| Newsletter for Collectors - Vol 4.7 | October 31, 2010 | | | Home • What‘s New • Photographers • Online Exhibitions
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WELCOME
Luminous-Lint is rolling along merrily as the online exhibitions are coming out or being improved. Exhibitions are never static so if you have better quality images, a refreshing idea, a correction or a suggestion that would be most welcome. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge, Alan
NEW ONLINE EXHIBITIONS
- Orientalism Adventurers with cameras and chemicals arrived to document the Biblical and archaeological sites of North Africa, the Middle East, the Near East and Egypt in the early 1840s.
Egypt was a particular favourite because of the public interest in all things Egyptian that was generated by the 1798-1801 military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and this led to a fascination within France, and Europe more generally, of the archaeological sites. Baron Vivant Denon published a popular account of the campaign in 1802 Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, and the multivolume Déscription de l‘Égypte (1809-1822) based on the research of the artists and scholars who accompanied Napoleon. The culmination of years of study was in 1822 when Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone allowing hieroglyphics to be translated for the first time.
The introduction of photography in 1839 meant that single plates, prints and albums of the locations could be placed before an already intrigued public and enterprising photographers immediately saw the commercial opportunities.
- Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days - What would Phileas Fogg and Passepartout have seen? When Jules Verne‘s book Around the World in Eighty Days was published in 1873 the world was at a stage of rapid industrial development.
Only a few years earlier the Suez Canal had been opened greatly reducing the time required to travel from Western Europe to India and the Far East. On 10 May 1869 the rails were joined at Promontary Summit for the Transcontinental railway in the United States. The railway station in Yokohama opened in 1872 symbolizing the immense changes in Japan which had been closed to foreigners until the Black Ships of Admiral Perry arrived in 1853. Emmigration and immigration during this period was enormous and ships such as the S/S Manhattan of the Guion Line crossed from Liverpool to New York six times between 1870-1872 and companies like the Pacific Mail Steamship company plied the routes between San Francisco, Panama, Yokohama, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The times were far from tranquil: Lieutenant Camus had been killed in Japan in 1868 by Samurai who objected to the presence of foreigners; San Francisco had an earthquake also in 1868, and between 1870 and 1871 there were the Orange Riots in New York. The bison mentioned in the novel were being exterminated in the US and the Battle of the Little Bighorn would happen only a few years later in 1876 changing the ways of the Plains Indians forever.
The setting for this online exhibition is the two and a half months from 2nd October 1872 until 21st December 1872 as the fictional Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout circumnavigate the globe to win a wager of £40,000. This exhibition follows the approximate route they took and shows the places as they were when the fictional pair passed through. The exact route has not been slavishly followed, nor have the exact dates, but rather they are explored through the visual remains of a long gone world.
Related Luminous-Lint exhibitions on the places they visited:
- Robert Frank: The Publications With assistance from a Private Collector.
This online exhibition provides a reference set of the book covers of works by and about Robert Frank. If you have any additional material we would be most interested.
- Gustave Le Gray: Seascapes We stop with astonishment before M. Le Gray’s "Sea and Sky", the most successful seizure of water and cloud yet attempted. The effect is the simplest conceivable. There is a plain, unbroken prairie of open sea, lined and rippled with myriad smiling trails of minute undulations, dark and sombrous and profoundly calm, over the dead below – smooth as a tombstone.
Journal of the Photographic Society (21 February 1857)
- Exterior views: Daguerreotypes (1839-1855) A preliminary reference set.
Currently seeking higher quality scans and further examples.
- Exterior views: Salt paper prints (1839-1855) A preliminary reference set.
Currently seeking higher quality scans and further examples.
- Identity cards A daguerreotypist of Paris has proposed to the government to have the likenesses of all persons who would obtain passports taken instanter, on paper, by a private invention of his own. A correspondent of one of the New York papers says on the subject:—"I am told that the Prefect of Police has presented the project to the Emperor, and that this plan is to be immediately carried into execution. It will now be impossible for robbers and thieves to kill a man in order to take possession of a passport, which would be of no use to them." The daguerreotypist will make a good thing of it.
Bizarre, For Fireside and Wayside, Conducted by J.M. Church, Volume 2, November-March, 1852-3, p.305, (Philadelphia, Church & Co.)
- Beauty and the Beast: Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards, 1905-1935 This exhibit is the result of a book project in which we used real photo postcards to explore the relationship between humans and animals, 1905-1935. It was during this period that both photo postcards were most popular and Americans experienced profound changes that altered their connection with animals. America was in transition from being predominately rural to a country dominated by cities, from a society where everyday contact with a variety of animals was common to one in which such contact was limited. Cars and trucks replaced horses. Viewing animals, other than pets, came to be done mainly in circuses, zoos and in the movies not in peoples’ own backyards. Food production became industrialized making the animals that are the source of our produce almost invisible. Our book documents the range of roles animals played from pets to vermin. We look at live as well as dead creatures, real as well as fantasy, loved and hated. We explore the contradictions, dualisms and paradoxes of our connection to animals, illustrating how animals were distanced and embraced, commoditized and anthropomorphized.
Robert Bogdan and Arnold Arluke (October 2010)
Related Luminous-Lint exhibitions on real photo postcards:
- Documentary: 19th century Philip Henry Delamotte and The Crystal Palace (1854-1855) Widely regarded as one of the classic documentary series of the nineteenth century.
- Documentary: 19th century Louis-Emile Durandelle and the Paris Opera (1860-1874) The construction of the Paris Opera House in the nineteenth century was a statement in quarried stone of civic and national pride. On 29 December 1860 a resolution was passed that commenced a competition for suitable designs and plans. The unanimously chosen winner was Charles Garnier and by July 1861 the site had been selected and the following month the excavation of the foundations commenced. This was far from an ideal time for new public works with both the Franco-Prussian War and the following dark times of the Paris Commune coinciding with the construction. Despite this Garnier completed the project by December 1874 and in January 1875 it opened:
The opening of the New Opera House at Paris took place on Tuesday last. The Government had engaged the entire house for the opening night, which was, therefore, a state festivity, to which the diplomatic corps, the deputies, &c, were invited. The regular performances were to commence last evening with Hamlet.
(The Academy, Issue 7, Jan 9, 1875, p.51)
This vast undertaking was described in a contemporary account as follows:
The historian of the new temple of song rounds off his record with an array of not uninteresting figures, and with a few of these I too shall close. The gas-pipes, if connected, would form a pipe twenty-five kilometres in length; fourteen furnaces and four hundred and fifty grates heat the house; a battery of seventy cups generates electricity for the scenic effects; nine reservoirs and two tanks hold a hundred thousand litres of water, and distribute their contents through six thousand nine hundred and eighteen metres of piping, and there are twenty-five hundred and thirty-one doors, and seven thousand five hundred and ninety-three keys, which latter M. Gamier delivered formally, but figuratively, I imagine, to M. Halanzier when the manager took possession of the premises.
(Frederick A. Schwab, "A Temple of Song", Scribners Monthly, May 1875, Volume X, No.1, p.20)
During the process Louis-Emile Durandelle photographed both the construction and the ornamental sculptures that decorated the immense building. His photographs were published in Le Nouvel Opera de Paris par Charles Garnier, (Paris: Ducher et Cie, 1875-81) and remain as one of the key documentations of a nineteenth century architectural project. Durandelle recorded many other key projects in Paris including the construction of Sacre Coeur, the Hotel de Ville, and the Eiffel Tower.
- Still life: Eggs
“When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.”
Pablo Picasso
This online exhibition first appeared in 2008 but some of you will have missed this visual treat.
- Documentary: 20th century Margaret Bourke-White and the Otis Steel Company (1928-1929) One of Bourke-White‘s clients was Otis Steel Company. Her success was due to her skills with both people and her technique. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains in Portrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her shoot for many reasons: First, steel making was a defense industry, so they wanted to be sure national security was not affected. Secondly, she was a woman and in those days people wondered if a woman and her delicate cameras could stand up to the intense heat, hazard, and generally dirty and gritty conditions inside a steel mill. When she got permission, the technical problems began. Black and white film in that era was sensitive to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel—she could see the beauty, but the pictures were coming out all black. She solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare (which produces white light) and having assistants hold them to light her scenes. Her abilities resulted in some of the best steel factory pictures of that era, and these earned her national attention.
[Wikipedia - Accessed: 30 October 2010]
Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, (Simon Schuster, 1963)
Related Luminous-Lint exhibitions on documentary photography:
- Victorians and Edwardians at War - We would like to hear from collectors who are able to assist with high resolution scans (160mm wide at 300dpi) of photographs of The Indian Mutiny, the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Zulu War in South Africa and other less well known wars and skirmishes the British were involved in between 1850 and 1910. This is for a book project by John Hannavy and you will get a copy of the book if one of your photographs is used. I‘m hoping that that people will have little known photographs to share. If you email me at alan@luminous-lint.com I‘ll forward everything on to John or you can contact him directly.
- Photomicroscopy - Examples of the work of John Benjamin Dancer (1812-1887) and M. Amadio of Throgmorton Street with his miniaturized head of Charles Dickens.
- Felice Beato in Burma or Burmah (now Myanmar) - The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol (UK - www.imagesofempire.com) has a set of Felice Beato photographs taken 1889-1891 of British forces during the conficts with Burmese rebels at Wuntho. Cambridge University Library: Royal Commonwealth Society Library also has 35 Beato images. Does anybody have scans of these? If you do you might have the earlier Colonel Robert Blackall Graham material from 1886-1887 as well.
- Tintypes - I‘m looking for the best exterior tintypes from around the world.
- Carte de visite publisher trade catalogs - There have been questions on the Internet recently about publisher catalogs that show visuals of available back marks. In the Yahoo group "cartes_de_visite-cartes de visite (CDV collectors)" some examples from the library at George Eastman House: International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, NY, USA were put up. The examples included: "Buchanan’s Complete Illustrated Catalogue. Philadelphia (1896)" and "Thos. H. McCollin’s Illustrated Price List of Photographic Supplies. Philadelphia (1882)". Does anybody know of others and where high quality scans are available? I‘ll pass the information on.
- Photography and Art in the 19th century - There are some classic books that explore the relationships between art and photography:
- Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photograph from Delacroix to Warhol, (Alberquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964)
- Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981)
- William E. Parker, (Ed.), Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences. Selected Essays by Heinrich Schwartz, (Gibbs M. Smith, Inc, Peregrine Smith Books in association with the Visual Studies Workshop, 1985)
- Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (Pelican Books, 1974)
To build up a reference set of examples I am interested in your favorite examples.
- Photography and Botany - Plant hunters, plant hunting expeditions, botanical gardens, photography in specimen collections, the use of photographs within 19th century scientific botanical discourse.
- Photography and Geology - Geologists, geomorphologists, pedologists, expeditions, rock sections and samples, mineralogy and soil mechanics in the 19th century. Now that is a topic which has been little explored!
The online exhibitions on Luminous-lint are never static so if you have better quality scans or a correction let me know.
Join in when you can - sharing makes the world a better place.
Alan - alan@luminous-lint.com
My own page on Facebook
If you go to my Facebook page - Alan Griffiths
or search for Luminous-Lint you‘ll join a community of over 4,000 fellow enthusiasts. I‘m finding it useful for keeping everybody updated about what is happening on Luminous-Lint and in the wider world of photography
generally. To everybody who is participating thanks for all your friendship, knowledge and support.
ADDRESS
Want your invitations, catalogs, books and prints to arrive at my place? Well check your address book:
Alan Griffiths
Luminous-Lint
Box 33055
Quinpool RPO
Halifax NS B3L 4T6
CANADA
IMPORTANT: Couriers, such as Fedex and UPS, require a street address and telephone number so send me an email (alan@luminous-lint.com) to obtain further instructions if that is the way you ship.
To get a wider perspective on the topics covered on Luminous-Lint the following links will help. |
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What‘s New on Luminous-Lint |
Helmut Newton (1920, 31 October - 2004, 23 January) was born - Germany, Berlin. Fashion and erotic photographer.
R.P. Napper (no info - 1867, 31 October) died - GB, Monmouthshire, Newport. Worked for Francis Frith but after leaving went to Spain where he continued taking photographs and a selection were compiled into the album "Views in Andalusia". |
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