Monday, September 3, 2012

Late 19th-century art photography...

Hi all,
Another great week on the blog, I'd say. I'm especially loving the links and images of contemporary photographers that you all are posting and commenting on. You'll be working on research papers and presentations starting in October that deal with current/recent photography so this is a wonderful start.

I am wondering, though, what resources you might be able to find that deal with "art photography" in the late 19th century. We've introduced some of the basic early processes, and tomorrow we'll cover some more, including the collodion process, tintypes, ambrotypes, and so on. And we're seeing more and more people take up the camera after 1850 or so for uses that extend far beyond portraiture. The development of "art photography" is something that Talbot envisioned, and we are going to start looking at images that attempt to "elevate" the photograph to fine art status by Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gustave Le Gray, and others. This week, I'd like to send you out into the interwebs to find resources that deal with prominent photographers of the late 19th c. Maybe you'll find videos, museum collections, galleries, archives...whatever. But let's do some hunting and see what solid resources we can collect here.

Each student should write at least one new post by 5pm on Sunday, Sept 9. Keep commenting on each others' posts, too. In fact, just for fun, you can comment on this one and see if you can come up with the best name for this precious brother-sister duo that we saw the other day...

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