Sunday, February 13, 2011

Napoleon Sarony

Sarony was a lithogrpher and budding photographer recognized the opportunity presented by the ascent of theater in society and the innovations in modern photography and launched a sudio on broadway in 1866. Over the next 30 years he photographed almost every star of the New York Stage. Up to his death it is shown that he had more than 40,000 negatives of show business personalities in his possession. He developed a rapport with the players and was famous for his use of lively backgrounds and having his subjects pose in colorful gestures.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/volpe/theater/theater/sarony.html


Antoine-Jean-Francois Claudet

Claudet was born in 1797, in Lyon, France. He then settled in London in 1827. After being a successful glass merchant, he learned the daguerreotype process from Daguerre himself. Claudet then purchased the first Daguerreotype license in Egland and estabished his own photographic studio on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery, behind St. Martin's church, London, from 1841 to 1851, later moved to 107 Regent Street. He broght several new technical improvements to the Daguerreotype process, including new sensiizing materials, exposure times and focal improvements, and is credit with the discovery that it was possible to develop prints under a red light, as well as the use of painted backdrops. Claudet passed away on December 27, 1867.

http://photographyhistory.blogspot.com/2010/09/antoine-jean-francois-claudet.html


Gertrude Stanton Kasebier

Kasebier was born in 1852 in Des Moines, Iowa. The start of her career in art followed from her first career as a mother. She studied painting at Pratt Institute, and after that she opened her first portrait studio in New York in 1897, she switched to photography, displaying the influence of her painting training in herPictorialist style. Her family and friends posed for her most celebrated series of photographs on the subject of motherhood.She exhibited her photographs in the Piladelphia Society exhibitions, and after Alfred Stieglitz reproduced five of her images in his journal Camera Notes in 1899. he following year, Kasebier and Anne Brigman wre the first two women to be elected to the British Linked Ring. Two years laer she became a founding member of Stieglitz's Photo-Secession group. Later on Kasebier broe with Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession in 1912 but continued to photograph until she closed her studio in 1929. Kasebier passed away in 1934 in New York City.

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1986


John William Draper

Draper was born on May 5, 1811 in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. He was a doctor, historian, chemist, and professor. He conducted landmark reserch into spectrum analysis and radiant light and heat, and showed that chlorine gas is altered by exposure to sunlight. He took the first detailed magnified photographs of the moon. He was the first president of the American Chemical Society, and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine. Draper also worked off of Louis Daguerre, whose work had allowed slow exposures of landscapes. After repeated falures, he finally accomplished the first photograph of a humans face. His sisters to be exact, Dorthy Catherie Draper in 1839. He also used a camera made of a cigar box and an eyelass lens in 1840, and opened his first photographic portrait studio. One of his students was Matthew Brady, another famous photographer. Draper passed away on January 4, 1882 in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

http://www.nndb.com/people/733/000167232/


Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron was born in 1815 in Calcutta, India. After she recieved her very first camera from her daughter and son-in-law, she began her working career in photography at the age of 48. She produced most of her work from her home at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. She used her family, domestic servants, and local residents as her models for her photography. She photographed the intellectuals and leaders within her circle of family and friends, some included, the painter George Frederick Watts, the astronomer Sir John Heschel, and the poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Cameron stated her photographic mission thus: "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible evotion to Poetry and beauty." Cameron died in 1879 in Sri Lanka.

http://www.getty.edu/art/getyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=2026


Paul Nadar

Nadar was born in 1856 and was a French Photographer, caricaturist, a writer and a balloonist. He was also the son of Felix Nadar. By 1853 he had become an expert photographer and oped up his own portrait studio. His portraits were neutral, unlike most photographers who's protraits were stiff. In 1855, he came up with the idea of using aerial photography from a balloon, with the balloon being named Le Geant. In 1874 he worked for his father in his fathers studio in Paris. In 1885 he collaborated with his father to make the first photo interview of a 101 year old chemist and colot theorist Michel- Eugene Chevreul. In 1893 he became Eastman Kodak's rpresentative in France. Nadar later died in 1939.



http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.artnet.com/WebServices/picture.aspx%3Fdate%3D19991027%26catalog%3D10977%26gallery%3D111548%26lot%3D00126%26filetype%3D2&imgrefurl=http://www.artnet.com/artists/lotdetailpage.aspx%3Flot_id%3D3AF7EBE67ED92D9D&usg=__B1xHbf5CrrHpGWttNmrRawhW6bE=&h=471&w=640&sz=36&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=Hsnl7kl6LYue1M:&tbnh=154&tbnw=205&ei=l0pYTbKENoT7lweAi4H-Bg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpaul%2Bnadar%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26biw%3D1345%26bih%3D457%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=515&oei=l0pYTbKENoT7lweAi4H-Bg&page=1&ndsp=16&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=143&ty=49

Franz Hanfstaengl

Hanfstaengl was born on March 1, 1804 in Baiernrain bei Bad Tolz. He was a German painter, lithographer and photographer. In 1816 he came on the recommendation of the town-school-teachers into the drawing-class of the leave-day school at Munich led by Hermann Josef Mitterer. He was taught lithography and he had contact with Alois Senefelder and studiedform 1819 to 1825 at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. In 1826 he went to Dresden and began his great work, he completed in 1852, of copying in lithograph the canvases of the Dresden Gallery. Between 1835 and 1852 Hanfstaengl brought out about 200 lithographic reproductions of masterworks from the Dresden picture-gallery, and published them in a portfolio. In 1833 in founded in Munich a lithographic establishment of his own, which he kept open until 1868, and to which he later attached a fine art printing shop and a photographic workshop. He was nicknamed 'Count Litho.' He later produced portraits of famous people such as King Ludwig II, Otto von Bismarck and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Hanfstaengl passed away on April 18, 1877 in Munich.

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


Carte de Visite

Small albumen prints mounted on cards 2-1/2 by 4 inches. They were wildly popular and made for decades in countries around the world. They were able to let friends and relatives exchange portraits, knowing that they would find a place in the others family album. Carte de Visite's could be sent through the mail without the need for a huge case and fragile cover glass. They were extremely inexpensive and they became so popular that by 1863 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Card portraits, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the 'green-backs' of civilization." They were also used to invite people to social gatherings, having a name engraved and printed on glossy stock. The standard size mentioned up above, was patented by a Parisian photographer, Andre Adolphe Disderi, in 1854. The use of a sliding plate holder and a camera with four lenses, made it easier to have eight negatives that could be taken on a single 8'' x 10'' glass plate. Cartes were introduced in New York, probably by C.D. Fredericks, late in the summer of 1859. The American Civil War gave the format enormous momentum as soldiers and their families posed for cartes before they were seperated by war or death. Queen Victoria created more than a hundred albums of cartes, featuring royalty and others of social prominence. Sales in England ran in the hundereds of millions, annually. Cartes were also made of groups and landscapes and even as pioneering examples of photojournalism.

http://www.photographymuseum.com/histsw.htm


Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Frederick Scott Archer

Archer was born in 1813 at Bishop's Stortford in the UK. He invented the photographic collodion process which preceded the modern gelatin emulsion and is remembered mainly for this single achievement which greatly increased the accessibility of photography for the general public. He found that calotype photography was useful as a way of capturing images of his subjects. Unsatisfied with the poor definition and contrast of the calotype and the long exposures needed, Archer invented the new process in 1848 and published it in 'The Chemist' in March of 1851, enabling photographers to combine the fine detail of the daguerreotype with the ability to print multiple paper copies like the calotype. Archer died in 1857. His death is unknown but it is said that he had poor health.

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




William Henry Fox Talbot

Talbot was born on February 11, 1800 at Melbury Abbas. He was a well educated man, studying at Harrow and Trinity College. He wrote a lot of papers . His first was "Some Experiments on Colored Flame" and he contributed it to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. He wrote "Monochromatic Light," and contributed it to the Quarterly Journal of Science in 1827. A number of papers on chemical subjects, including one on "Chemical Changes of Color" he sent to the Philosophical Magazine. In 1844 he published his first book called Pencil of Nature. He also published Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian Researches (1838-39), and Illustrations of the Antiquity of the Book of Genesis (1839). He was the author of English Etymologies (1846). He died at Lacock Abbey on September 17, 1877. Death is unknown.

http://www.nndb.com/people/397/000098103/




Hippolyte Bayard

Bayard was born on January 20, 1801. On June 24, 1839 he invented his own process known as direct positive printing and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs. He then produced his own method of producing photos called the Direct positive process. It exposed silver chloride paper to light, which turned the paper completely black. Then it was soaked in potassium iodine before being exposed in a camera. After the exposure, it was washed in a bath of hyposulfite of soda and dried. He would have people sit with their eyes closed so as to eliminate the eerie, "dead" quality produced due to blinking and moving one's eyes during such a long exposure. One of Bayard's most famous photograph's was called the Self Portrait as a Drowned Man. In the image, he pretends that he commited suicide, by sitting and leaning to the right. It was a very dark photograph and he wrote on the back of it, great detail about the photo, and what it represented. He later went onto work with photography and he was a founding member of the French Society of Photography. Hu suggested combining two negatives to properly expose the sky and then the landscape or building, and idea known as combination printing which began being used in the 1850's. Bayard died on May 14, 1887. Death is unknown.

<http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard>




Sir John Herschel

Herschel was born on March 7, 1792 in Berkshire, England. He was a mathematician, atronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor. In 1816 he took up astronomy and built a reflecting telescope. He was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1826 and again in 1836. He was also presented with the Lalande Medal of the French Institute in 1885, in 1821 the Royal Society bestowed upon him the Copley Medal for his mathematical contributions. Herschel was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1831. Herschel and his wife's first photographs were of flowers in South Africa. Herschel used a camera lucida to obtain accurate outlines of the specimens and left the details to his wife. 112 of the 132 flower studies were collected and published as "Flora Herscheliana" in 1996. He made improvements in inventing the cyanotype process and variations like the chrysotype, the beginning of the modern blueprint process. He experimented with color reproduction, finding out that rays of different parts of the spectrum tended to impart their own color to a photographic paper. He got together with Henry Collen in the early 1840's, the portrait painter of Queen Victoria. Herschel originally discovered the platinum process on the basis of the light sensitivity of platinum salts, later developed by William Willis. Herschel added to the word photography. He applied the terms negative and positive to photography. He discovered sodium thiosulfate to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and told Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery that this "hyposulphite of soda" could be used as a photographic fixer , and make them permanent. His groun-breaking research was read at the Royal Society in London in March of 1839 and January 1840. Herschel died on May 11, 1871. Death is unknown.

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




Louis Jacques Mende Daguerre

Daguerre was born on Novemeber 18, 1787. He began his work as an apprentice architect, and at the age of sixteen was an assistant stage designer in a Paris theatre. He knew a lot about handing the light and lighting effects, and supplied the scenic and lighting effects for a number of operas in theatres in Paris. He used a camera obscura as an aid to painting in perspective, which then led him to seek to freeze the image. In 1829he signed up a partnership with Nicephore Niepce. In 1835 he put an exposed plate in his chemical cupboard, and later found out that it had developed. Daguerre concluded that it was due to the presence of mercury vapour from a broken thermometer. This discovery made it possible to reduce the exposure time from eight hours to thirty minutes. In 1837 he found out how to fix the images. This new process was called a Daguerreotype. On January 7, 1839 an announcement was made of the discovery, but the details were not divulged until August 19 when the process was announced to the public. The French government bought the rights to give the information to the world. In 1851 Daguerre died. Death is unknown.

http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/daguerr.htm




Joseph Nicephore Niepce

Niepce was born in 1765. He is credited with producing the first successful photograph in June and July of 1827. He was fascinated with lithography, but he could not draw. So he had his son render images for the lithographs. His son was later drafted into the army in 1814. Niepce then started hearing about photochemical drawing. He soon turned his attention to silver salts. For the next decade he worked with photo-lithography. He found a way to fix images using acid baths. Niepce's breakthrough came in 1822 when he made a permanent image using a camera obscura. After exposing coated pewter plates to a camera image, he used the vapors from heated iodine crystals to darken the silver and heighten contrast. For his first photograph, it is believed that he used the lens of a crude camera and a pewtar plate with a few drops of bitumen (a tar like substance) on it and exposed the plate for eight hours. Niepce died of a stroke in 1833.
        
           http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/115a/history/niepce.html