ABSTRACT
The photograph in Figure 2.1 is by Roger Fenton. He was an amateur British photographer using a wet collodion plate process invented in 1851. It shows Fenton’s assistant quietly posing for the camera. It was taken in the Crimea before his more famous photograph of The Valley of the Shadow of Death (g. 2.8). The enormously weighty and cumbersome nature of photographic equipment needed by travelling photographers in these early years of photography is one of the striking features of the image. The van carried a darkroom tent, chemical apparatus, cameras, distilled water and sundry materials. Photography was not for the technologically challenged or fainthearted operator in the days before hand-held cameras. Fenton used glass plates treated with wet collodion which were prepared on location and developed as soon as a picture was taken. He travelled with ve large cameras, and hundreds of glass plates carefully boxed to avoid damage in transit. Travel to distant lands combined military adventurism with photographic reconnaissance and reportage. Photography was invented at the same time as the railways and the two technologies facilitated the production of travel photographs. Exotic and faraway places became key subjects for early photographers. Europeans and Americans acquired a taste for monuments of ancient cultures or sublime images of the great outdoors. Pictures designed to please the tourist imagination were served by the camera from
INTRODUCTION In this chapter we discuss photography in the nineteenth century. Specialists in a range of disciplines contributed to the study of photography. The first photographs were made in the early part of the century. They were the outcome of determined experimentation, guesswork, and skill. Dedicated efforts of specialists in various fields of scientific, technical and artistic work found a way of making a stable image on a sensitized surface through the action of light. The resources they drew from included drawing, optics, and chemistry and printing techniques. The process now called photography is rooted in the captured image and its successful multiplication. The invention of photography provided a way of making images without the labour of drawing and was also considered a spectacular new way of seeing the world. Early enthusiasts marvelled at the detail in the first daguerreotypes (a photographic method named after its creator, the Frenchman Louis Daguerre, in 1839) and for many years photography was seen as a new branch of the visual arts. In 1844 the English pioneer of photography William Henry Fox Talbot famously referred to the new medium as ‘the pencil of nature’ (fig. 1.1) as if to suggest the idea of a medium that allows nature to draw herself.
