Photography as Art
By TOM HOPKINSON
IN the exhibition, " Masterpieces of Victorian Photography." organised by the Arts Council and on view,in the Victoria and Albert Museum, there appears a study of a nude made in about 1860 by 0. G. Rejlander. The catalogue contains the sentence: "This magnificent study is in every way equal to Etty's finest nudes." The critic of The Times, in a brief notice of the exhibition, describes this picture as "especially banal," and the claim made for it as "nonsense." So are struck two more blows in the conflict which has raged for more than a hundred years as to whether photography deserves to rank as art and what its relation is to painting.
Before diving any deeper into the main problem, it is interest- ing to note that Etty and Rejlander, as champions of painting and photography respectively, are somewhat compromised figures and might almost have entered the battle on opposite sides, As Helmut Gemsheim, organiser of the present exhibition, points out in a forthcoming book, Etty's self-portrait with palette (not camera) in the National Portrait Gallery is copied from a photograph by those two great masters of portraiture, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson ; while Rejlander—though he made many admirable photographs, largely of children and of honestly-posed street scenes—is known to the casual student of photography chiefly for a ponderous imitation of the worst kind of Victorian painting.
Known as " The Two Ways of Life." this was shown at Manchester in 185? in the " Art Treasures Exhibition," at which photographs were first shown on equal terms with paintings. It is, as its name implies, a moralising allegory. A troupe of travelling stage-artistes posed for the picture, which was built up from more than thirty negatives, and the Prince Consort bought the first print for ten guineas on the spot. The con- troversy which followed was in part artistic, as to whether it was proper for photographs to be constructed in this way, and in part moral. Nudity in photography. the nudity of an actual person or persons. being held to be different in kind from the remoter nudity of painting, raised grave concern as to the conse- quences on principles less firm than those of the critics themselves or the Prince Consort.
Other artistes both decried and benefited from photography. Frith was a good example ; but questioned by the Studio in 1893 as to whether the camera was "the friend or fof of art," Frith wrote: " Photography has not benefited art, and to the professors of certain branches—to wit, miniature-painting and engraving— it has been so injurious as. in the form of photogravure, to have nearly destroyed the latter." But in 1857, when Frith was com- piling his ever-popular "Derby Day," he took a photographer, Howlett, with him to the Derby to shoot as many groups as he could from the roof of a cab rigged up as a travelling dark- room. From these groups Frith built up his painting, and it has long been hoped that, at some time or other, Howlett's prints would conic to light, though no one with whom I have ever discussed the matter had any knowledge of them.
In. the last week, however, one has suddenly appeared, being printed, with no special comment or explanation, in the Festival Issue of The Times. It will be interesting to see now whether the groups taken by another professional photographer, Samuel Fry, for Frith's " Railway Station " painting come to light as well. For this picture the printseller, Henry Graves, paid the colossal sum of nearly £24,000—though not to Frith himself— and intended to recover his money by yet another meta- morphosis. transforming the oil painting made from photographs into engravings.
Also included in the present exhibition are two works of particular interest for the relation between photography and painting. First of these is " The Lady of Shalott,' by Henry Peach Robinson. Robinson was a conventional artist—he had a picture in the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-two—who took up photography with enthusiasm. Following the immense success of his " combination picture." " Fading Away," he decided to construct one such fantasy every year while living on the proceeds of his portrait-photography. In " The Lady of Shalott " Robinson was clearly and admittedly influenced by the painting of the Pre-Raphaelites, who had themselves been influenced by the power of the camera, and particularly of the daguerreotype. to reproduce detail faithfully, and to bring out the element of design which even the most haphazard section of vegetation will contain.
Of much deeper importance, however, is the work of Eadweard Muybridge on the study of animal movement—of which three examples made between 1883 and 1885 arc exhibited. Muy- bridge's achievement was a double one. He demonstrated the exact movements of animals, and in doing so abolished a whole series of artistic cliches—such as the " rocking-horse " attitude so freely employed by painters. He also, by his sequences of pictures showing movement, was one of the pioneers of the cinema. Meissonicr was so impressed by Muybridge's work that he invited the leading French painters to his house to hear him lecture, and is said to have had a double track laid down outside his studio, along which he could be drawn at the same speed as a horse galloping, for the purpose of studying its movements.
But, granted that photography has proved serviceable to artists, to what extent is it itself an art ? The answer, I think, is that photography—like needlework—is a technique through which genuine artistic creation can be achieved. The two factors which particularly distinguish the photographic from other techniques are, first, the obvious one—that photography contains a very high admixture of science. But so does etching or the making of coloured lithographs. Second, that it contains a much higher degree of chance. Shaw stated this with typical exaggera- tion: "The photographer is like the codfish which lays a million eggs in order that one may be batched."
Equipped with the highest technical skill, and gifted to an unusual degree with the power to see and compose a picture, a photographer still needs a large element of luck for a picture to be successful. If not " a million," he may easily take some hundreds to achieve one that is worthwhile. The master of photography produces an infinity of failures, but the tyro achieves no successes.
In the show at the Victoria and Albert by far the most notable achievements are in the field of portraiture, and it is an astonish- ing fact that D. 0. Hill and Robert Adamson were making their beautiful portraits by the calotype process within two years of its having been patented by Fox-Talbot. These portraits, with their profound sense of character and their bold massing of light and shade, have never been surpassed—except perhaps by the work of the renowned Mrs. Cameron in the late 'sixties. Of her portrait of Thomas Carlyle, Roger Fry wrote: "Neither Whistler nor Watts come near to this in the breadth of the con- ception, in the logic of the plastic evocations, and neither approach the poignancy of this revelation of character." My own Preference would be for the portrait of William Gifford Palgrave and the magnificent photograph of Mrs.. Herbert Duckworth (No. 145), in which the strong line of the neck supports a sharply- outlined profile. The dramatic force of the pose unites with the beauty of the model in tcsmost moving harmony.
Finally, if the present exhibition. pays tribute to the artistic powers of a few Victorian photographers, it bears witness in the most striking way to Victorian technical ingenuity. Almost every development which has in recent years extended the photo- grapher's range, and increased his independence of external con- ditions, was foreshadowed within fifty years of the original inven- tion. Stereoscopic cameras came in the 'fifties ; exposure meters were being made from the 'sixties, as were microphotographs down to as little as ligth of an inch ; magazine cameras (carry- ing a number of plates or films) date from the 'eighties ; there was a treatise on flashlight photography in the 'nineties, as well as experiments lb colour and in the arrangement of pictures to produce movement on cinematograph lines. Fox-Talbot had even given a demonstration in 1851 on the lines of the most recent development—the multiple-flash stroboscope—and in certain copies of his book, The Pencil of Nature (1844-6), he fore- shadows the use of infra-red when he talks of the possibility of making pictures inside a darkened room.
The 400 or 500 photographs in the present exhibition have been chosen from the much larger private collection built up by Helmut Gernsheim during the last six years. It is his hope that it may form the nucleus of a national collection. Backed by this (possibly by the year 2051), photography may take its place as a medium through which work of undoubted artistic value has been, and can be, accomplished.
Previous page
