| Newsletter for Collectors - Vol 10.4 | May 15, 2016 | | | Home • What‘s New • Photographers • Online Exhibitions
Contents • Alphabetical • Styles and movements • Articles
Visual Indexes • Galleries & Dealers • Timelines • Techniques
Library • Contact us Welcome to another Luminous-Lint Newsletter.
The last month has been a period of intensive work on the different Themes within Luminous-Lint.
The term we use for themes, genres or categories doesn't really matter but it is essential that photohistory can be broken down into many distinct but interconnected histories. On the Daguerreian Society Facebook page the other day I posted a daguerreotype of date palms taken in Alexandria, Egypt by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey between 1842 and 1844.
There are entire books dedicated to the history of the photography of trees such as Françoise Reynaud's 2011, The Tree in Photographs, (J. Paul Getty Museum). There is an entire Theme on Luminous-Lint dedicated to it with a series of diverse topics starting with an 1890 article by Julius Friedrich Sachse on "Botanical Photography". This is followed with sections dealing with the tree photographs of Eugène Atget, Carleton E. Watkins, Leonard Misonne, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Jerry Uelsmann and many others. The cedars of Lebanon and the Forest of Fontainebleau are dealt with in detail along with the photographs of Darius Kinsey documenting logging in the American North-West (1906-1940). Each of these can be made into wall panels as was discussed in the April 5, 2016 newsletter (vol. 10.3).
The subject of the date palms by Girault de Prangey is at first sight trees but it is far more than that - it is a part of a travel sequence, an example of a daguerreotype, an early photograph taken in Egypt, a botanical image, an image taken within a specific time period, a part of a specific collection etc., etc.
Luminous-Lint brings these diverse approaches together into increasingly coherent histories. Tagging photographs is a first step in constructing clusters of related images and most institutional collections do this - the next step is to order the elements within each cluster and to prepare texts that contextualize them. Traditionally this has been done through exhibition catalogues but they are rarely updated and so we need to look at more radical ways of continually enhancing our ever-improving knowledge of photohistory.
The following Themes, most recent first, have been improved in the last few weeks on Luminous-Lint and Subscribers can access the detailed histories of each topic.
For the sake of space only the most recent updates are shown here.
A few numbers just for fun... |
There are 1,124 distinct Themes on Luminous-Lint and 67,144 photographs from 2,933 institutions, private collectors, photographers and estates are used to illustrate them. There are 9,048 references used to support the discussions and 6,841 footnotes.
The single theme Trees uses 590 photographs, is supported by 44 visual indexes (explained in previous newsletters) and 3 online exhibitions.
Trying to get a grasp of the range of photographs used for an individual process requires even greater detail. The section on the gelatin silver print uses 1,022 examples to provide an overview and the section on the daguerreotype a staggering 1,722 examples. It would be difficult to find a book on nineteenth century studio backgrounds and foregrounds that matches the 566 examples from around the world on Luminous-Lint.
Having collections of well-documented images is only the first step to analysis and it is in the evolving histories that the benefits are starting to appear.
To everybody who has assisted along the way, and to all those who have taken out a subscription to support Luminous-Lint, I say thank you...
All the best, Alan
Subscriptions are available for those who want to go far deeper into the many histories of photography and these are now extremely detailed incorporating vast amounts of original content.
Requests for further information - and still looking for ... |
Hand-coloured landscapes
Before colour processes were commercially available photographers got around it by hand-colouring and tinting. Early hand coloured daguerreotypes of landscapes don‘t exist (if I‘m incorrect on this please let me know), and coloured salt prints or large albumen prints of landscapes are rare. The exception to this may be stereoviews and lantern slides where there are quite a number. If you have, or know of any, hand-coloured landscape photographs I‘d be most interested. | 
LL/53938 | 
LL/6696 | 
LL/66408 |
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Richard Avedon (1923, 15 May - 2004, 1 October) was born - US, NY, New York. American portrait and fashion photographer.
Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers (1821, 15 May - 1901, 21 July) was born - France, Lot-et-Garonne, Montpezat. A world authority on mollusks who carried out research on the light-sensitive properties of Murex Brandaris. If the sea-snail is broken open it can reveal a yellow slime that changes in sunlight to Tyrian Purple (dibromo-indigo) - a natual More...
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925, 15 May - 1972, 7 May) was born - US, IL, Normal. American photographer - shadowy and masked figures emerge from dark and brooding landscapes.
Marie Théophile Louis Rousselet (1845, 15 May - 1929, 21 November) was born - France, Perpignan. French photographer. Between 1863 and 1868 he traveled extensively though India and on returning to Paris a two volume set "Voyage dans L'Inde" comprising 160 of his albumen prints was published by Goupil et Cie. Only one complete set of this More...
Eugene V. Harris (1913, 8 February - 1978, 15 May) died - US, IL, Chicago. He grew up in Minnesota and received a Bachelor of Education degree in 1937 from the State Teachers' College in Moorhead, MN. He joined the Foreign Services in 1944 and became the Asst. Agricultural Attache in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1948. He More...
Nigel Henderson (1917, 1 April - 1985, 15 May) died - England, Essex, Clacton-on-Sea, Thorpe-le-Soken. British photographer.
Étienne Jules Marey (1830, 5 March - 1904, 15 May) died - France, Paris. French experimental photographer and inventor. He was fascinated by the study of movement (he used the term ‘chronophotographie‘) in animals and man and his photographic inventions were a continual quest to improve his More...
Flip Schulke (1930, 24 June - 2008, 15 May) died - US, FL, West Palm Beach. Photojournalist active in the US who recorded the rise of Cassius Clay - who later became Mohammed Ali. He also recorded the American Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr. and his work was documented in three books: Martin Luther King Jr.:More... |
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