibition included "Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, George Seurat, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Othon Friesz, plus the sculptor Aristide Maillol. Post-Impressionists pushed the ideas of the Impressionists into new directions, their modernist journey from the past into the future."

http://arthistory.about.com/od/modernarthistory/a/Post-Impressionism-Art-History-101-Basics.htm

In Expressionism the artist attempts to depict the subjective emotions and responses that events or objects give him. He does this by distorting, exaggerating, the image and using primitivism, and fantasy, and "through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements". 

http://www.artmovements.co.uk/expressionism.htm

Fauvism (les fauves-wild beasts)rejected the softer pallette and style of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and used pure colour in large doses, with broader brushstrokes and more vibrant ones. The style first appeared in 1905, shocking the public (hence the name). The style can widely be considered to have influanced later artists

"Cubism was possibly the most revolutionary style of modern art; developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it was the first form of abstract art. Evolving at the beginning of the 20th century, it was greatly influanced by the changing world around it. The world as a whole had experianced more technological advances (phone, car, etc) in 40 years than it had in well over 400. Picasso and Braque felt that art needed a new style to reflect all this change, and both had a mutual interest in Cézannes later work

Dada artworks presented a paradox; they sought to demystify artwork but remain cryptic, letting the viewer interpret the work in a variety of ways. Some Dadaists , like Cubists, portrayed figures and scenes representationally so as to analyse the form and movement of them. Others (such asKurt Schwitters) used abstraction to "express the metaphysical essence of their subject matter." Both forms picked up on incidents of life and showed them in a new and interesting manner. "Tristan Tzara especially fought the assumption that Dada was a statement; yet Tzara and his fellow artists became increasingly agitated by politics and sought to incite a similar fury in Dada audiences." 

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-dada.htm

Surrealist Art aimed to make the  conscious less over-powering in art and to experiment with peoples perseption of reality or physical objects. There were several ways of presenting the idea, through collage, like Max Ernst, 'automatic art' - drawing without using conscious control - and more traditional painting and drawing.

Abstract Expressionism was the idea that everyone had a right to freedom of expression, and that art can, and should, be a medium for this. Styles varied greatly, from Jackson Pollock (for example) creating large, fairly uncontrolled pieces, to Mark Rothko, who made more subdued, broody art. However, they both shared the same opinion of the idea of freedom of expression; that is should be free.

The term 'Pop Art' was coined, in Britain, during the 1950s. It referred a number of artists who ha d taken an interest in images of "mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products". It was influenced art pieces in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life, and by American artists like Robert Rauschenberg; British artists like the Independent Group - Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Hmailton, Edourdo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, Lawrence  Alloway and John Hale - aimed to broaden taste to more popular, less academic art. Hamilton helped to organise the 'Man, Machine, and Motion' exhibition in 1955, and 'This is Tomorrow' with the still famous image Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? (1956). Pop Art coincided with youth and pop music of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London

Minimal art emerged in late 1950's America. The term was lifted from an essay about modern  art by art philosopher Richard Wollheim in 1965. . Minimal Art was first established in paintings, and then sculpture, where it had a much greater impact.
Minimal art sculptures were often made from industrial materials, such as aluminium, concrete, glass, steel, wood, plastic or stone. The artist’s personal signature was from the work as many of the sculptures were made industrially.

tsk1 - research for

Beginnings

Photography started with a camera and the basic idea has been around since about the 5th Century B.C. For centuries these were just ideas until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura sometime in the 11th Century. Even then, the camera did not actually record images, they simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down. The first camera obscuras used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It took until the 17th Century for camera obscuras to be made small enough to be portable and basic lenses to be added.

Permanent Images

Photography as we know it today began in the late 1830s in France when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable camera obscura to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly.

• Daguerreotype
  This experiment led to collaboration between Niépce and Louis Daguerre that resulted in the creation of the Daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were the forerunners to our modern film. A copper plate was coated with silver and exposed to iodine vapor before it was exposed to light. To create the image on the plate, the earlier Daguerreotypes had to be exposed to light for up to 15 minutes. The Daguerreotype was very popular until it was replaced in the late 1850s by emulsion plates.
  
  
• Emulsion Plates
  Emulsion plates, or wet plates, were less expensive than Daguerreotypes and took only two or three seconds of exposure time. This made them much more suited to portrait photography, which was the most common photography at the time. These wet plates used an emulsion process called the Collodion process, rather than a simple coating on the image plate. Two of these emulsion plates were ambrotype and tintype. Ambrotypes used a glass plate instead of the copper plate of the Daguerreotypes. Tintypes used a tin plate. While these plates were much more sensitive to light, they had to be developed quickly. It was during this time that bellows were added to cameras to help with focusing.
  
  
• Dry Plates
  In the 1870s, photography took another huge leap forward. Richard Maddox improved on a previous invention to make dry gelatine plates that were nearly equal with wet plates for speed and quality. These dry plates could be stored rather than made as needed. This allowed photographers much more freedom in taking photographs. Cameras were also able to be smaller so that they could be hand-held. As exposure times decreased, the first camera with a mechanical shutter was developed.

"Cameras for Everyone

"Photography was only for professionals or the very rich until George Eastman started a company called Kodak in the 1880s. Eastman created a flexible roll film that did not require the constant changing of solid plates. This allowed him to develop a self-contained box camera that held 100 exposures of film. This camera had a small single lens with no focusing adjustment. The consumer would take pictures and then send the camera back to the factory to for the film to be developed, much like our disposable cameras today. This was the first camera inexpensive enough for the average person to afford. The film was still large in comparison to today's 35mm film. It took until the late 1940s for 35mm film to become cheap enough for most people to afford.

"The Horrors of War

"Around 1930, Henri-Cartier Bresson and other photographers began to use small 35mm cameras to capture images of life as it occurred rather than staged portrait shots. When World War II started in 1939, many photojournalists adopted this style. The posed portraits of World War I soldiers gave way to graphic images of war and its aftermath. These images, such as Joel Rosenthal's photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima brought the reality of war across the ocean and helped galvanize the American people like never before. This style of capturing decisive moments shaped the face of photography forever.

"Instant Images

"At the same time 35mm cameras were becoming popular, Polaroid introduced the Model 95. Model 95 used a secret chemical process to develop film inside the camera in less than a minute. This new camera was fairly expensive but the novelty of instant images caught the public's attention. By the mid 1960s, Polaroid had many models on the market and the price had dropped so that even more people could afford it.

"Image Control

"While the French introduced the permanent image, the Japanese brought easy control of their images to the photographer. In the 1950s Asahi, which later became Pentax, introduced the Asahiflex and Nikon introduced its Nikon F camera. These were both SLR-type cameras and the Nikon F allowed for interchangeable lenses and other accessories. For the next 30 years SLR-type cameras remained the camera of choice and many improvements were introduced to both the cameras and the film itself.

"Smart Cameras

"In the late 1970s and early 1980s compact cameras that were capable of making image control decisions on their own were introduced. These "point and shoot" cameras calculated shutter speed, aperture, and focus; leaving photographers free to concentrate on composition. While these cameras became immensely popular with casual photographers, professionals and serious amateurs continued to prefer to make their own adjustments to image control.

"The Digital Age

In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous manufacturers worked on cameras that stored images electronically. The first of these were point and shoot cameras that used digital media instead of film. By 1991, Kodak had produced the first digital camera advanced enough to be used successfully by professionals. Other manufacturers quickly followed and today Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and other manufacturers all offer advanced digital SLR cameras. Even the most basic point and shoot camera now takes higher quality images than Niépce’s pewter plate."

http://photography.about.com/od/historyofphotography/a/photohistory.htm

"Photography was the perfect solution to art in the time of the enlightenment; scientific, reasonablewithout unnecessary flourishes. However the invention of photography changed the value of art - it could no longer be stated that art made after the invention of photography was only valuable as a snapshot of that time period; for that was the job of the camera. In a sense art was given a higher value as it portrayed a personal perception connected with historical events and philosophy."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_invention_of_photography_impact_the_art_world_in_general

http://www.artrev.com/blog/blogentry.asp?bid=156

"When photography was invented and became public in 1839, painting was the domain of artists and artisans serving a variety of needs. Many of the artist's functions were practical and served a range of social duties, celebrating and building the prestige of eminent sitters, spreading information on the physical appearance of the world, its landscape, its wonders, its cities and architecture, commemorating events of local interest or of great historical importance, and providing images which implemented the psychological grip of religions and the hierarchies and structure of society.
Painting also became the domain for the free expression of the imagination. The Romantic tradition re-enforced the concept of painting as Art, freed from illustrative duties, serving the highest purposes of the human spirit. Nonetheless, whatever its purpose, practical or expressive, and however personalized or formalized the end product, artistic depiction was always founded on the convention of illustrating elements recognizable from the visible world. Even wildly imaginative visions or ideas were expressed through identifiable symbols. Piranesi's fantasies were constructed in stone, Blake's angels had wings of feathers. Sketching from life was the only and inevitable induction of the artist, painting from nature the only code. Ideas were developed visually through the assemblage of facts.
Perhaps the greatest contribution which the new technique of photography could make to painting was to liberate Art from its ties to realism, to factuality. There was, ultimately, no need for the artist's pencil or brush to labour intensively to depict and record people, occasions or things which the photographer could document through his lens with practical ease and speed. Art was freed on its path to abstraction. The journey was not so swift, however, nor the goal so immediately evident. The French painter Paul Delaroche is credited with having claimed, on learning of the invention of photography, that "from today painting is dead". His immediate anxieties were greatly exaggerated. Painting flourished through the 19th century within a largely traditional set of conventions and moved on in the first half of the 20th century to the ambitious challenges of abstraction, pure form and colour, leaving to photographers the task of making visual records.

"PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE SERVICE OF PAINTING
Photography may have threatened the livelihood of certain artisan painters, the minor portraitists whose role was eclipsed by the new photographic portrait studios, the topographers or architectural artists whose painstaking work could now be done within a brief exposure of a photographic plate. Many artists, however, recognized photography as an invaluable aid, using the camera directly as a speedy sketching device or using published or commissioned images as visual reference and inspiration. There developed a steady trade in photographs made as artist's studies, études pour artistes. Studies of the human figure, such as those made by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in London, Auguste Belloc, Bruno Braquehais, or Felix Jacques-Antoine Moulin in Paris, served the needs of artists and voyeurs. The detailed analysis of which the camera was capable, recording, for example, the structure of trees, the minute configurations of leaves or stems, served the mid-century artist's obsession with realism. British philosopher John Ruskin encouraged the minute observation of nature by artists. The camera facilitated this function.
Photography could also serve artists by revealing details too fleeting to record with the eye. An oft-quoted example is the recording by Eadweard Muybridge, through instantaneous sequential photographs, of the precise stages of human and animal locomotion. He confirmed that at one stage in the pace of a horse's gallop all four hooves are off the ground. Ironically, it was the greatest fantasists who pursued the most exacting verisimilitude. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's cinematic dream vistas of ancient Rome, for instance, depended for their effect on a photographic exactness in the detail of marble, flower, or fabric. They are an early repudiation of the notion that the camera cannot lie. Their photographic level of veracity is a cunning deceit.
The group of 19th-century artists whose relationship with photography is perhaps most ambiguous is the Impressionists. Their approach to painting was diametrically opposed to the high "photographic" realism of the Academy. They rejected the pursuit of fine detail such as could be recorded unselectively on light-sensitive plates. Their way of looking was concerned rather with the way in which the eye and intellect perceive things rather than the dispassionate way in which the camera records. Yet at the very basis of their approach was the analysis of the effects of light on their subject matter. The Impressionist intuition was an echo of the structured investigations of photo-scientists, both groups sharing an interest in chromatic analysis and in the qualities of light as it defines form"

history of photography

roger fenton

steve.raynor@leedscitycollege.ac.uk

• 5th-4th Centuries B.C.
  Chinese and Greek philosophers describe the basic principles of optics and the camera.
• 1664-1666
  Isaac Newton discovers that white light is composed of different colors.
• 1727
  Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver nitrate darkened upon exposure to light.
• 1794
  First Panorama opens, the forerunner of the movie house invented by Robert Barker.
• 1814
  Joseph Niepce achieves first photographic image with camera obscura - however, the image required eight hours of light exposure and later faded.
• 1837
  Louis Daguerre's first daguerreotype - the first image that was fixed and did not fade and needed under thirty minutes of light exposure.
• 1840
  First American patent issued in photography to Alexander Wolcott for his camera.
• 1841
  William Henry Talbot patents the Calotype process - the first negative-positive process making possible the first multiple copies.
• 1843
  First advertisement with a photograph made in Philadelphia.
• 1851
  Frederick Scott Archer invented the Collodion process - images required only two or three seconds of light exposure.
• 1859
  Panoramic camera patented - the Sutton.
• 1861
  Oliver Wendell Holmes invents stereoscope viewer.
• 1865
  Photographs and photographic negatives are added to protected works under copyright.
• 1871
  Richard Leach Maddox invented the gelatin dry plate silver bromide process - negatives no longer had to be developed immediately.
• 1880
  Eastman Dry Plate Company founded.
• 1884
  George Eastman invents flexible, paper-based photographic film.
• 1888
  Eastman patents Kodak roll-film camera.
• 1898
  Reverend Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film.
• 1900
  First mass-marketed camera—the Brownie.
• 1913/1914
  First 35mm still camera developed.
• 1927
  General Electric invents the modern flash bulb.
• 1932
  First light meter with photoelectric cell introduced.
• 1935
  Eastman Kodak markets Kodachrome film.
• 1941
  Eastman Kodak introduces Kodacolor negative film.
• 1942
  Chester Carlson receives patent for electric photography (xerography).
• 1948
  Edwin Land markets the Polaroid camera.
• 1954
  Eastman Kodak introduces high speed Tri-X film.
• 1960
  EG&G develops extreme depth underwater camera for U.S. Navy.
• 1963
  Polaroid introduces instant color film.
• 1968
  Photograph of the Earth from the moon.
• 1973
  Polaroid introduces one-step instant photography with the SX-70 camera.
• 1977
  George Eastman and Edwin Land inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• 1978
  Konica introduces first point-and-shoot, autofocus camera.
• 1980
  Sony demonstrates first consumer camcorder.
• 1984
  Canon demonstrates first digital electronic still camera.
• 1985
  Pixar introduces digital imaging processor.
• 1990
  Eastman Kodak announces Photo CD as a digital image storage medium.

http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/Photography.htm

Camera Obscura, 16th century

Table-Top Camera Obscura, 17-18th centuries

We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel, who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing. The innovations which would lead to the development of photography existed long before the first photograph. The camera obscura (Latin,literally translating to "dark room") had been in existence for at least four hundred years, but its use was limited to its purpose as an aid to drawing. It was discovered that if a room was completely darkened, with a single hole in one wall, an inverted image would be seen on the opposite wall. A person inside of the room could then trace this image, which was upside-down (similating the way that images actually enter our eyes). The earliest record of the uses of a camera obscura can be found in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who may have used it as an aid to understanding perspective. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a table-top model was developed. By adding a focused lens and a mirror, it was possible for a person outside of the box to trace the image which was reflected through it.

Nicephore Niepce, World's First Photograph 1827

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Paris Boulevard 1839

It was a French man, Nicephore Niepce (pronounced Nee-ps) who produced the first photograph in June/July 1827. By using chemicals on a metal plate, placed inside of a camera obscura, he was able to record an obscure image of the view outside of his window. He called his process "heliography" (after the Greek "of the sun"). The image is difficult to decipher, but there is a building on the left, a tree, and a barn immediately in front. The exposure lasted eight hours, so the sun had time to move from east to west, appearing to shine on both sides of the building. Another problem is that he had difficulty "fixing" the image so that it would not continue to darken when exposed to light.
Daguerre (pronounced Dagair) is the most famous of several people who invented more successful and commercially applicable forms of photography. He regularly used a camera obscura as an aid to painting in perspective, and this had led him to seek to freeze the image. In 1826 he learned of the work of Niepce, and in January of 1829 signed up a partnership with him. The partnership was a short one since Niepce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued to experiment. He was able to reduce the exposure time to thirty minutes, and in 1837 he discovered a chemical process which would permanently to fix the image. This new process he called a Daguerreotype. Drawbacks at this time included the fact that the length of the exposure time ruled out portraiture; the image was laterally reversed (as one sees oneself in a mirror); and that the image was very fragile. Another drawback was that it was a "once only" system (since it was fixed to metal). Soon, exposure times were reduced to a matter of seconds, and portraiture became a commercially viable purpose for the new technology. It would be up to George Eastman to introduce flexible film in 1884, allowing multiple images to be produced on light-sensitized paper. Four years later he introduced the box camera, and photography could now reach a much greater number of people. With his slogan "You press the button, we do the rest" he brought photography to the masses.

Early Daguerrotypes

Daguerrotype of Couple Holding Daguerrotype (Unknown Artist) 1850

Kneeling Woman, daguerrotype 1850 Courtesy: American Museum of Photography. http://www.photographymuseum.com

Couple Holding a Daguerrotype is one of my favorite historical photographs because of its unique commentary on the value of photographs as a record of the real world. There is a sadness apparent in the couple's faces which tell me that the persons in the photograph are either deceased or separated from a long distance. Daguerre's invention made it possible for anyone of moderate means to have a portrait created, and photographers profitted from traveling to towns across the United States. In addition, any large town had dozens of photographic studios available for people to travel to.
Most people embraced this new technology with great enthusiasm. A few religious zealots, however, claimed that it was the work of the devil. Many artists who had trained for years in the techniques of portrait painting were also to find it a threat to their livelihood. Some painters dubbed the new invention "the foe-to-graphic art." A number of artists turned to photography for their livelihood, while others cashed in on the fact that the images were in monochrome, and began coloring them in. Some painters also used photography to assist them in painting (some of these artists were Gauguin, Cezanne, Courbet, Lautrec, Delacroix and Degas). Photography would eventually change the purpose of painting from one which focused on outward facts of reality to more emphasis on personal vision.

Matthew Brady, Abraham Lincoln

Emily Dickinson at 17 (Unknown Artist) 1847

Julia Margaret Cameron, Echo 1868

Anyone who was famous after 1839 had their likeness captured for future generations. Abraham Lincoln credited the success of his presidential election to two things: his widely known speech (the Gettysburgh Address) and his photograph, which was widely distributed. In addition to Lincoln's portrait, Matthew Brady is also famous for his images of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allen Poe. Julia Margaret Cameron was also well known for her photographs of famous men (Charles Darwin among them) as well as for her images of "fair women", She preferred a soft-focus effect, which have a poetic, haunting quality.

Civil War Field Camera

Timothy O'Sullivan, Harvest of Death (Gettysburgh)

In addition to portraits of famous men, Matthew Brady is known for his portraits of Civil War generals and for his images of vast fields littered with the corpses in the aftermath of battle. This was the first time that the destruction of war was captured on film, and would change the way we look at war forever. Brady is sometimes thought of as the century's most important photographer and the man who invented photojournalism. He also took credit for hundreds of photographs which were done by his employees, the most famous of these artists was Timothy O'Sullivan, who is believed to have moved corpses to attain more successful compositions.

Stereo Photographs

Stereograph (unknown artist)

One way that a photograph differs from the way that we perceive things in reality is that our eyes see in stereoscopic vision, whereas a photograph flattens all sense of three-dimensional depth. To compensate for this difference, the stereograph was invented. A camera would take 2 simultaneous images, and the developed image could be viewed by a stereoscope, which converged the 2 images into one 3-dimensional image. Viewing these images continued to be a very popular past-time until the invention of television

http://robinurton.com/history/photography.htm

Camera Obscuras' (Greek - dark room) - rooms with only one pin hole of light - were very likely used in art to make incredibly accurate drawings and paintings. The pin-hole of light works because light travels in straight lines - this means that the image, although it has perfect perspective and shadows etc, it is upside down. In the

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



http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/camera_a_chapter.html

tasks 2, 7,8 - Vincent Van Gogh

 Van Gogh was greatly influenced by Paul Gauguin, a friend who lived with him in his 'Studio in the South' (what he hoped would become a artist commune). Only a year after meeting and even less since moving south, Van Gogh had an attack of insanity/epilepsy and was admitted (a second time) to a hospital. In the last three years of his life, he produced his best work - his most vivid, most strange and bright.

 Starry night was painted during Van Goghs second stay in hospital and was painted from memory, as opposed to his normal technique of painting from life; usually striving for realism, this was a major change of direction for him - even tho he stay with it. Painting from memory allowed the painting to be less realistic, to be more emotion based. The painting is incredibly popular, because/and so many people feel they can relate to the swirling patterns.

http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starryindex.html

"Legacy

Van Gogh's renown steadily increased after his death, and his revolutionary approach to painting had a strong influence on the next generation of artists. The Fauves and the German Expressionists adopted both Van Gogh's use of color and gestural style, and later Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning made use of Van Gogh's experimental technique of sweeping, expressive brush strokes. He demonstrated that painting was not merely a study of the visible world, but also an expression of the artist's emotional response to his surroundings. His life of mental illness and instability created an image of a tortured soul who later captured the imagination of the world. His art and life have also inspired numerous films, as well as classical and popular music. Van Gogh painted 900 paintings and made 1,100 drawings and sketches, while only selling one of them in his career. Sharply contrasting his lifetime of poverty, Van Gogh's paintings have now sold for tens of millions of dollars and are some of the most rare and sought after acquisitions in the art market." http://www.theartstory.org/artist-van-gogh-vincent.htm

"Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.
In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. Near the end of 1888, an incident led Gauguin to ultimately leave Arles. Van Gogh pursued him with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his own ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.
 In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself "for the good of all." During his brief career he had sold one painting."http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/overview.html

His work was fanciful and escapist. His original plan to bring people joy through his work has been realised since his death in the late 1800s. His bright colours and slightly impressionist style earned is work the respect it originally deserved.

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-van-gogh-vincent.htm
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/catalog/Painting/

A Pair of Shoes was painted in 1888. Much of Van Gogh's work was created in these last few years of his life.
The shoes may represent a need of money and funding for life. They are central, keeping your attention with them, he's making the ordinary interesting. The simplicity of the painting makes it all the more interesting, wondering why Van Gogh decided to paint the shoes. His distinctive style of painting with lines is clearly visible, adding extra depth to the piece that would not necessarily be there if it were painted exactly hows the shoes and floor really were. The paving/tiling suggests the shoes are either in a kitchen or outside - possibly not allowed into the rest of the house and muddying the floor. They look like workers shoes - from the field or other dirty workplace.

task 2,7,8 - Pierre-August Renoir

Renoir started life as a poor working class boy, working as a porcelain painter in a factory - a job that was intense and delicate - good grounding for the work he would later do.

"Acknowledging modern criticism of Renoir's sensuality, Lawrence Gowing wrote: “ "Is there another respected modern painter whose work is so full of charming people and attractive sentiment? Yet what lingers is not cloying sweetness but a freshness that is not entirely explicable...One feels the surface of his paint itself as living skin: Renoir's aesthetic was wholly physical and sensuous, and it was unclouded...These interactions of real people fulfilling natural drives with well-adjusted enjoyment remain the popular masterpieces of modern art (as it used to be called), and the fact that they are not fraught and tragic, without the slightest social unrest in view, or even much sign of the spacial and communal disjunction which some persist in seeking, is far from removing their interests." ”
Albert Aurier, an art critic and early essayist on the impressionists, wrote in 1892: “ "With such ideas, with such a vision of the world and of femininity, one might have feared that Renoir would create a work which was merely pretty and merely superficial. Superficial it was not; in fact it was profound, for if, indeed, the artist has almost completely done away with the intellectuality of his models in his paintings, he has, in compensation, been prodigal with his own. As to the pretty, it is undeniable in his work, but how different from the intolerable prettiness of fashionable painters." ”
In a preview to the exhibition 'Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883' at the National Gallery, London in spring 2007, The Guardian wrote that "Even Degas laughed at his friend's style, calling it as puffy as cotton wool," but that "if we're going to love him, we need to love his chocolate box qualities, too."" http://www.pierre-auguste-renoir.org/biography.html

"In the early 1870s, Renoir and his friends joined with other avant-garde artists to form a loose-knit artistic circle now known as the impressionist movement. He participated in the first impressionist exhibition (1874) and throughout the 1870s remained committed to impressionist ideals. Renoir, however, continued to produce paintings of a more traditional sort, including portraits and scenes of leisure enjoyment, such as Le Moulin de la Galette (1876; Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
In his portraits and society paintings, Renoir masterfully rendered the shimmering interplay of light and color on surfaces, the prime goal of impressionism, but also kept an underlying sensuality." http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/Renoir/Renoir.shtml


Renoirs' style is very soft and quick (looking), while still being detailed and subtle. He used colours that closest to what was actually there, instead of the glorified style and colouring used in the old Masters paintings in the Salon and other important galleries. He showed great perception in displaying parties and ordinary scenes, while the old Masters used stuffy, set-up scenes in studios. 

The painting shows a dancing couple, captured in a moment of joy. The canvas is tall and thin, almost clinging to the dancers, as if making them the most important people in the world - which they may have felt like at the time; there is also very little in the frame besides the dancers, adding to this feeling. The colours of the clothes may represent a sort of Yin and Yang of the relationship they may be having; he wears a dark suit, she has a light frilly dress.