Review: Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 3: Photography and the Nineteenth Century, 1997

Writing over Romania

I first read this chapter about a month ago but never got around to writing it up after being sidetracked by Peter Henry Emerson.   I'll write more on him later, but for now I will review Clarke's presentation of the nineteenth century, a period when some of the issues photographers and critics contend with today were first set out.

Theoretically, photography was conceived as an extension of painting and therefore subject to the same conventions in subject and presentation.  This was exemplified by composite photographers such as Robinson and Rejlander, whose classical subject matter sought to convey ethical or moral intent, to "instruct, purify and enoble."1   At the same time, photographers were enthralled with science and engineering.  The world seemed a place where discovering the laws of nature made possible rapid social and economic development, where the real could be uncovered.  And what better example of capturing reality than the new invention of the camera, a machine capable of reproducing the seen, and reproducing it in detail never before possible with the brush.  

Emerson, Norfolk Broads

These assumptions and practices were brought into sharp relief by Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), who in a series of publications acerbically denounced any similarities between photography and painting, arguing instead for photography as an art form in itself, one he saw as essentially a science capable of faithfully reproducing human vision.  We do not, he noted, see everything in sharp focus.  In fact, we rarely see much of anything in the sharpness offered in photographs.  In order to faithfully reproduce what we see, images should be a little soft or hazy.  Emerson rejected what we today do in post-processing (combining and retouching), argued for the photographer doing most of his work on-location and in-camera, and rejected the idea of the photograph as a medium of allegory or narrative.  Emerson's concerns remain relevant in the 21^st century.  If most of the elements of an image are composed in computer software, is it still a photograph?   What, in fact, makes a photograph a photograph?

Clarke notes the emergence of travel photography as another major development of the period, one on which he will expand a bit in the next chapter, Landscape in Photography.    One aspect missing from Clarke’s treatment of the 19^th century is the effect of photography on the societies in which it was deployed.  How did being able to see ourselves reproduced change our conceptions of ourselves?  How did being able to see the world change our ideas about our places in it? 

1  C Jabez Hughes, p43

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