The word photography derives from the Greek words 'photos' - meaning light and 'graphein' - to write. The word was popularised by Sir John Herschel in 1839. Modern photography began in the 1820s with the first permanent photographs.
A camera obscura box used for drawing images
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Euclid described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E,[2][3] Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera,[3][4] Albertus Magnus (1193/1206-1280) discovered silver nitrate, and Georges Fabricius (1516-1571) discovered silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The novel Giphantie (by the French Tiphaigne de la Roche, 1729-1774) described what can be interpreted as photography.
For years images have been projected onto surfaces. According to the Hockney–Falco thesis as argued by artist David Hockney,[5] some artists used the camera obscura and camera lucida to trace scenes as early as the 16th century. However, this theory is heavily disputed by today's contemporary realist artists who are able to create high levels of realism without optical aids.[6] These early cameras did not record an image, but only projected images from an opening in the wall of a darkened room onto a surface, turning the room into a large pinhole camera. The phrase camera obscura literally means dark chamber. While this early prototype of today's modern camera may have had modest usage in its time, it was an important step in the evolution of the invention.
Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph of a scene from nature, circa 1826, "View from the Window at Le Gras," Saint-Loup-de-Varennes (France).
"Boulevard du Temple", taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839, was the first-ever photograph of a person. It is an image of a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the city traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is a man in the bottom left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show up in the picture.
Robert Cornelius, self-portrait, Oct. or Nov. 1839, approximate quarter plate daguerreotype. The back reads, "The first light picture ever taken." This self-portrait is the first photographic portrait image of a human ever produced.
The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1825 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His photographs were produced on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a negative image which then may be coated with ink and impressed upon paper, producing a print. Niépce then began experimenting with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light.
In partnership, Niépce (in Chalon-sur-Saône) and Louis Daguerre (in Paris) refined the existing silver process.[7] In 1833 Niépce died of a stroke, leaving his notes to Daguerre. While he had no scientific background, Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process. He discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapour before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image. Bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes the image. On January 7, 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype.[8] The French government bought the patent and immediately made it public domain.
In 1832, French-Brazilian painter and inventor Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process, naming it Photographie.
After reading about Daguerre's invention, Fox Talbot worked on perfecting his own process; in 1839 he got a key improvement, an effective fixer, from John Herschel, the astronomer, who had previously showed that hyposulfite of soda (also known as hypo, or now sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts. Later that year, Herschel made the first glass negative.
By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride to create an intermediate negative image. Unlike a daguerreotype, a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, like most chemical films do today. Talbot patented[9] this process, which greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography. Later George Eastman refined Talbot's process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte Bayard had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it, and so was not recognized as its inventor.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process.[citation needed] Photographer and children's author Lewis Carroll used this process.[citation needed]
Roger Fenton's assistant seated on Fenton's photographic van, Crimea, 1855.
Slovene Janez Puhar invented the technical procedure for making photographs on glass in 1841.[citation needed] The invention was recognized on July 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et Commerciale.
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley experimented with his own version of collodian emulsions after Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite to the pyrogallol developer.[citation needed] Berkeley discovered that with his own addition of sulfite, to absorb the sulfur dioxide given off by the chemical dithionite in the developer, that dithionite was not required in the developing process. In 1881 he published his discovery. Berkeley's formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite and citric acid. Ammonia was added just before use to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.[10]
Nineteenth-century experimentation with photographic processes frequently became proprietary. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal successfully sought legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his "Lambert Process" in the Eastern District of Louisiana.
[edit] Popularization
Mid 19th century "Brady stand" photo model's armrest table, meant to keep portrait models more still during long exposure times (studio equipment nicknamed after the famed US photographer, Mathew Brady).
A photographer appears to be photographing himself in a 19th-century photographic studio. (c.?1893)
The daguerreotype proved popular in responding to the demand for portraiture emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution.[citation needed] This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the development of photography. By 1851 a broadside by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington was advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10.[11] However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to copy. Photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply, which eventually led them back to Talbot's process.
Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.
In the twentieth century, photography developed rapidly as a commercial service. End-user supplies of photographic equipment accounted for only about 20 percent of industry revenue. For the modern enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, little has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925.[citation needed]
[edit] Color process
First color image, photograph by James Maxwell, 1861.
Although color photography was explored throughout the 19th century, initial experiments in color resulted in projected temporary images, rather than permanent color images. Moreover until the 1870s the emulsions available were not sensitive to red or green light.
The first color photo, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, was taken in 1861 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.[12] Several patentable methods for producing images (by either additive or subtractive methods, see below) were devised from 1862 on by two French inventors (working independently), Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros.[13] Practical methods to sensitize silver halide film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel (full sensitivity to red light was not achieved until the early years of the 20th century).
The first fully practical color plate, Autochrome, did not reach the market until 1907. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen (of filters) being made using dyed dots of potato starch. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light through each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when viewed through the screen restores colors approximating the original.
Other systems of color photography included that used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, which involved three separate monochrome exposures ('separation negatives') of a still scene through red, green, and blue filters. These required a special machine to display, but the results are impressive even by modern standards. His collection of glass plates was purchased from his heirs by the Library of Congress in 1948, and is now available in digital images.
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High speed photography
High speed photography is the science of taking pictures of very fast phenomena. In 1948, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) defined high-speed photography as any set of photographs captured by a camera capable of 128 frames per second or greater, and of at least three consecutive frames. High speed photography can be considered to be the opposite of time-lapse photography.
In common usage, high speed photography may refer to either or both of the following meanings. The first is that the photograph itself may be taken in a way as to appear to freeze the motion, especially to reduce motion blur. The second is that a series of photographs may be taken at a high sampling frequency or frame rate. The first requires a sensor with good sensitivity and either a very good shuttering system or a very fast strobe light. The second requires some means of capturing successive frames, either with a mechanical device or by moving data off electronic sensors very quickly.
Other considerations for high-speed photographers are record length, reciprocity breakdown, and spatial resolution
High speed motion pictures started in 1916 by German weapons scientists [7] .
Methods developed using stationary medium with frames in turn activated by a rotating mirror to rotating prism cameras using fast moving film [8] .
As film and mechanical transports improved, the high-speed film camera became available for scientific research. Kodak eventually shifted its film from acetate base to Estar (Kodak's name for a Mylar-equivalent plastic), which enhanced the strength and allowed it to be pulled faster. The Estar was also more stable than acetate allowing more accurate measurement, and it was not as prone to fire.
Each film type is available in many load sizes. These may be cut down and placed in magazines for easier loading. A 1,200-foot (370 m) magazine is typically the longest available for the 35 mm and 70 mm cameras. A 400-foot (120 m) magazine is typical for 16 mm cameras, though 1,000-foot (300 m) magazines are available. Typically rotary prism cameras use 100ft (30m) film loads. The images on 35 mm high-speed film are typically rectangular with the long side between the sprocket holes instead of parallel to the edges as in standard photography. 16 mm and 70 mm images are typically square rather than rectangular. A list of ANSI formats and sizes is available[9][10].
Most cameras use pulsed timing marks along the edge of the film (either inside or outside of the film perforations) produced by sparks or later by LEDs. These allow accurate measurement of the film speed and in the case of streak or smear images, velocity measurement of the subject. These pulses are usually cycled at 10, 100, 1000 Hz depending on the speed setting of the camera.
For the development of explosives the image of a line of sample was projected onto an arc of film via a rotating mirror. The advance of flame appeared as an oblique image on the film, from which the velocity of detonation was measured [12] .
By removing the prism from the rotary prism cameras and using a very narrow slit in place of the shutter, it is possible to take images whose exposure is proportional to the film speed across the slit. The image that results has several useful properties. The film advance direction is essentially a measure of time. If the subject's motion is perpendicular to the slit, it may show growth or motion perpendicular to the slit.
Motion compensation photography (also known as Ballistic Syncro Photography or Smear Photography when used to image high speed projectiles) is a form of streak photography. When the motion of the film is opposite to that of the subject with an inverting (positive) lens, and synchronized appropriately, the images show events as a function of time. Objects remaining motionless show up as streaks. This is the technique used for finish line photographs. At no time is it possible to take a still photograph that duplicates the results of a finish line photograph taken with this method. A still is a photograph in time, a streak/smear photograph is a photograph of time. When used to image high speed projectiles the use of a slit (as in Streak Photography) produce very short exposure times ensuring higher image resolution. The use for high speed projectiles means that one still image is normally produced on one roll of cine film. From this image information such as yaw or pitch can be determined. Because of its measurement of time variations in velocity will also be shown by lateral distortions of the image.
By combining this technique with a diffracted wavefront of light, as by a knife-edge, it is possible to take photographs of phase perturbations within a homogeneous medium. For example, it is possible to capture shockwaves of bullets and other high-speed objects. See, for example, Shadowgraph and Schlieren photography.
[edit] Video
In common usage, high speed photography may refer to either or both of the following meanings. The first is that the photograph itself may be taken in a way as to appear to freeze the motion, especially to reduce motion blur. The second is that a series of photographs may be taken at a high sampling frequency or frame rate. The first requires a sensor with good sensitivity and either a very good shuttering system or a very fast strobe light. The second requires some means of capturing successive frames, either with a mechanical device or by moving data off electronic sensors very quickly.
Other considerations for high-speed photographers are record length, reciprocity breakdown, and spatial resolution
High speed motion pictures started in 1916 by German weapons scientists [7] .
Methods developed using stationary medium with frames in turn activated by a rotating mirror to rotating prism cameras using fast moving film [8] .
As film and mechanical transports improved, the high-speed film camera became available for scientific research. Kodak eventually shifted its film from acetate base to Estar (Kodak's name for a Mylar-equivalent plastic), which enhanced the strength and allowed it to be pulled faster. The Estar was also more stable than acetate allowing more accurate measurement, and it was not as prone to fire.
Each film type is available in many load sizes. These may be cut down and placed in magazines for easier loading. A 1,200-foot (370 m) magazine is typically the longest available for the 35 mm and 70 mm cameras. A 400-foot (120 m) magazine is typical for 16 mm cameras, though 1,000-foot (300 m) magazines are available. Typically rotary prism cameras use 100ft (30m) film loads. The images on 35 mm high-speed film are typically rectangular with the long side between the sprocket holes instead of parallel to the edges as in standard photography. 16 mm and 70 mm images are typically square rather than rectangular. A list of ANSI formats and sizes is available[9][10].
Most cameras use pulsed timing marks along the edge of the film (either inside or outside of the film perforations) produced by sparks or later by LEDs. These allow accurate measurement of the film speed and in the case of streak or smear images, velocity measurement of the subject. These pulses are usually cycled at 10, 100, 1000 Hz depending on the speed setting of the camera.
For the development of explosives the image of a line of sample was projected onto an arc of film via a rotating mirror. The advance of flame appeared as an oblique image on the film, from which the velocity of detonation was measured [12] .
By removing the prism from the rotary prism cameras and using a very narrow slit in place of the shutter, it is possible to take images whose exposure is proportional to the film speed across the slit. The image that results has several useful properties. The film advance direction is essentially a measure of time. If the subject's motion is perpendicular to the slit, it may show growth or motion perpendicular to the slit.
Motion compensation photography (also known as Ballistic Syncro Photography or Smear Photography when used to image high speed projectiles) is a form of streak photography. When the motion of the film is opposite to that of the subject with an inverting (positive) lens, and synchronized appropriately, the images show events as a function of time. Objects remaining motionless show up as streaks. This is the technique used for finish line photographs. At no time is it possible to take a still photograph that duplicates the results of a finish line photograph taken with this method. A still is a photograph in time, a streak/smear photograph is a photograph of time. When used to image high speed projectiles the use of a slit (as in Streak Photography) produce very short exposure times ensuring higher image resolution. The use for high speed projectiles means that one still image is normally produced on one roll of cine film. From this image information such as yaw or pitch can be determined. Because of its measurement of time variations in velocity will also be shown by lateral distortions of the image.
By combining this technique with a diffracted wavefront of light, as by a knife-edge, it is possible to take photographs of phase perturbations within a homogeneous medium. For example, it is possible to capture shockwaves of bullets and other high-speed objects. See, for example, Shadowgraph and Schlieren photography.
[edit] Video
Gray card
A gray card is a middle gray reference, typically used together with a reflective light meter, as a way to produce consistent image exposure and/or color in film and photography.
A gray card is a flat object of a neutral gray color that derives from a flat reflectance spectrum. A typical examples is the Kodak R-27 set, which contains two 8x10" cards and one 4x5" card which have 18% reflectance across the visible spectrum, and a white reverse side which has 90% reflectance. Note that flat spectral reflectance is a stronger condition than simply appearing neutral; this flatness ensures that the card appears neutral under any illuminant (see metamerism).
A major use of gray cards is to provide a standard reference object for exposure determination in photography. A gray card is an (approximate) realisation of a Lambertian scatterer; its apparent brightness (and exposure determination) therefore does not depend on its orientation relative to the light source. By placing a gray card in the scene to be photographed, oriented at a defined angle relative to the direction of the incident light, and taking a reading from it with a reflected light meter, the photographer can be assured of consistent exposures across their photographs. This technique is similar to using an incident meter, as it depends on the illuminance but not the reflectivity of the subject.
In addition to providing a means for measuring exposure, a gray card provides a convenient reference for white balance, or color balance, allowing the camera to compensate for the illuminant color in a scene.
Gray cards can be used for in-camera white balance or post-processing white balance. Many digital cameras have a custom white balance feature. A photo of the gray card is taken and used to set white balace for a sequence of photos. For post-processing white balance, a photo of the gray card in the scene is taken, and the image processing software uses the data from the pixels in the gray card area of the photo to set the white balance point for the whole image.
Most digital cameras do a reasonable job of controlling color. For the casual user, a gray card is unnecessary. Many serious photographers or hobbyists consider gray cards an essential part of the digital photography process.
Gray cards are made of a variety of materials including plastic, paper, and foam. Some photographers hold[citation needed] that any neutral white or grey surface, such as a white piece of paper, a concrete or stone wall, or a white shirt are suitable substitutes for a gray card; however, since bright white papers and clothing washed in typical detergents contain fluorescent whitening agents, they tend to not be very spectrally neutral.[1] Gray cards specially made to be spectrally flat are therefore more suitable to the purpose than surfaces that happen to be available.
A gray card is a flat object of a neutral gray color that derives from a flat reflectance spectrum. A typical examples is the Kodak R-27 set, which contains two 8x10" cards and one 4x5" card which have 18% reflectance across the visible spectrum, and a white reverse side which has 90% reflectance. Note that flat spectral reflectance is a stronger condition than simply appearing neutral; this flatness ensures that the card appears neutral under any illuminant (see metamerism).
A major use of gray cards is to provide a standard reference object for exposure determination in photography. A gray card is an (approximate) realisation of a Lambertian scatterer; its apparent brightness (and exposure determination) therefore does not depend on its orientation relative to the light source. By placing a gray card in the scene to be photographed, oriented at a defined angle relative to the direction of the incident light, and taking a reading from it with a reflected light meter, the photographer can be assured of consistent exposures across their photographs. This technique is similar to using an incident meter, as it depends on the illuminance but not the reflectivity of the subject.
In addition to providing a means for measuring exposure, a gray card provides a convenient reference for white balance, or color balance, allowing the camera to compensate for the illuminant color in a scene.
Gray cards can be used for in-camera white balance or post-processing white balance. Many digital cameras have a custom white balance feature. A photo of the gray card is taken and used to set white balace for a sequence of photos. For post-processing white balance, a photo of the gray card in the scene is taken, and the image processing software uses the data from the pixels in the gray card area of the photo to set the white balance point for the whole image.
Most digital cameras do a reasonable job of controlling color. For the casual user, a gray card is unnecessary. Many serious photographers or hobbyists consider gray cards an essential part of the digital photography process.
Gray cards are made of a variety of materials including plastic, paper, and foam. Some photographers hold[citation needed] that any neutral white or grey surface, such as a white piece of paper, a concrete or stone wall, or a white shirt are suitable substitutes for a gray card; however, since bright white papers and clothing washed in typical detergents contain fluorescent whitening agents, they tend to not be very spectrally neutral.[1] Gray cards specially made to be spectrally flat are therefore more suitable to the purpose than surfaces that happen to be available.
Portrait photography
Portrait photography or portraiture is the capture by means of photography of the likeness of a person or a small group of people (a group portrait), in which the face and expression is predominant. The objective is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the subject. Like other types of portraiture, the focus of the photograph is the person's face, although the entire body and the background may be included. A portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the camera.
Unlike many other photography styles, the subjects of portrait photography are often non-professional models. Family portraits commemorating special occasions, such as graduations or weddings, may be professionally produced or may be vernacular and are most often intended for private viewing rather than for public exhibition.
However, many portraits are created for public display ranging from fine art portraiture, to commercial portraiture such as might be used to illustrate a company's annual report, to promotional portraiture such a might be found on a book jacket showing the author of the book.
Portrait photography has been around since the invention and popularization of the camera. It is a cheaper and often more accessible method than portrait painting, which has been used by distinguished figures before the popularity of the camera.
The relatively low cost of the daguerreotype in the middle of the 19th century lead to its popularity for portraiture. Studios sprang up in cities around the world, some producing more than 500 plates a day. The style of these early works reflected the technical challenges associated with 30-second exposure times and the painterly aesthetic of the time. Subjects were generally seated against plain backgrounds and lit with the soft light of an overhead window and whatever else could be reflected with mirrors. As the equipment became more advanced, the ability to capture images with short exposure times gave photographer more creative freedom and thus created new styles of portrait photography.
As photographic techniques developed, photographers took their talents out of the studio and onto battlefields, across oceans and into remote wilderness. William Shew's Daguerreotype Saloon, Roger Fenton's Photographic Van and Mathew Brady's What-is-it? wagon set the standards for making portraits and other photographs in the field.
[edit] Lighting for portraiture
When portrait photographs are composed and captured in a studio, the professional photographer has control over the lighting of the composition of the subject and can adjust direction and intensity. There are many ways to light a subject's face, but there are several common lighting plans which are easy enough to describe. Of course making them work in a studio or on location is a matter of experimentation and practice.
[edit] Three-Point Lighting
One of the most basic lighting plans is called three-point lighting. This plan uses three (and sometimes four) lights to fully model (bring out details and the three-dimensionality of) the subject's features. The three main lights used in this light plan are as follows:
[edit] The Key light
Also called a main light, the key light is usually placed to one side of the subject's face, between 30 and 60 degrees off centre and a bit higher than eye level. The key light is the brightest light in the lighting plan.
[edit] The Fill light
Placed opposite the key light, the fill light fills in or softens the shadows on the opposite side of the face. The brightness of the fill light is usually between 1/3 and 1/4 that of the key light. This is expressed as a ratio as in 3:1 or 4:1. When the ratio is 3:1 this is sometimes called Kodak lighting since this was the ratio suggested by Kodak in the instructional booklets accompanying the company's early cameras.
The purpose of these two lights is to mimic the natural light created by placing a subject in a room near a window. The daylight falling on the subject through the window is the Key light and the Fill light is reflected light coming from the walls of the room. This type of lighting can be found in the works of hundreds of classical painters and early photographers and is often called Rembrandt lighting.
Modern portraitists have chosen to add one or two lights to this lighting plan.
[edit] The Rim light
Also called a backlight or hair light, the rim light (the third main light in the three-point lighting plan) is placed behind the subject, out of the picture frame, and often rather higher than the Key light or Fill. The point of the rim light is to provide separation from the background by highlighting the subject's shoulders and hair. The rim light should be just bright enough to provide separation from the background, but not as bright as the key light.
[edit] Butterfly lighting
Butterfly lighting is another common lighting plan and has been very popular over the past decade or so. In this case, only two lights are common. The Key light is placed directly in front of the subject, often above the camera or slightly to one side, and a bit higher than is common for a three-point lighting plan. The second light is a rim light. Often a reflector is placed below the subject's face to provide fill light and soften shadows.
This lighting can be recognised by the strong light falling on the forehead, the bridge of the nose and the upper cheeks, and by the distinct shadow below the nose which often looks rather like a butterfly and thus provides the name for this lighting plan. Butterfly lighting was a favourite of famed Hollywood portraitist George Hurrell which is why this style of lighting is often called Paramount lighting, after the movie studio of the same name.
[edit] Accessory lights
These lights can be added to basic lighting plans to provide additional highlights or add background definition.
[edit] The Kicker
A kicker is a small light, often made directional through the use of a snoot, umbrella, or softbox. The kicker is designed to add highlights to the off side of the subject's face, usually just enough to establish the jaw line or edge of an ear. The kicker should thus be a bit brighter than the fill light, but not so bright it over fills the off side of the face. Many portraitists choose not to use a kicker and settle for the three main lights of the standard plans.
[edit] Background lights
Not so much a part of the portrait lighting plan, but rather designed to provide illumination for the background behind the subject, background lights can pick out details in the background, provide a halo effect by illuminating a portion of a backdrop behind the subject's head, or turn the background pure white by filling it with light.
[edit] Other lighting equipment
Most lights used in modern photography are a flash of some sort. The lighting for portraiture is typically diffused by bouncing it from the inside of an umbrella, or by using a soft box. A soft box is a fabric box, encasing a photo strobe head, one side of which is made of translucent fabric. This provides a softer lighting for portrait work and is often considered more appealing than the harsh light often cast by open strobes. Hair and background lights are usually not diffused. It is more important to control light spillage to other areas of the subject. Snoots, barn doors and flags or gobos help focus the lights exactly where the photographer wants them. Background lights are sometimes used with color gels placed in front of the light to create coloured backgrounds.
[edit] Styles of portraiture
There are many different techniques for portrait photography. Often it is desirable to capture the subject's eyes and face in sharp focus while allowing other less important elements to be rendered in a soft focus. At other times, portraits of individual features might be the focus of a composition such as the hands, eyes or part of the subject's torso.
Unlike many other photography styles, the subjects of portrait photography are often non-professional models. Family portraits commemorating special occasions, such as graduations or weddings, may be professionally produced or may be vernacular and are most often intended for private viewing rather than for public exhibition.
However, many portraits are created for public display ranging from fine art portraiture, to commercial portraiture such as might be used to illustrate a company's annual report, to promotional portraiture such a might be found on a book jacket showing the author of the book.
Portrait photography has been around since the invention and popularization of the camera. It is a cheaper and often more accessible method than portrait painting, which has been used by distinguished figures before the popularity of the camera.
The relatively low cost of the daguerreotype in the middle of the 19th century lead to its popularity for portraiture. Studios sprang up in cities around the world, some producing more than 500 plates a day. The style of these early works reflected the technical challenges associated with 30-second exposure times and the painterly aesthetic of the time. Subjects were generally seated against plain backgrounds and lit with the soft light of an overhead window and whatever else could be reflected with mirrors. As the equipment became more advanced, the ability to capture images with short exposure times gave photographer more creative freedom and thus created new styles of portrait photography.
As photographic techniques developed, photographers took their talents out of the studio and onto battlefields, across oceans and into remote wilderness. William Shew's Daguerreotype Saloon, Roger Fenton's Photographic Van and Mathew Brady's What-is-it? wagon set the standards for making portraits and other photographs in the field.
[edit] Lighting for portraiture
When portrait photographs are composed and captured in a studio, the professional photographer has control over the lighting of the composition of the subject and can adjust direction and intensity. There are many ways to light a subject's face, but there are several common lighting plans which are easy enough to describe. Of course making them work in a studio or on location is a matter of experimentation and practice.
[edit] Three-Point Lighting
One of the most basic lighting plans is called three-point lighting. This plan uses three (and sometimes four) lights to fully model (bring out details and the three-dimensionality of) the subject's features. The three main lights used in this light plan are as follows:
[edit] The Key light
Also called a main light, the key light is usually placed to one side of the subject's face, between 30 and 60 degrees off centre and a bit higher than eye level. The key light is the brightest light in the lighting plan.
[edit] The Fill light
Placed opposite the key light, the fill light fills in or softens the shadows on the opposite side of the face. The brightness of the fill light is usually between 1/3 and 1/4 that of the key light. This is expressed as a ratio as in 3:1 or 4:1. When the ratio is 3:1 this is sometimes called Kodak lighting since this was the ratio suggested by Kodak in the instructional booklets accompanying the company's early cameras.
The purpose of these two lights is to mimic the natural light created by placing a subject in a room near a window. The daylight falling on the subject through the window is the Key light and the Fill light is reflected light coming from the walls of the room. This type of lighting can be found in the works of hundreds of classical painters and early photographers and is often called Rembrandt lighting.
Modern portraitists have chosen to add one or two lights to this lighting plan.
[edit] The Rim light
Also called a backlight or hair light, the rim light (the third main light in the three-point lighting plan) is placed behind the subject, out of the picture frame, and often rather higher than the Key light or Fill. The point of the rim light is to provide separation from the background by highlighting the subject's shoulders and hair. The rim light should be just bright enough to provide separation from the background, but not as bright as the key light.
[edit] Butterfly lighting
Butterfly lighting is another common lighting plan and has been very popular over the past decade or so. In this case, only two lights are common. The Key light is placed directly in front of the subject, often above the camera or slightly to one side, and a bit higher than is common for a three-point lighting plan. The second light is a rim light. Often a reflector is placed below the subject's face to provide fill light and soften shadows.
This lighting can be recognised by the strong light falling on the forehead, the bridge of the nose and the upper cheeks, and by the distinct shadow below the nose which often looks rather like a butterfly and thus provides the name for this lighting plan. Butterfly lighting was a favourite of famed Hollywood portraitist George Hurrell which is why this style of lighting is often called Paramount lighting, after the movie studio of the same name.
[edit] Accessory lights
These lights can be added to basic lighting plans to provide additional highlights or add background definition.
[edit] The Kicker
A kicker is a small light, often made directional through the use of a snoot, umbrella, or softbox. The kicker is designed to add highlights to the off side of the subject's face, usually just enough to establish the jaw line or edge of an ear. The kicker should thus be a bit brighter than the fill light, but not so bright it over fills the off side of the face. Many portraitists choose not to use a kicker and settle for the three main lights of the standard plans.
[edit] Background lights
Not so much a part of the portrait lighting plan, but rather designed to provide illumination for the background behind the subject, background lights can pick out details in the background, provide a halo effect by illuminating a portion of a backdrop behind the subject's head, or turn the background pure white by filling it with light.
[edit] Other lighting equipment
Most lights used in modern photography are a flash of some sort. The lighting for portraiture is typically diffused by bouncing it from the inside of an umbrella, or by using a soft box. A soft box is a fabric box, encasing a photo strobe head, one side of which is made of translucent fabric. This provides a softer lighting for portrait work and is often considered more appealing than the harsh light often cast by open strobes. Hair and background lights are usually not diffused. It is more important to control light spillage to other areas of the subject. Snoots, barn doors and flags or gobos help focus the lights exactly where the photographer wants them. Background lights are sometimes used with color gels placed in front of the light to create coloured backgrounds.
[edit] Styles of portraiture
There are many different techniques for portrait photography. Often it is desirable to capture the subject's eyes and face in sharp focus while allowing other less important elements to be rendered in a soft focus. At other times, portraits of individual features might be the focus of a composition such as the hands, eyes or part of the subject's torso.
Night photography
Night photography refers to photographs taken outdoors between dusk and dawn. Night photographers generally have a choice between using artificial light or using a long exposure, exposing the scene for seconds or even minutes, in order to give the film enough time to capture a usable image, and to compensate for reciprocity failure. With the progress of high-speed films, higher-sensitivity digital image sensors, wide-aperture lenses, and the ever-greater power of urban lights, night photography is increasingly possible using available light.
In the early 1900s, a few notable photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and William Fraser, began working at night. The first photographers known to have produced large bodies of work at night were Brassai and Bill Brandt. In 1932, Brassai published Paris de Nuit, a book of black-and-white photographs of the streets of Paris at night. During World War II, British photographer Brandt took advantage of the black-out conditions to photograph the streets of London by moonlight.
By the 1990s, British-born photographer Michael Kenna had established himself as the most commercially successful night photographer. His black-and-white landscapes were most often set between dusk and dawn in locations that included San Francisco, Japan, France, and England. Some of his most memorable projects depict the Ford Motor Company's Rogue River plant, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in northern England, and many of the Nazi concentration camps scattered across Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Austria.
During the beginning of the 21st century, the popularity of digital cameras made it much easier for beginning photographers to understand the complexities of photographing at night. Today, there are hundreds of websites dedicated to night photography.
In the early 1900s, a few notable photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and William Fraser, began working at night. The first photographers known to have produced large bodies of work at night were Brassai and Bill Brandt. In 1932, Brassai published Paris de Nuit, a book of black-and-white photographs of the streets of Paris at night. During World War II, British photographer Brandt took advantage of the black-out conditions to photograph the streets of London by moonlight.
By the 1990s, British-born photographer Michael Kenna had established himself as the most commercially successful night photographer. His black-and-white landscapes were most often set between dusk and dawn in locations that included San Francisco, Japan, France, and England. Some of his most memorable projects depict the Ford Motor Company's Rogue River plant, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in northern England, and many of the Nazi concentration camps scattered across Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Austria.
During the beginning of the 21st century, the popularity of digital cameras made it much easier for beginning photographers to understand the complexities of photographing at night. Today, there are hundreds of websites dedicated to night photography.
Monochrome photography
Monochrome photography is the recording of single colour, or wavelength, of light. The term generally refers to all forms of black and white photography, recording light in tones of grey ranging from black to white.[1]
Black and white photography is considered more subtle and interpretive, and less realistic than colour photography.[1] Monochrome images are not direct renditions of their subjects, but are abstractions from reality, representing colors in shades of grey. In computer terms, this is often called greyscale.[citation needed]
Monochrome images may be produced using black and white film or paper or by manipulating colour images using computer software.
Black and white photography is considered more subtle and interpretive, and less realistic than colour photography.[1] Monochrome images are not direct renditions of their subjects, but are abstractions from reality, representing colors in shades of grey. In computer terms, this is often called greyscale.[citation needed]
Monochrome images may be produced using black and white film or paper or by manipulating colour images using computer software.
Single-lens reflex camera
A single-lens reflex (SLR) camera is camera that uses a semi-automatic moving mirror system which permits the photographer to sometimes see exactly what will be captured by the film or digital imaging system, as opposed to pre-SLR cameras where the view through the viewfinder could be significantly different from what was captured on film.
Prior to the development of SLR, all cameras with viewfinders had two optical light paths: one path through the lens to the film, and another path positioned above (TLR or twin-lens reflex) or to the side (rangefinder). Because the viewfinder and the film lens cannot share the same optical path, the viewing lens is aimed to intersect with the film lens at a fixed point somewhere in front of the camera. This is not problematic for pictures taken at a middle or longer distance but parallax causes framing errors in close-up shots. Moreover, focusing the lens of a non-reflex camera when it is opened to wider apertures (such as in low light or while using low-speed film) is not easy.
Most SLR cameras permit upright and laterally correct viewing through use of a pentaprism situated in the optical path between the reflex mirror and viewfinder. Light is reflected by a movable mirror upwards into the pentaprism where it is reflected several times until it aligns with the viewfinder. When the shutter is released, the mirror moves out of the light path and the light shines directly onto the film, or in the case of a DSLR, the CCD or CMOS imaging sensor.
Focus can be adjusted manually by the photographer or automatically by an autofocus system. The viewfinder can include a matte focusing screen located just above the mirror system to diffuse the light. This system permits accurate viewing, composing and focusing, especially useful with interchangeable lenses.
Up until the 1990s, SLR was the most advanced photographic preview system available, but the recent development and refinement of digital imaging technology with an on-camera live LCD preview screen has overshadowed SLR's popularity. Nearly all inexpensive compact digital cameras now include an LCD preview screen allowing the photographer to see exactly what the CCD is capturing. However, SLR is still popular in high-end and professional cameras, because the pixel resolution, contrast ratio, refresh rate, and color gamut of an LCD preview screen cannot compete with the clarity and shadow detail of a direct-viewed optical SLR viewfinder.
Prior to the development of SLR, all cameras with viewfinders had two optical light paths: one path through the lens to the film, and another path positioned above (TLR or twin-lens reflex) or to the side (rangefinder). Because the viewfinder and the film lens cannot share the same optical path, the viewing lens is aimed to intersect with the film lens at a fixed point somewhere in front of the camera. This is not problematic for pictures taken at a middle or longer distance but parallax causes framing errors in close-up shots. Moreover, focusing the lens of a non-reflex camera when it is opened to wider apertures (such as in low light or while using low-speed film) is not easy.
Most SLR cameras permit upright and laterally correct viewing through use of a pentaprism situated in the optical path between the reflex mirror and viewfinder. Light is reflected by a movable mirror upwards into the pentaprism where it is reflected several times until it aligns with the viewfinder. When the shutter is released, the mirror moves out of the light path and the light shines directly onto the film, or in the case of a DSLR, the CCD or CMOS imaging sensor.
Focus can be adjusted manually by the photographer or automatically by an autofocus system. The viewfinder can include a matte focusing screen located just above the mirror system to diffuse the light. This system permits accurate viewing, composing and focusing, especially useful with interchangeable lenses.
Up until the 1990s, SLR was the most advanced photographic preview system available, but the recent development and refinement of digital imaging technology with an on-camera live LCD preview screen has overshadowed SLR's popularity. Nearly all inexpensive compact digital cameras now include an LCD preview screen allowing the photographer to see exactly what the CCD is capturing. However, SLR is still popular in high-end and professional cameras, because the pixel resolution, contrast ratio, refresh rate, and color gamut of an LCD preview screen cannot compete with the clarity and shadow detail of a direct-viewed optical SLR viewfinder.
War photography
War photography captures images of armed conflict and life in war-torn areas, beginning with Roger Fenton's photographs of the Crimean War of 1853-56, in which he was limited by his bulky equipment and the technology of the day, which had not yet developed a method for photographing moving objects.
The photography of war depicts the terrors of war mingled with acts of sacrifice. Different to paintings or drawings of war, photographic images are not easily altered; although in some cases, photographers manipulate the subjects and scenes depicted in a work, resulting in an image that is not completely objective in nature.
Photography, presented to the public in 1839, was believed to create images that were accurate representations of the world. Photography was used to record historical information, but not always in the optimistic way that was conceived at the advent of the medium.
It was anticipated that photographers, supposedly not acting as active participants of war but as neutral partisan, would be able to bring their cumbersome photographic equipment into the battlefield and record the rapid action of combat. This was not the case, as the technical insufficiency of the photograph in recording movement was not considered. The daguerreotype, an early form of photography that generated a single image using a silver-coated copper plate, took a very long time to produce. This prevented action photography, as images took minutes to develop and could not be processed immediately.
Valley of the Shadow of Death, with road full of cannonballs, by Roger Fenton in the Crimea, 1855
The first war photographer was an anonymous American who took a number of daguerrotypes during the Mexican–American War, in 1847[1]. The first known war photographer is the Hungarian-Romanian Carol Popp de Szathmàri who took photos of various officers in 1853 and of war scenes near Oltenita and Silistra in 1854, during the Crimean War. He created some 200 pictures albums, which he personally offered in 1855 to Napoleon III of France and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. About 9 of his pictures survive today[2]. The French photographer Ernest Edouard de Caranza caught his countrymans in their camp near Varna, in 1854. He was followed by Roger Fenton, in 1855, although with his bulky equipment he was limited to posed still photographs or landscapes. He took a large van and an assistant, and returned to Britain with over 350 usable large format negatives.
The inability of the early photograph to record a moving object lead to the practice of recreating scenes of battle, such as in the work of both Haley Sims and Alexander Gardner. They admittedly reconfigured scenes that took place during the American Civil War (1861-1865) in order to intensify the visual and emotional effects of battle.[3] Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady rearranged bodies of dead soldiers during the Civil War in order to create a clear picture of the atrocities associated with battle. In Soldiers on the Battlefield, 1862, Brady produced a controversial tableau of the dead within a desolate landscape. This work, along with Alexander Gardner’s 1863 work Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter[4] were images, which, when shown to the public, brought home the horrific reality of war.[5]
A Wehrmacht combat photographer on the Eastern Front, 1941.
Since early photographers were not able to create images of moving targets, they would record more sedentary aspects of war, such as fortifications, soldiers, and land before and after battle along with the re-creation of action scenes. Similar to battle photography, portrait images of soldiers were also often staged. In order to produce a photograph, the subject had to be perfectly still for a matter of minutes, so they were posed to be comfortable and minimize movement.
Unlike paintings, which presented a single illustration of a specific event, photography offered the opportunity for an extensive amount of images to enter circulation. The proliferation of the photographic images allowed the public to be well informed in the discourses of war. The advent of mass-reproduced images of war were not only used to inform the public but they served as imprints of the time and as historical recordings.[6] Mass-produced images did have consequences. Besides informing the public, the glut of images in distribution over-saturated the market, allowing viewers to develop the ability to disregard the immediate value and historical importance of certain photographs.
The photography of war depicts the terrors of war mingled with acts of sacrifice. Different to paintings or drawings of war, photographic images are not easily altered; although in some cases, photographers manipulate the subjects and scenes depicted in a work, resulting in an image that is not completely objective in nature.
Photography, presented to the public in 1839, was believed to create images that were accurate representations of the world. Photography was used to record historical information, but not always in the optimistic way that was conceived at the advent of the medium.
It was anticipated that photographers, supposedly not acting as active participants of war but as neutral partisan, would be able to bring their cumbersome photographic equipment into the battlefield and record the rapid action of combat. This was not the case, as the technical insufficiency of the photograph in recording movement was not considered. The daguerreotype, an early form of photography that generated a single image using a silver-coated copper plate, took a very long time to produce. This prevented action photography, as images took minutes to develop and could not be processed immediately.
Valley of the Shadow of Death, with road full of cannonballs, by Roger Fenton in the Crimea, 1855
The first war photographer was an anonymous American who took a number of daguerrotypes during the Mexican–American War, in 1847[1]. The first known war photographer is the Hungarian-Romanian Carol Popp de Szathmàri who took photos of various officers in 1853 and of war scenes near Oltenita and Silistra in 1854, during the Crimean War. He created some 200 pictures albums, which he personally offered in 1855 to Napoleon III of France and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. About 9 of his pictures survive today[2]. The French photographer Ernest Edouard de Caranza caught his countrymans in their camp near Varna, in 1854. He was followed by Roger Fenton, in 1855, although with his bulky equipment he was limited to posed still photographs or landscapes. He took a large van and an assistant, and returned to Britain with over 350 usable large format negatives.
The inability of the early photograph to record a moving object lead to the practice of recreating scenes of battle, such as in the work of both Haley Sims and Alexander Gardner. They admittedly reconfigured scenes that took place during the American Civil War (1861-1865) in order to intensify the visual and emotional effects of battle.[3] Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady rearranged bodies of dead soldiers during the Civil War in order to create a clear picture of the atrocities associated with battle. In Soldiers on the Battlefield, 1862, Brady produced a controversial tableau of the dead within a desolate landscape. This work, along with Alexander Gardner’s 1863 work Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter[4] were images, which, when shown to the public, brought home the horrific reality of war.[5]
A Wehrmacht combat photographer on the Eastern Front, 1941.
Since early photographers were not able to create images of moving targets, they would record more sedentary aspects of war, such as fortifications, soldiers, and land before and after battle along with the re-creation of action scenes. Similar to battle photography, portrait images of soldiers were also often staged. In order to produce a photograph, the subject had to be perfectly still for a matter of minutes, so they were posed to be comfortable and minimize movement.
Unlike paintings, which presented a single illustration of a specific event, photography offered the opportunity for an extensive amount of images to enter circulation. The proliferation of the photographic images allowed the public to be well informed in the discourses of war. The advent of mass-reproduced images of war were not only used to inform the public but they served as imprints of the time and as historical recordings.[6] Mass-produced images did have consequences. Besides informing the public, the glut of images in distribution over-saturated the market, allowing viewers to develop the ability to disregard the immediate value and historical importance of certain photographs.
Street photography
Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions, and other settings.
Street photography uses the techniques of straight photography in that it shows a pure vision of something, like holding up a mirror to society. Street photography often tends to be ironic and can be distanced from its subject matter, and often concentrates on a single human moment, caught at a decisive or poignant moment. On the other hand, much street photography takes the opposite approach and provides a very literal and extremely personal rendering of the subject matter, giving the audience a more visceral experience of walks of life they might only be passingly familiar with. In the 20th century, street photographers have provided an exemplary and detailed record of street culture in Europe and North America, and elsewhere to a somewhat lesser extent.
Many classic works of street photography were created in the period between roughly 1890 and 1975 and coincided with the introduction of portable cameras, especially small 35mm, rangefinder cameras. Classic practitioners of street photography include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, William Eggleston, Brassa?, Willy Ronis, Robert Doisneau and Garry Winogrand.
Street photography uses the techniques of straight photography in that it shows a pure vision of something, like holding up a mirror to society. Street photography often tends to be ironic and can be distanced from its subject matter, and often concentrates on a single human moment, caught at a decisive or poignant moment. On the other hand, much street photography takes the opposite approach and provides a very literal and extremely personal rendering of the subject matter, giving the audience a more visceral experience of walks of life they might only be passingly familiar with. In the 20th century, street photographers have provided an exemplary and detailed record of street culture in Europe and North America, and elsewhere to a somewhat lesser extent.
Many classic works of street photography were created in the period between roughly 1890 and 1975 and coincided with the introduction of portable cameras, especially small 35mm, rangefinder cameras. Classic practitioners of street photography include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, William Eggleston, Brassa?, Willy Ronis, Robert Doisneau and Garry Winogrand.
Bokeh
In photography, bokeh is the blur,[1][2] or the æsthetic quality of the blur,[3][4][5] in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light."[6] Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— "good" or "bad" bokeh, respectively.[1] Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.
Bokeh is often most visible around small background highlights, such as specular reflections and light sources, which is why it often associated with such areas.[1] However, bokeh is not limited to highlights, as blur occurs in all out-of-focus regions of the image.
The term comes from the Japanese word boke (?? or ??), which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji (???), the "blur quality". The Japanese term boke is also used in the sense of a mental haze or senility.[7]
The English spelling bokeh was popularized in 1997 in Photo Techniques magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the March/April 1997 issue; he altered the spelling to suggest the correct pronunciation to English speakers, saying "it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable".[2] Bokeh replaced the previous spelling boke that had been in use at least since 1996, when Merklinger had also suggested "or Bokeh if you prefer."[8]
The term bokeh has appeared in photography books at least since 1998.[9] It is sometimes pronounced /'bo?k?/ (boke-uh[10]).
[edit] Description
An extremely shallow depth of field, a common effect of macro lenses, emphasizes bokeh
The depth of field is the region where the size of the circle of confusion is less than the resolution of the human eye. Circles with a diameter less than the circle of confusion will appear to be in focus.
Although difficult to quantify, some lenses enhance overall image quality by producing more subjectively pleasing out-of-focus areas. Good bokeh is especially important for large-aperture lenses, macro lenses, and long telephoto lenses because they are typically used with a shallow depth of field. Bokeh is also important for medium telephoto "portrait lenses" (typically 85–150 mm on 35-mm format) because in portraiture photography, the photographer typically seeks to obtain a shallow depth of field to achieve an out-of-focus background and make the subject stand out.
The bokeh produced by a Catadioptric lens (also called a mirror lens).
Bokeh characteristics may be quantified by examining the image's circle of confusion. In out-of-focus areas, each point of light becomes an image of the aperture, generally a more or less round disc. Depending how a lens is corrected for spherical aberration, the disc may be uniformly illuminated, brighter near the edge, or brighter near the center. Lenses that are poorly corrected for spherical aberration will show one kind of disc for out-of-focus points in front of the plane of focus, and a different kind for points behind. This may actually be desirable, as blur circles that are dimmer near the edges produce less-defined shapes which blend smoothly with the surrounding image. Lens manufacturers including Nikon, Canon, and Minolta make lenses designed with specific controls to change the rendering of the out-of-focus areas.
Catadioptric lens bokeh seen in more detail.
The shape of the aperture has a great influence on the subjective quality of bokeh. When a lens is stopped down to something other than its maximum aperture size (minimum f-number), out-of-focus points are blurred into the polygonal shape of the aperture rather than perfect circles. This is most apparent when a lens produces undesirable, hard-edged bokeh, therefore some lenses have aperture blades with curved edges to make the aperture more closely approximate a circle rather than a polygon. Lens designers can also increase the number of blades to achieve the same effect. Traditional "Portrait" lenses, such as the "fast" 85mm focal length models for 35mm cameras often feature almost circular aperture diaphragms, as is the case with Canon's EF 85mm f/1.2L II lens and Nikon's 85mm f/1.4D, and are generally considered exceptional performers. A catadioptric telephoto lens displays bokehs resembling doughnuts, because its secondary mirror blocks the central part of the aperture opening. Recently, photographers have found how to exploit the shape of the bokehs by creating a simple mask out of card with the shape that the photographer wishes the bokeh to be, and placing it over the lens. Common shapes are stars and hearts, but it is possible to create it with almost any shape imagined.[11]
Leica lenses, especially vintage ones, are often claimed to excel in bokeh quality, although Leica photographers have tended to make more use of maximum aperture due to the lenses' ability to maintain good sharpness at wide openings and the suitability of the Leica camera system for available-light theatre work and reportage. Consequently, more evidence is needed to determine whether Leica's lens designers deliberately set out to produce pleasing bokeh.
Minolta/Sony STF 135mm f/2.8 [T4.5]* (STF standing for Smooth Transition Focus) is a lens which is specifically designed to produce pleasing bokeh. An apodization filter is used to soften the aperture edges which results in a smooth defocused area with gradually fading circles. Those qualities make it the only lens of this kind currently on the market.
No bokeh
Faux (synthetic) bokeh
Recently, a research group at MIT Media Lab showed that the bokeh effect can be used to make imperceptibly small barcodes, or bokodes. By using markers as small as 2.5 microns, if the marker is viewed out of focus through an ordinary camera, the resulting bokeh is large enough to scan the information in the barcode.[12]
Bokeh is often most visible around small background highlights, such as specular reflections and light sources, which is why it often associated with such areas.[1] However, bokeh is not limited to highlights, as blur occurs in all out-of-focus regions of the image.
The term comes from the Japanese word boke (?? or ??), which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji (???), the "blur quality". The Japanese term boke is also used in the sense of a mental haze or senility.[7]
The English spelling bokeh was popularized in 1997 in Photo Techniques magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the March/April 1997 issue; he altered the spelling to suggest the correct pronunciation to English speakers, saying "it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable".[2] Bokeh replaced the previous spelling boke that had been in use at least since 1996, when Merklinger had also suggested "or Bokeh if you prefer."[8]
The term bokeh has appeared in photography books at least since 1998.[9] It is sometimes pronounced /'bo?k?/ (boke-uh[10]).
[edit] Description
An extremely shallow depth of field, a common effect of macro lenses, emphasizes bokeh
The depth of field is the region where the size of the circle of confusion is less than the resolution of the human eye. Circles with a diameter less than the circle of confusion will appear to be in focus.
Although difficult to quantify, some lenses enhance overall image quality by producing more subjectively pleasing out-of-focus areas. Good bokeh is especially important for large-aperture lenses, macro lenses, and long telephoto lenses because they are typically used with a shallow depth of field. Bokeh is also important for medium telephoto "portrait lenses" (typically 85–150 mm on 35-mm format) because in portraiture photography, the photographer typically seeks to obtain a shallow depth of field to achieve an out-of-focus background and make the subject stand out.
The bokeh produced by a Catadioptric lens (also called a mirror lens).
Bokeh characteristics may be quantified by examining the image's circle of confusion. In out-of-focus areas, each point of light becomes an image of the aperture, generally a more or less round disc. Depending how a lens is corrected for spherical aberration, the disc may be uniformly illuminated, brighter near the edge, or brighter near the center. Lenses that are poorly corrected for spherical aberration will show one kind of disc for out-of-focus points in front of the plane of focus, and a different kind for points behind. This may actually be desirable, as blur circles that are dimmer near the edges produce less-defined shapes which blend smoothly with the surrounding image. Lens manufacturers including Nikon, Canon, and Minolta make lenses designed with specific controls to change the rendering of the out-of-focus areas.
Catadioptric lens bokeh seen in more detail.
The shape of the aperture has a great influence on the subjective quality of bokeh. When a lens is stopped down to something other than its maximum aperture size (minimum f-number), out-of-focus points are blurred into the polygonal shape of the aperture rather than perfect circles. This is most apparent when a lens produces undesirable, hard-edged bokeh, therefore some lenses have aperture blades with curved edges to make the aperture more closely approximate a circle rather than a polygon. Lens designers can also increase the number of blades to achieve the same effect. Traditional "Portrait" lenses, such as the "fast" 85mm focal length models for 35mm cameras often feature almost circular aperture diaphragms, as is the case with Canon's EF 85mm f/1.2L II lens and Nikon's 85mm f/1.4D, and are generally considered exceptional performers. A catadioptric telephoto lens displays bokehs resembling doughnuts, because its secondary mirror blocks the central part of the aperture opening. Recently, photographers have found how to exploit the shape of the bokehs by creating a simple mask out of card with the shape that the photographer wishes the bokeh to be, and placing it over the lens. Common shapes are stars and hearts, but it is possible to create it with almost any shape imagined.[11]
Leica lenses, especially vintage ones, are often claimed to excel in bokeh quality, although Leica photographers have tended to make more use of maximum aperture due to the lenses' ability to maintain good sharpness at wide openings and the suitability of the Leica camera system for available-light theatre work and reportage. Consequently, more evidence is needed to determine whether Leica's lens designers deliberately set out to produce pleasing bokeh.
Minolta/Sony STF 135mm f/2.8 [T4.5]* (STF standing for Smooth Transition Focus) is a lens which is specifically designed to produce pleasing bokeh. An apodization filter is used to soften the aperture edges which results in a smooth defocused area with gradually fading circles. Those qualities make it the only lens of this kind currently on the market.
No bokeh
Faux (synthetic) bokeh
Recently, a research group at MIT Media Lab showed that the bokeh effect can be used to make imperceptibly small barcodes, or bokodes. By using markers as small as 2.5 microns, if the marker is viewed out of focus through an ordinary camera, the resulting bokeh is large enough to scan the information in the barcode.[12]
Light painting
Light painting, also known as light drawing or light graffiti is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. In many cases the light source itself does not have to appear in the image. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources.
The light can either be used to selectively illuminate parts of the subject or to "paint" a picture by shining it directly into the camera lens. Light painting requires a sufficiently slow shutter speed, usually a second or more. Like night photography, it has grown in popularity since the advent of digital cameras because they allow photographers to see the results of their work immediately.
Light painting can take on the characteristics of a quick pencil sketch. Pablo Picasso was photographed in 1949 doing a quick sketch in the air.[1]
Flash lights or light pens can also be used to create Full Bleed images. Different colored lights can be used to project an image on the CCD.
[edit] Moving the camera
Light painting by moving the camera, also called camera painting, is the antithesis of traditional photography. At night, or in a dark room, the camera can be taken off the tripod and used like a paintbrush. An example is using the night sky as the canvas, the camera as the brush and cityscapes (amongst other light sources) as the palette. Putting energy into moving the camera by stroking lights, making patterns and laying down backgrounds can create abstract artistic images. Also known as "Camera Toss."
Making a light painting doesn't necessarily need to be done in a dark room or at night. Sometimes using artificial light, like LEDs and mobile phones, or through the limited sunlight beaming in a curtained room creates a shadowing effect. Using a mirror creates a double image, which adds up to a more creative result.
[edit] Technique and equipment
Light photo of a glowsticking dance.
A variety of light sources can be used, ranging from simple flashlights to dedicated devices like the Hosemaster, which uses a fiber optic light pen.[2] Other sources of light including candles, matches, lighter flints, glowsticks, and Poi are also popular.
A tripod is usually necessary due to the long exposure times involved. Alternatively, the camera may be placed on or braced against a table or other solid support. A shutter release cable or self timer is generally employed in order to minimize camera shake. Color Gels can also be used to color the light sources.
Manual focus is often used since autofocus systems may not perform well in low light. In addition, photographers often use a slow film speed or low ISO setting on a digital sensor to minimize grain (or digital noise) and increase exposure tolerance, as evaluating exposure is often tricky.
The light can either be used to selectively illuminate parts of the subject or to "paint" a picture by shining it directly into the camera lens. Light painting requires a sufficiently slow shutter speed, usually a second or more. Like night photography, it has grown in popularity since the advent of digital cameras because they allow photographers to see the results of their work immediately.
Light painting can take on the characteristics of a quick pencil sketch. Pablo Picasso was photographed in 1949 doing a quick sketch in the air.[1]
Flash lights or light pens can also be used to create Full Bleed images. Different colored lights can be used to project an image on the CCD.
[edit] Moving the camera
Light painting by moving the camera, also called camera painting, is the antithesis of traditional photography. At night, or in a dark room, the camera can be taken off the tripod and used like a paintbrush. An example is using the night sky as the canvas, the camera as the brush and cityscapes (amongst other light sources) as the palette. Putting energy into moving the camera by stroking lights, making patterns and laying down backgrounds can create abstract artistic images. Also known as "Camera Toss."
Making a light painting doesn't necessarily need to be done in a dark room or at night. Sometimes using artificial light, like LEDs and mobile phones, or through the limited sunlight beaming in a curtained room creates a shadowing effect. Using a mirror creates a double image, which adds up to a more creative result.
[edit] Technique and equipment
Light photo of a glowsticking dance.
A variety of light sources can be used, ranging from simple flashlights to dedicated devices like the Hosemaster, which uses a fiber optic light pen.[2] Other sources of light including candles, matches, lighter flints, glowsticks, and Poi are also popular.
A tripod is usually necessary due to the long exposure times involved. Alternatively, the camera may be placed on or braced against a table or other solid support. A shutter release cable or self timer is generally employed in order to minimize camera shake. Color Gels can also be used to color the light sources.
Manual focus is often used since autofocus systems may not perform well in low light. In addition, photographers often use a slow film speed or low ISO setting on a digital sensor to minimize grain (or digital noise) and increase exposure tolerance, as evaluating exposure is often tricky.
Macro photography
Macro photography is close-up photography. The classical definition is that the image projected on the "film plane" (i.e., film or a digital sensor) is close to the same size as the subject. On 35 mm film (for example), the lens is typically optimized to focus sharply on a small area approaching the size of the film frame. Most 35mm format macro lenses achieve at least 1:2, that is to say, the image on the film is 1/2 the size of the object being photographed. Many 35mm macro lenses are 1:1, meaning the image on the film is the same size as the object being photographed. Another important distinction is that lenses designed for macro are usually at their sharpest at macro focus distances and are not quite as sharp at other focus distances.
In recent years, the term macro has been used in marketing material to mean being able to focus on a subject close enough so that when a regular 6×4 inch (15×10 cm) print is made, the image is life-size or larger. With 35mm film this requires a magnification ratio of only approximately 1:4, which demands less of lens quality than 1:1. With digital cameras the actual image size is rarely stated, so that the magnification ratio is largely irrelevant; cameras instead advertise their closest focusing distance.
Macroscopy competes with the digital microscope where a small camera tube can be attached directly to a computer, usually by a USB port. Macroscopy also competes with photomicroscopy, and it is much less expensive to achieve high quality images. However, high magnification images are more difficult using macroscopy.
The method is especially useful in forensic work, where small details at crime or accident scenes may often be significant. Trace evidence such as fingerprints and skid marks is especially important, and easily recorded using macroscopy. Fracture surfaces from broken products are very revealing using fractography, especially when photographed using glancing light to highlight surface details.
In recent years, the term macro has been used in marketing material to mean being able to focus on a subject close enough so that when a regular 6×4 inch (15×10 cm) print is made, the image is life-size or larger. With 35mm film this requires a magnification ratio of only approximately 1:4, which demands less of lens quality than 1:1. With digital cameras the actual image size is rarely stated, so that the magnification ratio is largely irrelevant; cameras instead advertise their closest focusing distance.
Macroscopy competes with the digital microscope where a small camera tube can be attached directly to a computer, usually by a USB port. Macroscopy also competes with photomicroscopy, and it is much less expensive to achieve high quality images. However, high magnification images are more difficult using macroscopy.
The method is especially useful in forensic work, where small details at crime or accident scenes may often be significant. Trace evidence such as fingerprints and skid marks is especially important, and easily recorded using macroscopy. Fracture surfaces from broken products are very revealing using fractography, especially when photographed using glancing light to highlight surface details.
Selective focus
Depth of field can be anywhere from a fraction of a millimeter to virtually infinite. In some cases, such as landscapes, it may be desirable to have the entire image sharp, and a large DOF is appropriate. In other cases, artistic considerations may dictate that only a part of the image be in focus, emphasizing the subject while de-emphasizing the background, perhaps giving only a suggestion of the environment (Langford 1973, 81). For example, a common technique in melodramas and horror films is a closeup of a person's face, with someone just behind that person visible but out of focus. A portrait or close-up still photograph might use a small DOF to isolate the subject from a distracting background. The use of limited DOF to emphasize one part of an image is known as selective focus, differential focus or shallow focus.
Although a small DOF implies that other parts of the image will be unsharp, it does not, by itself, determine how unsharp those parts will be. The amount of background (or foreground) blur depends on the distance from the plane of focus, so if a background is close to the subject, it may be difficult to blur sufficiently even with a small DOF. In practice, the lens f-number is usually adjusted until the background or foreground is acceptably blurred, often without direct concern for the DOF.
Sometimes, however, it is desirable to have the entire subject sharp while ensuring that the background is sufficiently unsharp. When the distance between subject and background is fixed, as is the case with many scenes, the DOF and the amount of background blur are not independent. Although it is not always possible to achieve both the desired subject sharpness and the desired background unsharpness, several techniques can be used to increase the separation of subject and background.
For a given scene and subject magnification, the background blur increases with lens focal length. If it is not important that background objects be unrecognizable, background de-emphasis can be increased by using a lens of longer focal length and increasing the subject distance to maintain the same magnification. This technique requires that sufficient space in front of the subject be available; moreover, the perspective of the scene changes because of the different camera position, and this may or may not be acceptable.
Selective focus using tilt with a Lensbaby
The situation is not as simple if it is important that a background object, such as a sign, be unrecognizable. The magnification of background objects also increases with focal length, so with the technique just described, there is little change in the recognizability of background objects.[4] However, a lens of longer focal length may still be of some help; because of the narrower angle of view, a slight change of camera position may suffice to eliminate the distracting object from the field of view.
Although tilt and swing are normally used to maximize the part of the image that is within the DOF, they also can be used, in combination with a small f-number, to give selective focus to a plane that isn't perpendicular to the lens axis. With this technique, it is possible to have objects at greatly different distances from the camera in sharp focus and yet have a very shallow DOF. The effect can be interesting because it differs from what most viewers are accustomed to seeing.
Although a small DOF implies that other parts of the image will be unsharp, it does not, by itself, determine how unsharp those parts will be. The amount of background (or foreground) blur depends on the distance from the plane of focus, so if a background is close to the subject, it may be difficult to blur sufficiently even with a small DOF. In practice, the lens f-number is usually adjusted until the background or foreground is acceptably blurred, often without direct concern for the DOF.
Sometimes, however, it is desirable to have the entire subject sharp while ensuring that the background is sufficiently unsharp. When the distance between subject and background is fixed, as is the case with many scenes, the DOF and the amount of background blur are not independent. Although it is not always possible to achieve both the desired subject sharpness and the desired background unsharpness, several techniques can be used to increase the separation of subject and background.
For a given scene and subject magnification, the background blur increases with lens focal length. If it is not important that background objects be unrecognizable, background de-emphasis can be increased by using a lens of longer focal length and increasing the subject distance to maintain the same magnification. This technique requires that sufficient space in front of the subject be available; moreover, the perspective of the scene changes because of the different camera position, and this may or may not be acceptable.
Selective focus using tilt with a Lensbaby
The situation is not as simple if it is important that a background object, such as a sign, be unrecognizable. The magnification of background objects also increases with focal length, so with the technique just described, there is little change in the recognizability of background objects.[4] However, a lens of longer focal length may still be of some help; because of the narrower angle of view, a slight change of camera position may suffice to eliminate the distracting object from the field of view.
Although tilt and swing are normally used to maximize the part of the image that is within the DOF, they also can be used, in combination with a small f-number, to give selective focus to a plane that isn't perpendicular to the lens axis. With this technique, it is possible to have objects at greatly different distances from the camera in sharp focus and yet have a very shallow DOF. The effect can be interesting because it differs from what most viewers are accustomed to seeing.
Hyperfocal distance
The hyperfocal distance is the nearest focus distance at which the DOF extends to infinity; focusing the camera at the hyperfocal distance results in the largest possible depth of field for a given f-number (Ray 2000, 55). Focusing beyond the hyperfocal distance does not increase the far DOF (which already extends to infinity), but it does decrease the DOF in front of the subject, decreasing the total DOF. Some photographers consider this wasting DOF; however, see The object field method below for a rationale for doing so. If the lens includes a DOF scale, the hyperfocal distance can be set by aligning the infinity mark on the distance scale with the mark on the DOF scale corresponding to the f-number to which the lens is set. For example, with the 35 mm lens shown above set to f/11, aligning the infinity mark with the ‘11’ to the left of the index mark on the DOF scale would set the focus to the hyperfocal distance. Focusing on the hyperfocal distance is a special case of zone focusing in which the far limit of DOF is at infinity
Zone focusing
When the 35 mm lens above is set to f/11 and focused at approximately 1.4 m, the DOF (a “zone” of acceptable sharpness) extends from 1 m to 2 m. Conversely, the required focus and f-number can be determined from the desired DOF limits by locating the near and far DOF limits on the lens distance scale and setting focus so that the index mark is centered between the near and far distances; the required f-number is determined by finding the markings on the DOF scale that are closest to the near and far distances (Ray 1994, 315). For the 35 mm lens above, if it were desired for the DOF to extend from 1 m to 2 m, focus would be set to approximately 1.4 m and the aperture set to f/11. The DOF limits can be determined from a scene by focusing on the farthest object to be within the DOF and noting the distance on the lens distance scale, and repeating the process for the nearest object to be within the DOF. If the near and far distances fall outside the largest f-number markings on the DOF scale, the desired DOF cannot be obtained; for example, with the 35 mm lens above, it is not possible to have the DOF extend from 0.7 m to infinity.
Some distance scales have markings for only a few distances; for example, the 35 mm lens above shows only 3 ft and 5 ft on its upper scale. Using other distances for DOF limits requires visual interpolation between marked distances; because the distance scale is nonlinear, accurate interpolation can be difficult. In most cases, English and metric distance markings are not coincident, so using both scales to note focused distances can sometimes lessen the need for interpolation. Many autofocus lenses have smaller distance and DOF scales and fewer markings than do comparable manual-focus lenses, so that determining focus and f-number from the scales on an autofocus lens may be more difficult than with a comparable manual-focus lens. In most cases, determining these settings using the lens DOF scales on an autofocus lens requires that the lens or camera body be set to manual focus.[2]
On a view camera, the focus and f-number can be obtained by measuring the focus spread and performing simple calculations; the procedure is described in more detail in the section Focus and f-number from DOF limits. Some view cameras include DOF calculators that indicate focus and f-number without the need for any calculations by the photographer (Tillmanns 1997, 67–68; Ray 2002, 230–31).
Some distance scales have markings for only a few distances; for example, the 35 mm lens above shows only 3 ft and 5 ft on its upper scale. Using other distances for DOF limits requires visual interpolation between marked distances; because the distance scale is nonlinear, accurate interpolation can be difficult. In most cases, English and metric distance markings are not coincident, so using both scales to note focused distances can sometimes lessen the need for interpolation. Many autofocus lenses have smaller distance and DOF scales and fewer markings than do comparable manual-focus lenses, so that determining focus and f-number from the scales on an autofocus lens may be more difficult than with a comparable manual-focus lens. In most cases, determining these settings using the lens DOF scales on an autofocus lens requires that the lens or camera body be set to manual focus.[2]
On a view camera, the focus and f-number can be obtained by measuring the focus spread and performing simple calculations; the procedure is described in more detail in the section Focus and f-number from DOF limits. Some view cameras include DOF calculators that indicate focus and f-number without the need for any calculations by the photographer (Tillmanns 1997, 67–68; Ray 2002, 230–31).
Depth of field
n optics, particularly as relates to film and photography, the depth of field (DOF) is the portion of a scene that appears acceptably sharp in the image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions.
In some cases, it may be desirable to have the entire image sharp, and a large DOF is appropriate. In other cases, a small DOF may be more effective, emphasizing the subject while de-emphasizing the foreground and background. In cinematography, a large DOF is often called deep focus, and a small DOF is often called shallow focus.
The DOF is determined by the subject distance (that is, the distance to the plane that is perfectly in focus), the lens focal length, the lens f-number, and the format size or circle of confusion criterion.
For a given format size, at moderate subject distances, DOF is approximately determined by the subject magnification and the lens f-number. For a given f-number, increasing the magnification, either by moving closer to the subject or using a lens of greater focal length, decreases the DOF; decreasing magnification increases DOF. For a given subject magnification, increasing the f-number (decreasing the aperture diameter) increases the DOF; decreasing f-number decreases DOF.
When a picture is taken in two different format sizes from the same distance at the same f-number with lenses that give the same angle of view, the smaller format has greater DOF. When a picture is taken in two different formats from the same distance at the same f-number using lenses of the same focal length, the smaller format has less DOF.
Cropping an image and enlarging to the same size final image as an uncropped image taken under the same conditions is equivalent to using a smaller format under the same conditions, so the cropped image has less DOF.
When focus is set to the hyperfocal distance, the DOF extends from half the hyperfocal distance to infinity, and the DOF is the largest possible for a given f-number.
The advent of digital technology in photography has provided additional means of controlling the extent of image sharpness; some methods allow extended DOF that would be impossible with traditional techniques, and some allow the DOF to be determined after the image is made.
In some cases, it may be desirable to have the entire image sharp, and a large DOF is appropriate. In other cases, a small DOF may be more effective, emphasizing the subject while de-emphasizing the foreground and background. In cinematography, a large DOF is often called deep focus, and a small DOF is often called shallow focus.
The DOF is determined by the subject distance (that is, the distance to the plane that is perfectly in focus), the lens focal length, the lens f-number, and the format size or circle of confusion criterion.
For a given format size, at moderate subject distances, DOF is approximately determined by the subject magnification and the lens f-number. For a given f-number, increasing the magnification, either by moving closer to the subject or using a lens of greater focal length, decreases the DOF; decreasing magnification increases DOF. For a given subject magnification, increasing the f-number (decreasing the aperture diameter) increases the DOF; decreasing f-number decreases DOF.
When a picture is taken in two different format sizes from the same distance at the same f-number with lenses that give the same angle of view, the smaller format has greater DOF. When a picture is taken in two different formats from the same distance at the same f-number using lenses of the same focal length, the smaller format has less DOF.
Cropping an image and enlarging to the same size final image as an uncropped image taken under the same conditions is equivalent to using a smaller format under the same conditions, so the cropped image has less DOF.
When focus is set to the hyperfocal distance, the DOF extends from half the hyperfocal distance to infinity, and the DOF is the largest possible for a given f-number.
The advent of digital technology in photography has provided additional means of controlling the extent of image sharpness; some methods allow extended DOF that would be impossible with traditional techniques, and some allow the DOF to be determined after the image is made.
Exposure
In photography, exposure is the total amount of light allowed to fall on the photographic medium (photographic film or image sensor) during the process of taking a photograph. Exposure is measured in lux seconds, and can be computed from exposure value (EV) and scene luminance over a specified area.
In photographic jargon, an exposure generally refers to a single shutter cycle. For example: a long exposure refers to a single, protracted shutter cycle to capture enough low-intensity light, whereas a multiple exposure involves a series of relatively brief shutter cycles; effectively layering a series of photographs in one image. For the same film speed, the accumulated photometric exposure (H) should be similar in both cases.
The radiometric quantity radiant exposure[3] is sometimes used instead; it is the product of image-plane irradiance and time, the accumulated amount of incident light energy per area.[4] If the measurement is adjusted to account only for light that reacts with the photo-sensitive surface, that is, weighted by the appropriate spectral sensitivity, the exposure is still measured in radiometric units (joules per square meter), rather than photometric units (weighted by the nominal sensitivity of the human eye).[5] Only in this appropriately weighted case does the H measure the effective amount of light falling on the film, such that the characteristic curve will be correct independent of the spectrum of the light.
Many photographic materials are also sensitive to "invisible" light, which can be a nuisance (see UV filter and IR filter), or a benefit (see Infrared photography and Full spectrum photography). The use of radiometric units is appropriate to characterize such sensitivity to invisible light.
In sensitometric data, such as characteristic curves, the log exposure[2] is conventionally expressed as log10(H). Photographers more familiar with base-2 logarithmic scales (such as exposure values) can convert using 3.32 log2(H) ˜ log10(H).
[edit] Exposure settings
"Correct" exposure may be defined as an exposure that achieves the effect the photographer intended[6]. The purpose of exposure adjustment (in combination with lighting adjustment) is to control the amount of light from the subject that is allowed to fall on the film, so that it falls into an appropriate region of the film's characteristic curve and yields a "correct" or acceptable exposure.
[edit] Overexposure and underexposure
White chair: Deliberate use of overexposure for aesthetic purposes
A photograph may be described as overexposed when it has a loss of highlight detail, that is, when the bright parts of an image are effectively all white, known as "blown out highlights" (or "clipped whites"). A photograph may be described as underexposed when it has a loss of shadow detail, that is, the dark areas indistinguishable from black, known as "blocked up shadows" (or sometimes "crushed shadows," "crushed blacks," or "clipped blacks," especially in video).[7][8][9] As the image to the right shows, these terms are technical ones rather than artistic judgments; an overexposed or underexposed image may be "correct", in that it provides the effect that the photographer intended.
[edit] Manual exposure
In manual mode, the photographer adjusts the lens aperture and/or shutter speed to achieve the desired exposure. Many photographers need to control aperture and shutter independently because opening up the aperture increases exposure, but also decreases the depth of field, and a slower shutter increases exposure but also increases the opportunity for motion blur.
'Manual' exposure calculations may be based on some method of light metering with a working knowledge of exposure values, the APEX system and/or the zone system.
[edit] Automatic exposure
A camera in automatic exposure (AE) mode automatically calculates and adjusts exposure settings in order to match (as closely as possible) the subject's mid-tone to the mid-tone of the photograph. For most cameras this means using an on-board TTL exposure meter.
Aperture priority mode gives the photographer manual control of the aperture, whilst the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed to achieve the exposure specified by the TTL meter. Shutter priority mode gives manual shutter control, with automatic aperture compensation. In each case, the actual exposure level is still determined by the camera's exposure meter.
[edit] Exposure compensation
Main article: Exposure compensation
The purpose of an exposure meter is to estimate the subject's mid-tone luminance and indicate the camera exposure settings required to record this as a mid-tone. In order to do this it has to make a number of assumptions which, under certain circumstances, will be wrong. If the exposure setting indicated by an exposure meter is taken as the "reference" exposure, the photographer may wish to deliberately overexpose or underexpose in order to compensate for known or anticipated metering inaccuracies (see exposure meter).
Cameras with any kind of internal exposure meter usually feature an exposure compensation setting which is intended to allow the photographer to simply offset the exposure level from the internal meter's estimate of appropriate exposure. Frequently calibrated in stops,[10] also known as EV units,[11] a "+1" exposure compensation setting indicates one stop more (twice as much) exposure and "–1" means one stop less (half as much) exposure.[12][13]
Exposure compensation is particularly useful in combination with auto-exposure mode, as it allows the photographer to bias the exposure level without resorting to full manual exposure and losing the flexibility of auto exposure. On low-end video camcorders, exposure compensation may be the only manual exposure control available.
[edit] Exposure time
Main article: shutter speed
A two second exposure of a fire poi ball dance
The exposure for a photograph is determined by the sensitivity of the medium used. For photographic film, sensitivity is referred to as film speed and is measured on a scale published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Faster film requires less exposure and has a higher ISO rating. Exposure is a combination of the length of time and the level of illumination received by the photosensitive material. Exposure time is controlled in a camera by shutter speed and the illumination level by the lens aperture. Slower shutter speeds (exposing the medium for a longer period of time) and greater lens apertures (admitting more light) produce greater exposures.
An approximately correct exposure will be obtained on a sunny day using ISO 100 film, an aperture of f/16 and a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. This is called the sunny 16 rule: at an aperture of f/16 on a sunny day, a suitable shutter speed will be one over the film speed (or closest equivalent).
A scene can be exposed in many ways, depending on the desired effect a photographer wishes to convey.
In photographic jargon, an exposure generally refers to a single shutter cycle. For example: a long exposure refers to a single, protracted shutter cycle to capture enough low-intensity light, whereas a multiple exposure involves a series of relatively brief shutter cycles; effectively layering a series of photographs in one image. For the same film speed, the accumulated photometric exposure (H) should be similar in both cases.
The radiometric quantity radiant exposure[3] is sometimes used instead; it is the product of image-plane irradiance and time, the accumulated amount of incident light energy per area.[4] If the measurement is adjusted to account only for light that reacts with the photo-sensitive surface, that is, weighted by the appropriate spectral sensitivity, the exposure is still measured in radiometric units (joules per square meter), rather than photometric units (weighted by the nominal sensitivity of the human eye).[5] Only in this appropriately weighted case does the H measure the effective amount of light falling on the film, such that the characteristic curve will be correct independent of the spectrum of the light.
Many photographic materials are also sensitive to "invisible" light, which can be a nuisance (see UV filter and IR filter), or a benefit (see Infrared photography and Full spectrum photography). The use of radiometric units is appropriate to characterize such sensitivity to invisible light.
In sensitometric data, such as characteristic curves, the log exposure[2] is conventionally expressed as log10(H). Photographers more familiar with base-2 logarithmic scales (such as exposure values) can convert using 3.32 log2(H) ˜ log10(H).
[edit] Exposure settings
"Correct" exposure may be defined as an exposure that achieves the effect the photographer intended[6]. The purpose of exposure adjustment (in combination with lighting adjustment) is to control the amount of light from the subject that is allowed to fall on the film, so that it falls into an appropriate region of the film's characteristic curve and yields a "correct" or acceptable exposure.
[edit] Overexposure and underexposure
White chair: Deliberate use of overexposure for aesthetic purposes
A photograph may be described as overexposed when it has a loss of highlight detail, that is, when the bright parts of an image are effectively all white, known as "blown out highlights" (or "clipped whites"). A photograph may be described as underexposed when it has a loss of shadow detail, that is, the dark areas indistinguishable from black, known as "blocked up shadows" (or sometimes "crushed shadows," "crushed blacks," or "clipped blacks," especially in video).[7][8][9] As the image to the right shows, these terms are technical ones rather than artistic judgments; an overexposed or underexposed image may be "correct", in that it provides the effect that the photographer intended.
[edit] Manual exposure
In manual mode, the photographer adjusts the lens aperture and/or shutter speed to achieve the desired exposure. Many photographers need to control aperture and shutter independently because opening up the aperture increases exposure, but also decreases the depth of field, and a slower shutter increases exposure but also increases the opportunity for motion blur.
'Manual' exposure calculations may be based on some method of light metering with a working knowledge of exposure values, the APEX system and/or the zone system.
[edit] Automatic exposure
A camera in automatic exposure (AE) mode automatically calculates and adjusts exposure settings in order to match (as closely as possible) the subject's mid-tone to the mid-tone of the photograph. For most cameras this means using an on-board TTL exposure meter.
Aperture priority mode gives the photographer manual control of the aperture, whilst the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed to achieve the exposure specified by the TTL meter. Shutter priority mode gives manual shutter control, with automatic aperture compensation. In each case, the actual exposure level is still determined by the camera's exposure meter.
[edit] Exposure compensation
Main article: Exposure compensation
The purpose of an exposure meter is to estimate the subject's mid-tone luminance and indicate the camera exposure settings required to record this as a mid-tone. In order to do this it has to make a number of assumptions which, under certain circumstances, will be wrong. If the exposure setting indicated by an exposure meter is taken as the "reference" exposure, the photographer may wish to deliberately overexpose or underexpose in order to compensate for known or anticipated metering inaccuracies (see exposure meter).
Cameras with any kind of internal exposure meter usually feature an exposure compensation setting which is intended to allow the photographer to simply offset the exposure level from the internal meter's estimate of appropriate exposure. Frequently calibrated in stops,[10] also known as EV units,[11] a "+1" exposure compensation setting indicates one stop more (twice as much) exposure and "–1" means one stop less (half as much) exposure.[12][13]
Exposure compensation is particularly useful in combination with auto-exposure mode, as it allows the photographer to bias the exposure level without resorting to full manual exposure and losing the flexibility of auto exposure. On low-end video camcorders, exposure compensation may be the only manual exposure control available.
[edit] Exposure time
Main article: shutter speed
A two second exposure of a fire poi ball dance
The exposure for a photograph is determined by the sensitivity of the medium used. For photographic film, sensitivity is referred to as film speed and is measured on a scale published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Faster film requires less exposure and has a higher ISO rating. Exposure is a combination of the length of time and the level of illumination received by the photosensitive material. Exposure time is controlled in a camera by shutter speed and the illumination level by the lens aperture. Slower shutter speeds (exposing the medium for a longer period of time) and greater lens apertures (admitting more light) produce greater exposures.
An approximately correct exposure will be obtained on a sunny day using ISO 100 film, an aperture of f/16 and a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. This is called the sunny 16 rule: at an aperture of f/16 on a sunny day, a suitable shutter speed will be one over the film speed (or closest equivalent).
A scene can be exposed in many ways, depending on the desired effect a photographer wishes to convey.
Zone system
The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black and white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black and white and color, negative and reversal, and to digital photography.
An expressive image involves the arrangement and rendering of various scene elements according to photographer’s desire. Achieving the desired image involves image management (placement of the camera, choice of lens, and possibly the use of camera movements) and control of image values. The Zone System is concerned with control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired. Anticipation of the final result before making the exposure is known as visualization.
[edit] Exposure metering
Almost any scene of photographic interest contains elements of different luminance; consequently, the “exposure” actually is many different exposures. The exposure time is the same for all elements, but the image illuminance varies with the luminance of each subject element.
Exposure is often determined using a reflected-light[1] exposure meter. The earliest meters measured overall average luminance; meter calibration was established to give satisfactory exposures for typical outdoor scenes. However, if the part of a scene that is metered includes large areas of unusually high or low reflectance, or unusually large areas of highlight or shadow, the “effective” average reflectance[2] may differ substantially from that of a “typical” scene, and the rendering may not be as desired.
An averaging meter cannot distinguish between a subject of uniform luminance and one that consists of light and dark elements. When exposure is determined from average luminance measurements, the exposure of any given scene element depends on the relationship of its reflectance to the effective average reflectance. For example, a dark object of 4% reflectance would be given a different exposure in a scene of 20% effective average reflectance than it would be given in a scene of 12% reflectance. In a sunlit outdoor scene, the exposure for the dark object would also depend on whether the object was in sunlight or shade. Depending on the scene and the photographer’s objective, any of the previous exposures might be acceptable. However, in some situations, the photographer might wish to specifically control the rendering of the dark object; with overall average metering, this is difficult if not impossible. When it is important to control the rendering of specific scene elements, alternative metering techniques may be required.
It is possible to make a meter reading of an individual scene element, but the exposure indicated by the meter will render that element as a medium gray; in the case of a dark object, that result is usually not what is desired. Even when metering individual scene elements, some adjustment of the indicated exposure is often needed if the metered scene element is to be rendered as visualized.
[edit] Exposure zones
In the Zone System, measurements are made of individual scene elements, and exposure is adjusted based on the photographer’s knowledge of what is being metered: a photographer knows the difference between freshly fallen snow and a black horse, while a meter does not. Volumes have been written on the Zone System, but the concept is very simple—render light subjects as light, and dark subjects as dark, according to the photographer’s visualization. The Zone System assigns numbers from 0 through 10[3] to different brightness values, with 0 representing black, 5 middle gray, and 10 pure white; these values are known as zones. To make zones easily distinguishable from other quantities, Adams and Archer used Roman rather than Arabic numerals. Strictly speaking, zones refer to exposure,[4] with a Zone V exposure (the meter indication) resulting in a mid-tone rendering in the final image. Each zone differs from the preceding or following zone by a factor of two, so that a Zone I exposure is twice that of Zone 0, and so forth. A one-zone change is equal to one stop,[5] corresponding to standard aperture and shutter controls on a camera. Evaluating a scene is particularly easy with a meter that indicates in exposure value (EV), because a change of one EV is equal to a change of one zone.
Many small- and medium-format cameras include provision for exposure compensation; this feature works well with the Zone System, especially if the camera includes spot metering, but obtaining proper results requires careful metering of individual scene elements and making appropriate adjustments.
[edit] Zones, the physical world, and the print
The relationship between the physical scene and the print is established by characteristics of the negative and the print. Exposure and development of the negative are usually determined so that a properly exposed negative will yield an acceptable print on a specific photographic paper.
An expressive image involves the arrangement and rendering of various scene elements according to photographer’s desire. Achieving the desired image involves image management (placement of the camera, choice of lens, and possibly the use of camera movements) and control of image values. The Zone System is concerned with control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired. Anticipation of the final result before making the exposure is known as visualization.
[edit] Exposure metering
Almost any scene of photographic interest contains elements of different luminance; consequently, the “exposure” actually is many different exposures. The exposure time is the same for all elements, but the image illuminance varies with the luminance of each subject element.
Exposure is often determined using a reflected-light[1] exposure meter. The earliest meters measured overall average luminance; meter calibration was established to give satisfactory exposures for typical outdoor scenes. However, if the part of a scene that is metered includes large areas of unusually high or low reflectance, or unusually large areas of highlight or shadow, the “effective” average reflectance[2] may differ substantially from that of a “typical” scene, and the rendering may not be as desired.
An averaging meter cannot distinguish between a subject of uniform luminance and one that consists of light and dark elements. When exposure is determined from average luminance measurements, the exposure of any given scene element depends on the relationship of its reflectance to the effective average reflectance. For example, a dark object of 4% reflectance would be given a different exposure in a scene of 20% effective average reflectance than it would be given in a scene of 12% reflectance. In a sunlit outdoor scene, the exposure for the dark object would also depend on whether the object was in sunlight or shade. Depending on the scene and the photographer’s objective, any of the previous exposures might be acceptable. However, in some situations, the photographer might wish to specifically control the rendering of the dark object; with overall average metering, this is difficult if not impossible. When it is important to control the rendering of specific scene elements, alternative metering techniques may be required.
It is possible to make a meter reading of an individual scene element, but the exposure indicated by the meter will render that element as a medium gray; in the case of a dark object, that result is usually not what is desired. Even when metering individual scene elements, some adjustment of the indicated exposure is often needed if the metered scene element is to be rendered as visualized.
[edit] Exposure zones
In the Zone System, measurements are made of individual scene elements, and exposure is adjusted based on the photographer’s knowledge of what is being metered: a photographer knows the difference between freshly fallen snow and a black horse, while a meter does not. Volumes have been written on the Zone System, but the concept is very simple—render light subjects as light, and dark subjects as dark, according to the photographer’s visualization. The Zone System assigns numbers from 0 through 10[3] to different brightness values, with 0 representing black, 5 middle gray, and 10 pure white; these values are known as zones. To make zones easily distinguishable from other quantities, Adams and Archer used Roman rather than Arabic numerals. Strictly speaking, zones refer to exposure,[4] with a Zone V exposure (the meter indication) resulting in a mid-tone rendering in the final image. Each zone differs from the preceding or following zone by a factor of two, so that a Zone I exposure is twice that of Zone 0, and so forth. A one-zone change is equal to one stop,[5] corresponding to standard aperture and shutter controls on a camera. Evaluating a scene is particularly easy with a meter that indicates in exposure value (EV), because a change of one EV is equal to a change of one zone.
Many small- and medium-format cameras include provision for exposure compensation; this feature works well with the Zone System, especially if the camera includes spot metering, but obtaining proper results requires careful metering of individual scene elements and making appropriate adjustments.
[edit] Zones, the physical world, and the print
The relationship between the physical scene and the print is established by characteristics of the negative and the print. Exposure and development of the negative are usually determined so that a properly exposed negative will yield an acceptable print on a specific photographic paper.
Rule of thirds
he rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design.[1] The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.[2] Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.[citation needed]
The photograph to the right demonstrates the application of the rule of thirds. The horizon sits at the horizontal line dividing the lower third of the photo from the upper two-thirds. The tree sits at the intersection of two lines, sometimes called a power point. Points of interest in the photo don't have to actually touch one of these lines to take advantage of the rule of thirds. For example, the brightest part of the sky near the horizon where the sun recently set does not fall directly on one of the lines, but does fall near the intersection of two of the lines, close enough to take advantage of the rule.
The rule of thirds is applied by aligning a subject with the guide lines and their intersection points, placing the horizon on the top or bottom line, or allowing linear features in the image to flow from section to section. The main reason for observing the rule of thirds is to discourage placement of the subject at the center, or prevent a horizon from appearing to divide the picture in half.[3]
When photographing or filming people, it is common to line the body up with a vertical line, and having the person's eyes in line with a horizontal one. If filming a moving subject, the same pattern is often followed, with the majority of the extra room being in front of the person (the way they are moving).[4]
The photograph to the right demonstrates the application of the rule of thirds. The horizon sits at the horizontal line dividing the lower third of the photo from the upper two-thirds. The tree sits at the intersection of two lines, sometimes called a power point. Points of interest in the photo don't have to actually touch one of these lines to take advantage of the rule of thirds. For example, the brightest part of the sky near the horizon where the sun recently set does not fall directly on one of the lines, but does fall near the intersection of two of the lines, close enough to take advantage of the rule.
The rule of thirds is applied by aligning a subject with the guide lines and their intersection points, placing the horizon on the top or bottom line, or allowing linear features in the image to flow from section to section. The main reason for observing the rule of thirds is to discourage placement of the subject at the center, or prevent a horizon from appearing to divide the picture in half.[3]
When photographing or filming people, it is common to line the body up with a vertical line, and having the person's eyes in line with a horizontal one. If filming a moving subject, the same pattern is often followed, with the majority of the extra room being in front of the person (the way they are moving).[4]
Digital Camera
Compact cameras are designed to be small and portable and are particularly suitable for casual and "snapshot" use, thus are also called point-and-shoot camera. The smallest, generally less than 20 mm thick, are described as subcompacts or "ultra-compacts". Compact cameras are usually designed to be easy to use, sacrificing advanced features and picture quality for compactness and simplicity; images can usually only be stored using lossy compression (JPEG). Most have a built-in flash usually of low power, sufficient for nearby subjects. Live preview is almost always used to frame the photo. They may have limited motion picture capability. Compacts often have macro capability, but if they have zoom capability the range is usually less than for bridge and DSLR cameras. Generally a contrast-detect autofocus system, using the image data from the live preview feed off the main imager, focuses the lens.
Typically, these cameras incorporate a nearly-silent leaf shutter into their lenses.
To enable lower costs and smaller size, these cameras typically use image sensors with a diagonal of approximately 6 mm, corresponding to a crop factor around 6. This gives them weaker low-light performance, greater depth of field, generally closer focusing ability, and smaller components than cameras using larger sensors.
Digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) are digital cameras based on film single-lens reflex cameras (SLRs). They take their name from their unique viewing system, in which a mirror reflects light from the lens through a separate optical viewfinder. In order to capture an image the mirror is flipped out of the way, allowing light to fall on the imager. Since no light reaches the imager during framing, autofocus is accomplished using specialized sensors in the mirror box itself. Most 21st century DSLRs also have a "live view" mode that emulates the live preview system of compact cameras, when selected.
These cameras have much larger sensors than the other types, typically 18 mm to 36 mm on the diagonal (crop factor 2, 1.6, or 1). This gives them superior low-light performance, less depth of field at a given aperture, and a larger size.
They make use of interchangeable lenses; each major DSLR manufacturer also sells a line of lenses specifically intended to be used on their cameras. This allows the user to select a lens designed for the application at hand: wide-angle, telephoto, low-light, etc. So each lens does not require its own shutter, DSLRs use a focal-plane shutter in front of the imager, behind the mirror.
The mirror flipping out of the way at the moment of exposure makes a distinctive "clack" sound.
Typically, these cameras incorporate a nearly-silent leaf shutter into their lenses.
To enable lower costs and smaller size, these cameras typically use image sensors with a diagonal of approximately 6 mm, corresponding to a crop factor around 6. This gives them weaker low-light performance, greater depth of field, generally closer focusing ability, and smaller components than cameras using larger sensors.
Digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) are digital cameras based on film single-lens reflex cameras (SLRs). They take their name from their unique viewing system, in which a mirror reflects light from the lens through a separate optical viewfinder. In order to capture an image the mirror is flipped out of the way, allowing light to fall on the imager. Since no light reaches the imager during framing, autofocus is accomplished using specialized sensors in the mirror box itself. Most 21st century DSLRs also have a "live view" mode that emulates the live preview system of compact cameras, when selected.
These cameras have much larger sensors than the other types, typically 18 mm to 36 mm on the diagonal (crop factor 2, 1.6, or 1). This gives them superior low-light performance, less depth of field at a given aperture, and a larger size.
They make use of interchangeable lenses; each major DSLR manufacturer also sells a line of lenses specifically intended to be used on their cameras. This allows the user to select a lens designed for the application at hand: wide-angle, telephoto, low-light, etc. So each lens does not require its own shutter, DSLRs use a focal-plane shutter in front of the imager, behind the mirror.
The mirror flipping out of the way at the moment of exposure makes a distinctive "clack" sound.
Documentary Photography
The term "documentary" applied to photography antedates the mode or genre itself. Photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances date to the earliest daguerreotype and calotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness areas. Nineteenth century archaeologist John Beasly Greene, for example, traveled to Nubia in the early 1850s to photograph the major ruins of the region;[1] One early documentation project was the French Missions Heliographiques organized by the official Commission des Monuments historiques to develop an archive of France's rapidly-disappearing architectural and human heritage; the project included such photographic luminaries as Henri Le Secq, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray.
In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the Civil War by photographers for at least three consortia of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the dead by Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by George N. Barnard. A huge body of photography of the vast regions of the Great West was produced by official government photographers for the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, the USGS, during the period 1868-1878, including most notably the photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.[2]
Both the Civil War and USGS photographic works point up an important feature of documentary photography: the production of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a wide audience through publication. The US Government published Survey photographs in the annual Reports, as well as portfolios designed to encourage continued funding of scientific surveys.
The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided impetus for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. [3] The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gather photographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably [[How The Other Half Lives]] of 1890 and [[The Children of the Slums]] of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.
Riis's documentary photography was passionately devoted to changing the inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly-expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in urban reform movements, notably the Social Gospel and Progressive movements. His most famous successor was the photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, whose systematic surveys of conditions of child-labor in particular, made for the National Child Labor Commission and published in sociological journals like The Survey, are generally credited with strongly influencing the development of child-labor laws in New York and the United States more generally.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a new wave of documentary, both of rural and urban conditions. The Farm Security Administration, a common term for the Historical Division, supervised by Roy Stryker, funded legendary photographic documentarians, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott among others. This generation of documentary photographers is generally credited for codifying the documentary code of accuracy mixed with impassioned advocacy, with the goal of arousing public commitment to social change.[4]
During the wartime and postwar eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric of photojournalism. Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank is generally credited with developing a counterstrain of more personal, evocative, and complex documentary, exemplified by his work in the 1950s, published in the United States in his 1959 book , The Americans. In the early 1960s, his influence on photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander resulted in an important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], which brought those two photographers together with their colleague Diane Arbus under the title, New Documents. MoMA curator John Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation, committed not to social change but to formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of modernity, had replaced the older forms of social documentary.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary" photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this generation are the photographers Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model of post-documentary, and Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75 served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the disempowered.
In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the Civil War by photographers for at least three consortia of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the dead by Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by George N. Barnard. A huge body of photography of the vast regions of the Great West was produced by official government photographers for the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, the USGS, during the period 1868-1878, including most notably the photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.[2]
Both the Civil War and USGS photographic works point up an important feature of documentary photography: the production of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a wide audience through publication. The US Government published Survey photographs in the annual Reports, as well as portfolios designed to encourage continued funding of scientific surveys.
The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided impetus for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. [3] The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gather photographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably [[How The Other Half Lives]] of 1890 and [[The Children of the Slums]] of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.
Riis's documentary photography was passionately devoted to changing the inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly-expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in urban reform movements, notably the Social Gospel and Progressive movements. His most famous successor was the photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, whose systematic surveys of conditions of child-labor in particular, made for the National Child Labor Commission and published in sociological journals like The Survey, are generally credited with strongly influencing the development of child-labor laws in New York and the United States more generally.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a new wave of documentary, both of rural and urban conditions. The Farm Security Administration, a common term for the Historical Division, supervised by Roy Stryker, funded legendary photographic documentarians, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott among others. This generation of documentary photographers is generally credited for codifying the documentary code of accuracy mixed with impassioned advocacy, with the goal of arousing public commitment to social change.[4]
During the wartime and postwar eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric of photojournalism. Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank is generally credited with developing a counterstrain of more personal, evocative, and complex documentary, exemplified by his work in the 1950s, published in the United States in his 1959 book , The Americans. In the early 1960s, his influence on photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander resulted in an important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], which brought those two photographers together with their colleague Diane Arbus under the title, New Documents. MoMA curator John Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation, committed not to social change but to formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of modernity, had replaced the older forms of social documentary.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary" photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this generation are the photographers Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model of post-documentary, and Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75 served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the disempowered.
Candid photography
Candid photography is best described as un-posed and unplanned, immediate and unobtrusive. This is in contrast to classic photography, which includes aspects such as carefully staged portrait photography, landscape photography or object photography. Candid photography catches moments of life from immersion in it.
Candid photography is opposed to the stalking involved in animal photography, sports photography or photographic journalistic intrusion, which all have a focus on getting distant objects photographed, e.g. by using telephoto lenses. Candid photography's setup includes a photographer who is there with the "subjects" to be photographed, close, and not hidden. People photographed on candid shots either ignore or accept the close presence of the photographer's camera without posing.
The events documented are often private, they involve people in close relation to something they do, or they involve people's relation to each other. Candids are the kinds of pictures taken at children's birthday parties and on Christmas morning, opening the presents; the pictures a wedding photographer takes at the reception, of people dancing, eating, and socializing with other guests.
[edit] As an art form
Some professional photographers develop candid photography into an art form. Henri Cartier-Bresson might be considered the master of the art of candid photography, capturing the "decisive moment" in everyday life over a span of several decades. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was one of the great photographers to document life in the streets of New York to often capture life — and death — at their rawest edges. Almost all successful photographers in the field of candid photography master the art of making people relax and feel at ease around the camera, they master the art of blending in at parties, of finding acceptance despite an obvious intrusive element - the camera. This is certainly true for most celebrity photographers, such as René Burri, Raeburn Flerlage or Murray Garrett.
It could be argued that candid photography is the purest form of photojournalism. There is a fine line between photojournalism and candid photography, a line that was blurred by photographers such as Bresson and Weegee. Photojournalism often sets out to tell a story in images, whereas candid photography simply captures people living an event.
[edit] Camera equipment
Equipment for candid photography is typically lightweight, small and unobtrusive rather than big and intimidating. Lomo rule photography describes using an old Russian point-and shoot-camera for candid photography. The larger the equipment, the more difficult to master the art of making the equipment appear to be unobtrusive to achieve candid photography.
Candid photography typically requires high film speeds or ISOs as strobe flashes can interrupt interactions, causing people to stage their photo appearance rather than behaving naturally. For this reason, candid photography has traditionally taken place outdoors, where the sun provides ample light. Due to higher film speeds (ISO) being required for indoor ambient light photography, candid photography can feature grainy, high contrast images. However, several recent full-frame DSLR cameras have brought high-ISO noise to historically low levels, allowing for clean, saturated images at speeds up to and beyond ISO 6400.
As small point and shoot cameras with affordable lenses are used widely for candid photography, photographs may feature vignetting, distortion and over saturation of colors. Due to short reaction times, exposure or focus may be slightly off. Due to strobe flashes being obstructive to candid photography and incompatible with many compacts, pictures may show blurring or other technical faults. All these are usually accepted as features of candid photography, and often, part of what makes candid photography an art.
Rangefinders and small, early film SLRs have long been preferred equipment for candid photographers. Candid photographers also seem to prefer the use of black and white film, which has an inherently artistic appearance and roughly 3 stops more dynamic range compared to digital cameras. However, as the dynamic range of digital cameras improves, smaller cameras are developed, and lens speed and sharpness improves, candid photographers are given many new tools to capture high quality candid images.
Candid photography is opposed to the stalking involved in animal photography, sports photography or photographic journalistic intrusion, which all have a focus on getting distant objects photographed, e.g. by using telephoto lenses. Candid photography's setup includes a photographer who is there with the "subjects" to be photographed, close, and not hidden. People photographed on candid shots either ignore or accept the close presence of the photographer's camera without posing.
The events documented are often private, they involve people in close relation to something they do, or they involve people's relation to each other. Candids are the kinds of pictures taken at children's birthday parties and on Christmas morning, opening the presents; the pictures a wedding photographer takes at the reception, of people dancing, eating, and socializing with other guests.
[edit] As an art form
Some professional photographers develop candid photography into an art form. Henri Cartier-Bresson might be considered the master of the art of candid photography, capturing the "decisive moment" in everyday life over a span of several decades. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was one of the great photographers to document life in the streets of New York to often capture life — and death — at their rawest edges. Almost all successful photographers in the field of candid photography master the art of making people relax and feel at ease around the camera, they master the art of blending in at parties, of finding acceptance despite an obvious intrusive element - the camera. This is certainly true for most celebrity photographers, such as René Burri, Raeburn Flerlage or Murray Garrett.
It could be argued that candid photography is the purest form of photojournalism. There is a fine line between photojournalism and candid photography, a line that was blurred by photographers such as Bresson and Weegee. Photojournalism often sets out to tell a story in images, whereas candid photography simply captures people living an event.
[edit] Camera equipment
Equipment for candid photography is typically lightweight, small and unobtrusive rather than big and intimidating. Lomo rule photography describes using an old Russian point-and shoot-camera for candid photography. The larger the equipment, the more difficult to master the art of making the equipment appear to be unobtrusive to achieve candid photography.
Candid photography typically requires high film speeds or ISOs as strobe flashes can interrupt interactions, causing people to stage their photo appearance rather than behaving naturally. For this reason, candid photography has traditionally taken place outdoors, where the sun provides ample light. Due to higher film speeds (ISO) being required for indoor ambient light photography, candid photography can feature grainy, high contrast images. However, several recent full-frame DSLR cameras have brought high-ISO noise to historically low levels, allowing for clean, saturated images at speeds up to and beyond ISO 6400.
As small point and shoot cameras with affordable lenses are used widely for candid photography, photographs may feature vignetting, distortion and over saturation of colors. Due to short reaction times, exposure or focus may be slightly off. Due to strobe flashes being obstructive to candid photography and incompatible with many compacts, pictures may show blurring or other technical faults. All these are usually accepted as features of candid photography, and often, part of what makes candid photography an art.
Rangefinders and small, early film SLRs have long been preferred equipment for candid photographers. Candid photographers also seem to prefer the use of black and white film, which has an inherently artistic appearance and roughly 3 stops more dynamic range compared to digital cameras. However, as the dynamic range of digital cameras improves, smaller cameras are developed, and lens speed and sharpness improves, candid photographers are given many new tools to capture high quality candid images.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Queens, New York. He studied for a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts,[1] though he dropped out in 1969 before finishing his degree.[2]
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital from complications arising from AIDS; he was 42 years old. His ashes were buried in Queens, New York, in his mother's grave, marked 'Maxey'.
Nearly a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. His vision for the Foundation was that it would be "the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about".[3] Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official estate and helped promote his work throughout the world, it has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection.[3]
[edit] Art
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in the studio, particularly towards the end of his career. Common subjects include flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies; celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith (a Patti Smith portrait[4] from 1986 recalls Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait[5]); homoerotic and BDSM acts (including Coprophagia), and classical nudes. Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio series sparked national attention in the early 1990s when it was included in The Perfect Moment, a traveling exhibition funded by National Endowment for the Arts. The portfolio includes some of Mapplethorpe's most explicit imagery, including a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus.[6][7][8] Though his work had been regularly displayed in publicly funded exhibitions, conservative and religious organizations, such as the American Family Association seized on this exhibition to vocally oppose government support for what they called "nothing more than the sensational presentation of potentially obscene material."[9] As a result, Mapplethorpe became something of a cause celebre for both sides of the American Culture war. The installation of The Perfect Moment in Cincinnati resulted in the unsuccessful prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, on charges of "pandering obscenity".
His sexually-charged photographs of black men have been criticized as exploitative.[10][11] Such criticism was the subject of a work by American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991-1993). Ligon juxtaposes several of Mapplethorpe's most iconic images of black men appropriated from the 1988 publication, Black Book, with various critical texts to complicate the racial undertones of the imagery.
[edit] Corcoran Scandal
In June 1989, pop artist Lowell Blair Nesbitt became involved with a scandal involving Mapplethorpe's work. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. had agreed to host a traveling solo exhibit of Mapplethorpe's works, without making a stipulation as to what type of subject matter would be used. Mapplethorpe decided to show a new series that he had explored shortly before his death, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment curated by Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Art.[12] The hierarchy of the Corcoran and several members of Congress were horrified when the works were revealed to them, and the museum refused to go forth with the exhibit. It was at this time that Nesbitt, a long-time friend of Mapplethorpe, revealed that he had a $1.5 million bequest to the museum in his will. Nesbitt publicly promised that if the museum refused to host the exhibition he would revoke his bequest. The Corcoran refused and Nesbitt bequeathed the money to the Phillips Collection instead.
After the Corcoran refused the Mapplethorpe exhibition, the underwriters of the exhibition went to the nonprofit Washington Project for the Arts,[13] which showed the controversial images in its own space from July 21 - August 13, 1989, to large crowds.[14]
[edit] UCE Controversy
In 1998, the University of Central England was involved in a controversy when a book by Mapplethorpe was confiscated. A final year undergraduate student was writing a paper on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and intended to illustrate the paper with a few photographs. She took the photographs to the local chemist to be developed and the chemist informed West Midlands Police because of the unusual nature of the images. The police confiscated the library book from the student and informed the university that the book would have to be destroyed. If the university agreed to the destruction, no further action would be taken.
The book in question was Mapplethorpe, published by Jonathan Cape 1992. The university Vice-Chancellor, Dr Peter Knight, supported by the Senate took the view that the book was a legitimate book for the university library to hold and that the action of the police was a serious infringement of academic freedom. The Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the police, under caution, with a view to prosecution under the terms of the Obscene Publications Act. This Act defines obscenity as material that is likely to deprave and corrupt. It was used unsuccessfully in the famous Lady Chatterley's Lover trial. Curiously the police were not particularly interested in some of the more notorious images which could have been covered by other legislation. They focused on one particular image, 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito 1977,' which depicts one man urinating into the mouth of another.
After the interview with the Vice-Chancellor a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service as the Director of Public Prosecutions has to take the decision as to whether or not to proceed with a trial. After a delay of about six months the affair came to an end when Dr Knight was informed by the DPP that no action would be taken as 'there was insufficient evidence to support a successful prosecution on this occasion'. The original book was returned, in a slightly tattered state, and restored to the university library
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital from complications arising from AIDS; he was 42 years old. His ashes were buried in Queens, New York, in his mother's grave, marked 'Maxey'.
Nearly a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. His vision for the Foundation was that it would be "the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about".[3] Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official estate and helped promote his work throughout the world, it has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection.[3]
[edit] Art
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in the studio, particularly towards the end of his career. Common subjects include flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies; celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith (a Patti Smith portrait[4] from 1986 recalls Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait[5]); homoerotic and BDSM acts (including Coprophagia), and classical nudes. Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio series sparked national attention in the early 1990s when it was included in The Perfect Moment, a traveling exhibition funded by National Endowment for the Arts. The portfolio includes some of Mapplethorpe's most explicit imagery, including a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus.[6][7][8] Though his work had been regularly displayed in publicly funded exhibitions, conservative and religious organizations, such as the American Family Association seized on this exhibition to vocally oppose government support for what they called "nothing more than the sensational presentation of potentially obscene material."[9] As a result, Mapplethorpe became something of a cause celebre for both sides of the American Culture war. The installation of The Perfect Moment in Cincinnati resulted in the unsuccessful prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, on charges of "pandering obscenity".
His sexually-charged photographs of black men have been criticized as exploitative.[10][11] Such criticism was the subject of a work by American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991-1993). Ligon juxtaposes several of Mapplethorpe's most iconic images of black men appropriated from the 1988 publication, Black Book, with various critical texts to complicate the racial undertones of the imagery.
[edit] Corcoran Scandal
In June 1989, pop artist Lowell Blair Nesbitt became involved with a scandal involving Mapplethorpe's work. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. had agreed to host a traveling solo exhibit of Mapplethorpe's works, without making a stipulation as to what type of subject matter would be used. Mapplethorpe decided to show a new series that he had explored shortly before his death, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment curated by Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Art.[12] The hierarchy of the Corcoran and several members of Congress were horrified when the works were revealed to them, and the museum refused to go forth with the exhibit. It was at this time that Nesbitt, a long-time friend of Mapplethorpe, revealed that he had a $1.5 million bequest to the museum in his will. Nesbitt publicly promised that if the museum refused to host the exhibition he would revoke his bequest. The Corcoran refused and Nesbitt bequeathed the money to the Phillips Collection instead.
After the Corcoran refused the Mapplethorpe exhibition, the underwriters of the exhibition went to the nonprofit Washington Project for the Arts,[13] which showed the controversial images in its own space from July 21 - August 13, 1989, to large crowds.[14]
[edit] UCE Controversy
In 1998, the University of Central England was involved in a controversy when a book by Mapplethorpe was confiscated. A final year undergraduate student was writing a paper on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and intended to illustrate the paper with a few photographs. She took the photographs to the local chemist to be developed and the chemist informed West Midlands Police because of the unusual nature of the images. The police confiscated the library book from the student and informed the university that the book would have to be destroyed. If the university agreed to the destruction, no further action would be taken.
The book in question was Mapplethorpe, published by Jonathan Cape 1992. The university Vice-Chancellor, Dr Peter Knight, supported by the Senate took the view that the book was a legitimate book for the university library to hold and that the action of the police was a serious infringement of academic freedom. The Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the police, under caution, with a view to prosecution under the terms of the Obscene Publications Act. This Act defines obscenity as material that is likely to deprave and corrupt. It was used unsuccessfully in the famous Lady Chatterley's Lover trial. Curiously the police were not particularly interested in some of the more notorious images which could have been covered by other legislation. They focused on one particular image, 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito 1977,' which depicts one man urinating into the mouth of another.
After the interview with the Vice-Chancellor a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service as the Director of Public Prosecutions has to take the decision as to whether or not to proceed with a trial. After a delay of about six months the affair came to an end when Dr Knight was informed by the DPP that no action would be taken as 'there was insufficient evidence to support a successful prosecution on this occasion'. The original book was returned, in a slightly tattered state, and restored to the university library
Gustave Le Gray
Gustav Le Gray was born in 1820 in Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris, France.[1] He was originally trained as a painter, studying under François-Édouard Picot and Paul Delaroche.[1] He even exhibited at the salon in 1848 and 1853. He then crossed over to photography in the early years of its development.
He made his first daguerreotypes by 1847.[3] His early photographs included portraits; scenes of nature such as Fontainebleau Forest; and buildings such as châteaux of the Loire Valley.[3][4]
He taught photography to students such as Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, and Maxime Du Camp.[3] In 1851 he became one of the first five photographers hired for the Missions Héliographiques to document French monuments and buildings.[4][5] In that same year he helped found the Société Héliographique, the "first photographic organization in the world".[5] Le Gray published a treatise on photography, which went through four editions, in 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1854.
In 1855 Le Gray opened a "lavishly furnished" studio. At that time, becoming progressively the official photographer of Napoleon III, he became a successful portraitist. His most famous work dates from this period, 1856 to 1858, especially his seascapes. The studio was a fancy place, but in spite of his artistic success the business was poorly managed and ran into debts.[3] He therefore "closed his studio, abandoned his wife and children, and fled the country to escape his creditors".[3]
He began to tour the Mediterranean in 1860 with the writer Alexandre Dumas, père.[5] They crossed the path of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Dumas enthusiastically joined the revolutionnary forces with his groupmates. His striking pictures of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Palermo under Sicilian bombing became instantly famous throughout Europe at the same time than their subjects. Dumas abandoned Le Gray and the other travellers in Malta[2] due to a conflict[3] about a woman. Le Gray went to Lebanon, then Syria where he covered the movements of the French army for a magazine in 1861. Harmed, he took a halt there before heading to Egypt. In Alexandria he photogaphed Henri d'Artois and the future Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and wrote to Nadar while sending pictures. He established himself in Cairo in 1864 where he remained about 20 years, earning an humble life as a professor of drawing,[5] while still having a small photography shop. He sent pictures to the universal exhibition in 1867 but it did not really caught any attention. He had commands from the vice-king Ismail Pasha. From this late period only remain a mere 50 pictures, some of them as beautiful as usual. He probably died in 1884 in Cairo.[1]
[edit] Technical innovations
His technical innovations included:
* Improvements on paper negatives,[4] specifically waxing them before exposure "making the paper more receptive to fine detail".[6]
* A collodion process published in 1850 but which was "theoretical at best".[7] The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott Archer who published his process in 1851.[7]
* Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky[2][4][6] at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range. It is the first of the nowadays photograph technique known as High dynamic range imaging or HDR.
He made his first daguerreotypes by 1847.[3] His early photographs included portraits; scenes of nature such as Fontainebleau Forest; and buildings such as châteaux of the Loire Valley.[3][4]
He taught photography to students such as Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, and Maxime Du Camp.[3] In 1851 he became one of the first five photographers hired for the Missions Héliographiques to document French monuments and buildings.[4][5] In that same year he helped found the Société Héliographique, the "first photographic organization in the world".[5] Le Gray published a treatise on photography, which went through four editions, in 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1854.
In 1855 Le Gray opened a "lavishly furnished" studio. At that time, becoming progressively the official photographer of Napoleon III, he became a successful portraitist. His most famous work dates from this period, 1856 to 1858, especially his seascapes. The studio was a fancy place, but in spite of his artistic success the business was poorly managed and ran into debts.[3] He therefore "closed his studio, abandoned his wife and children, and fled the country to escape his creditors".[3]
He began to tour the Mediterranean in 1860 with the writer Alexandre Dumas, père.[5] They crossed the path of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Dumas enthusiastically joined the revolutionnary forces with his groupmates. His striking pictures of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Palermo under Sicilian bombing became instantly famous throughout Europe at the same time than their subjects. Dumas abandoned Le Gray and the other travellers in Malta[2] due to a conflict[3] about a woman. Le Gray went to Lebanon, then Syria where he covered the movements of the French army for a magazine in 1861. Harmed, he took a halt there before heading to Egypt. In Alexandria he photogaphed Henri d'Artois and the future Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and wrote to Nadar while sending pictures. He established himself in Cairo in 1864 where he remained about 20 years, earning an humble life as a professor of drawing,[5] while still having a small photography shop. He sent pictures to the universal exhibition in 1867 but it did not really caught any attention. He had commands from the vice-king Ismail Pasha. From this late period only remain a mere 50 pictures, some of them as beautiful as usual. He probably died in 1884 in Cairo.[1]
[edit] Technical innovations
His technical innovations included:
* Improvements on paper negatives,[4] specifically waxing them before exposure "making the paper more receptive to fine detail".[6]
* A collodion process published in 1850 but which was "theoretical at best".[7] The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott Archer who published his process in 1851.[7]
* Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky[2][4][6] at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range. It is the first of the nowadays photograph technique known as High dynamic range imaging or HDR.
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (21 October 1804 – 7 December 1892) was a French photographer and draughtsman who was active in the Middle East. His daguerreotypes are the earliest surviving photographs of Greece, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Turkey. Remarkably, his works were only discovered in the 1920s in a storeroom of his estate and then only became known eighty years later.
Girault de Prangey studied painting in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and in 1841 he learned daguerreotypy, possibly from Louis Daguerre himself or from Hippolyte Bayard. Girault de Prangey was keenly interested in the architecture of the Middle East, and he toured Italy and the countries of the eastern Mediterranean between 1841 and 1844, producing over 900 daguerreotypes of architectural views, landscapes, and portraits.
After his return to France, Girault de Prangey made watercolour and pen-and-ink studies after his photographs and published a small-edition book of lithographs from them. He also made stereographs of his estate and the exotic plants he collected. Girault de Prangey did not exhibit or otherwise make his photographs known during his lifetime.
Girault de Prangey studied painting in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and in 1841 he learned daguerreotypy, possibly from Louis Daguerre himself or from Hippolyte Bayard. Girault de Prangey was keenly interested in the architecture of the Middle East, and he toured Italy and the countries of the eastern Mediterranean between 1841 and 1844, producing over 900 daguerreotypes of architectural views, landscapes, and portraits.
After his return to France, Girault de Prangey made watercolour and pen-and-ink studies after his photographs and published a small-edition book of lithographs from them. He also made stereographs of his estate and the exotic plants he collected. Girault de Prangey did not exhibit or otherwise make his photographs known during his lifetime.
Richard Prince
ichard Prince was born on August 6, 1949 in the American occupied Panama Canal Zone. The occupation of his parents is unknown. During an interview in 2000 with Julie L. Belcove, he responded to the question of why his parents were in the Zone, by saying “they worked for the government.” When asked further if his father was involved in the military, Prince responded, “No, he just worked for the government.” He combined this response with a mischievous smile so as to allude to the possibility of a CIA background. Prince later lived in the New England city of Braintree, Massachusetts a suburb of Boston.
He was first interested in art created by the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. “I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative” (Richard Prince, June 1, 2000, Fairchild Publications). Prince was growing up during the height of Pollock’s career, thus making his work very accessible. The 1956 publication of Time Magazine’s article that dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” made the thought of pursuing art as career all the more possible. After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18. He traveled the continent via train, making a point to track down the museums that housed famous artworks he had seen in textbooks.
He returned home and attended Nasson College in Maine. He describes his school as being one without grades or real structure. From Maine he was drawn to New York City. Prince has said that the attraction for NYC was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio. Prince described the picture as displaying “a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio” (Nancy Spector, Richard Prince). We see here the significant influence Pollock’s idea of being comfortable with solitude had on Prince. It pushed him to look for a new kind of life in NYC.
Prince arrived in the city in 1977 and began to slowly immerse himself into the downtown art scene. He had entered the big city in a time of an “anything goes” attitude. From the East Village to the Lower Eastside to SoHo, emerging artists, writers, musicians, and dancers found refuge in a Club scene infused environment that promoted the growth of collaboration, in the ways of artistic demonstration as well as creativity. Prince found himself in a city that had been dominated by the works of the Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rauschenberg and the other greats of the 60’s, but also a city that was open to the orchestration of the new. He struggled in his early days in the city and one could observe that he has struggled for the majority of his career, until recently.
Prince’s first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, NY.[2] The pamphlet Menthol Pictures was published as part of that residency .[3]
In the fall of 2007, Prince was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a show that encompassed every facet of his career, displaying it in chorological order, along the upward spiraling walls. This show has continued onto the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will eventually come to its end in the summer of 2008 at the London Serpentine Gallery. Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has said, “He is absolutely essential to what’s going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It’s not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives.”
Prince has built up one of the greatest private collection of Beat books and papers in existence. Prince has several copies of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, including one inscribed to Kerouac’s mother, one famously read on The Steve Allen Show, the original proof copy of the book and an original galley, as well as the copy owned by Neal Cassady — aka Dean Moriarty, which has Cassady’s signature and marginal notes within.[4]
[edit] Career
Over the last 59 years, Richard Prince’s career has played out much like how he once described his work methodology. In a 2005 New York Magazine interview he said, “It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.” Prince has been about experimenting and working with the results. He has said that a governing factor of his work is the spontaneity of it. At the end of the day, what he is creating is just paint on canvas. If his work stood next to a de Kooning or a Picasso, there would be no difference in the medium. It is the subject that is radical.
[edit] Rephotography
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Richard Prince is an appropriation artist - one who pulls from the works of others and the world he lives in to create his own work. Appropriation art became popular in the late 70’s and it has been said Prince was the father of it. Other appropriation artists such as Sherry Levine, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Mike Bidlo all came into prominence around the same time as Prince, but Prince has accredited himself to be the first.[citation needed] He has even said[citation needed] that Levine called him early in his career to ask permission to play with his newly developing technique.
During this early period, he spent his days working in New York for the Times Magazine’s tear sheets department. At the end of each work day, he would be left with nothing but the torn out advertising images from the eight or so magazines owned by Time-Life. It was almost destiny[citation needed] that the images that he looked through day after day and was exposed to would become his subjects. Prince was engaged with the media and corporate America’s advertising to such an extent, that he was infected with a heightened sense of the their role and presence in everyday life.
Prince had very little experience with photography, but he has said in interviews[citation needed] that all he needed was a subject, the medium would follow- whether it be paint and brush or camera and film. He compared his new method of searching out interesting advertisements with “beachcombing.” His first series during this time focused on models, living room furniture, watches, pens, and jewelry. All the luxurious and material things that appear daily in our media drenched society.
He began to shuffle through the highs and lows of the media infused pop culture and brought both moods to the surface. Pop culture became the focus of his work, deconstructing the media and all its false illusions. He wanted to present what the magazines provided him with as naturally as possible. By zooming in on particular aspects of the ads, he was able to distort them to such an extent that the female wearing the oversized, fashionable hat, now appeared to the “in” and stylish world as though she was an alien. Prince removed the subjects of his photographs from the context of the advertisements they came from, displacing them and presenting them naked and relocated.
In these early photographs, he was highlighting the fictive side of the media, the falsities that lay at its foundation. He was unveiling, exposing the truth of American life. He was showing the distance that lies between the fictional characters created by the media, which are often displayed as a representation of a brand, and that of real life.
This is most seen in his series known as the Cowboys, produced from 1980 to 1992. Prince’s most famous group of “rephotographs,” as his style became known, were taken from Marlboro Cigarette advertisements, images of the Marlboro Man, the ideal figurine of masculinity, the real American man. The Marlboro Man was the iconic equivalent of a present day company like Ralph Lauren who uses the polo pony image to identify and associate with their brand. “Every week. I’d see one and be like, Oh that’s mine, Thank you” (Richard Prince, May 2, 2005 New York Magazine”).
[edit] Cowboys
Prince’s Cowboys displayed men who were accompanied by 10-gallon hats, boots, horses, lassoes, spurs and all the fixings that make up the stereotypical image of a cowboy. They were set in the Western U.S., in drastically arid landscapes with stone outcrops flanked by cacti and tumbleweeds and they had backdrops of desert sunsets. The advertisements were staged with the utmost attention to detail so as to make the revival of a “dead” generation of people as successful as possible.
The greatest irony lies within these photographs, for Prince is showing just how false the media is in the depiction of “fake” cowboys. He is playing with the reality that these images are of people imitating the real. His works raise the question of what is real, what is a real cowboy, and what makes it so? Prince’s photographs of these advertisements help us to decide for ourselves just how real the media images are. He also lets us question the authenticity of life in general. While these works guide us though a search for the meaning of “real”, they also push us to question the boundaries of ownership.
The subjects of Prince’s rephotographs are the photos of others. He is merely photographing the works of other photographers, who in the case of the cowboys, had been hired by Marlboro Cigarettes to create images depicting cowboys. Prince describes his process in a 2003 interview with Artforum International Magazine’s Steve Lafreiniere as, “I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually I had no skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom.”[5]
Prince was a spectator to the imagery of others and decided to approach it in a new manner, interpret it in his own way, while challenging the socially accepted. Prince’s naivety to photography can potentially be accredited with the success of his earth shaking work. Just where do you draw the line as to what is a reflection of inspirational works and what is just down right thievery? But through his thievery he is creating something new, something Richard Prince. At the end of the day he is still dismantling the original, whether it is greatly noticeable or not.
[edit] Gangs
Prince’s rephotographs led to his series known as the Gangs. The Gangs followed the same technique of appropriating images from magazines much as the Cowboys did, but now the subjects turned away from advertisements and mass media and looked towards the niches within American society.
Prince used this series to pay homage to the “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” nestled throughout American life, hidden within small subcultures. He is shining a light on the bizarre types of people found in different subculture prescribed by magazines. Looking through the publications, he became exposed to little known groups of people; from the motorcycle obsessed, to hot rod enthusiasts, to surfers, to lovers of heavy metal music.
These Gangs are most recognized in his series Girlfriends that featured Biker Girls. One edition of a motorcycle magazine that he used, featured photographs of motorcycle fans girlfriends. They were sprawled out straddling their men’s bikes. Rather than criticize, Prince is almost celebrating these people.
These new artworks consisted of a single sheet of white paper covered with a grouping or “ganging” of 9x12, 35 mm photographs. Prince did not wish for there to be any distinct relationship between all of the “ganged” photographs. He felt it was not necessary, although sometimes there was a relationship. An example can be seen in such works as his 1984 Velvet Beach that featured 12 ektacolor photographs of waves, massive waves, clearly from some sort of surf periodical. Also his 1986 Live Free or Die, which was created by gathering 9 images of loosely dressed women, sexually posing upon motorcycles.
A gang is made up of individuals, with a common interest or affiliation, whether it be obvious or not and it is in these clusters of images that he is immersing this idea into his work. Again Prince provides us, with these gangs, a look into the world of monster truck fans, the porn addicted, and transvestite punk rockers, highlighting all of the stereotypes that surround each. He is bringing to light the rebellious side of American culture, those who oppose conversion to the social norm. He is using the subject of his work to protest against mass media’s influence on daily life by showing off those who refuse to accept it, very much like Prince himself.
Prince has clearly said numerous times that he would like to be a biker chick, thus helping us to see the parallel between Prince and the subject of his rephotographs. These photographs have unsettled the art world, not only because of the method in which they are created, but also because of the way in which the money side of the art world has responded to them. Richard Prince has on two occasions set and broken the highest amount received at auction for a photograph.
[edit] Paintings
[edit] Joke Paintings
Prince has continued with his appropriation through his entire career. However, next rather than extract inspiration from the photography of others, he moved into the realm of text, with great attention given to jokes. In the mid-80’s, Prince began to search out comedic lines that had been used so often by different comedians and films that he considered them to be overplayed, overused. These jokes had been used by such an array of individuals, that their originators were no longer attached to them at all, nor were they recognizable as any one person’s joke. Prince again uses his joke works to explore the extent of ownership and its significance in life and more so in art. He is testing the limits of right to possession by helping these jokes to continue further on their journey, away from their authors. He is widening the gap between the creator and the user.
Prince’s first joke piece came about in 1985, in New York, when he was living in the back room of the 303 Gallery, located on Park Avenue South. His first “Joke” was about psychiatrists, a subject he later worked with often. Prince described the discovery of the idea for the Jokes beginning when he posted up a small 11 x 14 inch handwritten joke on paper. He realized that if he had walked into a gallery and had seen it hanging from the wall, he would have been envious. Prince’s Jokes come in several forms. His first Jokes were hand written, taken from joke books. His jokes grew into more substantial works as he began to incorporate them with images, often pairing jokes with images that had no relevance with one another, creating an obscure relationship. An example of one of these peculiar combinations can be seen in his 1991 Good Revolution, a piece that depicted black and white images of a male torso in boxing shorts set amongst doodles of a kitchen stove. These were set above the text “Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman that will give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong home, that’s what it means.” In the late 80’s/early 90’s Prince, like his contemporaries Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, was one of the first to play with image and text, a style that was becoming increasingly popular. Prince would often put jokes amongst cartoons, often from the New Yorker, that’d he’d copy by hand. Prince described his early discovery of jokes and his sense of humor, as “I never really started telling, I started telling them over. Back in 1985, in Venice, California, I was drawing my favorite cartoons in pencil on paper. After this I dropped the illustration or image part of the cartoon and concentrated on the punch line” (Modern Painter’s Special American Issue, Autumn 2002”) Prince’s jokes were primarily “one-liners”. They were very satirical, poking fun at topics such as religion, the relationship between husband and wife, his relations with women, and so on. The jokes are all quite simple and straight to the point, often relying on a punch line; “I took my wife to a wife-swapping party, I had to throw in some cash” or “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my names”. Prince commonly repeats his jokes over and over in one piece, immediately after the first finishes, the same one starts up again. This repetition works to fuel the continual break down of the joke’s originality and significance. He is aiding in the destruction of these, sometimes tasteless, textual parodies.
Prince has stated that he does not censor his choice of jokes. There are no limitations, although he has made it clear that the only boundary that he will never cross is “Why did the Nazi cross the road?” Jokes became the complete subject of his prints, set atop monochromatic backgrounds red, orange, blue, yellow, etc. These works range in size from 56 x 48 inches as seen in his 1994 Untitled, to 112 x 203.5 inches, as seen in his 2000 work Nuts. His early jokes were modestly sized, but as they caught on he began executing larger pieces. These Monochromatic Jokes question the importance of the unique, in high art. What is it that set these jokes apart from one another, the background color, the color of the text, the jokes themselves? If you look at any of the artists working around the same time period as Prince, even the other appropriation artists, we see a distinct quality between works and series. Works are distinguishable from one another or identifiable as a particular artist, but with Prince’s Monochromatic Jokes, we are presented with yellow text upon a blue background a seen in his 1989 Are You Kidding? If you were to look at the works of Jeff Koons, another appropriation artist, and what he was creating in the late 80’s in the same environment and time period as Prince, there’d be a striking difference. Not only between the technique and style, but also the significance given to making the artwork identifiable. An example of this can be seen if we look at what each artist created in the same year. For example, in 1988 Koons was working with porcelain sculptures like his Michael Jackson and Bubbles and Pink Panther. These are two works produced in this year that are both identifiable from one another. In the same year, 1988, we can look at Prince’s Fireman and the Drunk and his Untitled (Joke). What sets these two works apart? The subject of the jokes, the burnt orange background in the one and the lime green in the other?
Prince used his Jokes to disturb the balance that had governed the art world, as well as incorporate painting into his career. Jokes provided Prince with the means to demonstrate his talent with paint. This is seen in the increasingly diverse backgrounds of his jokes. In a 2000 interview with Julie L. Belcove, Prince called the joke paintings “what I wanted to become known for.” When asked of the artistic genre of his jokes Prince once responded “The Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.” (Artforum International Magazine, March 1, 2003). Since Prince’s emergence as an appropriation artist, he has taken the technique into the realm of a multitude of mediums. We look at the recently discussed series as his most significant because they set the groundwork for a career of appropriation. Yet following the rephotopraphs, Gangs, and the Jokes, we see more. Prince continues to keep up his theme of the trialing of authorship and the questioning of reality and its presence in the materialist infused media culture. Other notable series have been his Celebrities, Car Hoods, Check Paintings, and Nurse Paintings.
[edit] Celebrities
Celebrities is a series that plays with the American obsession with movie stars. As seen in his earlier works, Prince continues his obsession with collecting in this late 90’s series. Prince would search out headshots of actors and actresses and then proceed to sign them to himself, using the featured actor’s signature. He is working with the American dream in these works, the possibility that anyone can find fame, as well as the idea that our culture is so obsessed with the famous, that they would desire an image of a celebrity signed to them. Again subtly altering the works of another and forever making them him own.
[edit] Car Hoods
Car Hoods are a series that works off of the early Gangs series. It featured images from car enthusiast magazines, as well as Prince’s own interest with automobiles. Prince ordered car hoods of all different models of classic vehicles sold by stores that advertised in the magazines he photographed. He would than take the hoods and cast molds, which he would then wash in different colors. He created something very Rothko-esc with these hoods. There is something about the simplicity of color that interacts separately, yet together with one another. It brings back a memento mori of the color field artist. The peculiar host of the paint, the mold of a car hood, rather than the traditional canvas, pushes the viewer to look beyond the actuality of the piece and see life within the paint, the “poetry behind the process”.
[edit] The Check Paintings
The Check Paintings series is like the Celebrities. It was made possible by Prince’s addiction with collecting. Prince began to seek out canceled checks from famous figures in history ranging from Jack Kerouac to Andy Warhol. He would put these checks onto paint-covered canvases and often paired them with images of the individual they once belonged to. It again plays with the idea of America’s interest in the famous and the fact that these “celebrities” are real people, no different from you or I. They aren’t untouchable or elites, they too get their checks cashed and cancelled.
[edit] The Nurse Paintings
The Nurse Paintings are Prince’s most recent series. These nurses are inspired by the covers and titles of inexpensive novels that were commonly sold at newspaper stands and delis (pulp romance novels). They were cheap and trashy entertainment, hence Prince’s attraction to their reflection of what the American people want. Prince scanned the covers of the nurse books with his computer and then using the modern invention of inkjet printing, transferred the images to canvas. He then personalized the pieces with acyclic paint, adding an air of mystique to them. They first debuted in 2003 at Barbara Gladstone Galleries, who along with Larry Gagosian, represents Prince.[6] They received mixed responses at their premier, not even able to sell for the asking price of 50-60 thousand. Presently a work from the Nurse series, which he stopped at 42 nurses, sells for a minimum of 5-6 million. Each nurse is distinguished by a personalized name such as Surfer Nurse, Naughty Nurse, Millionaire Nurse, and Dude Ranch Nurse. These are all like the images appropriated from the books they were sourced from. At an auction in New York, two different Nurses went up for sale and surpassed their high estimates. It is like Prince said “The problem with art is, it’s not like the game of golf, where you put the ball in the hole or you don’t put the ball in the hole. There’s no umpire. There’s no judge. There are no rules. It’s one of the problems, but it’s also one of the great things about art: It becomes a question of what lasts.”. Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse album used nurse paintings for their album, and even named a song "Dude Ranch Nurse" after Prince's work.
[edit] Technique
Actual covers of books were scanned to create the foundation for the paintings — the titles and the images of the nurses. They are ink jet print on canvas with acrylic overlay and are fairly large in scale.
Richard Prince used the technique of modern rephotography and this series is notable for the technique of layering digital and analogue media: the application of an analogue medium (acrylic) to a digitalized print (ink jet) of a digitalized image (scan) of an analogue print (book cover) of an analogue artwork (original art portrayed on the book cover).
[edit] Subjects
In the series of paintings, the nurses all wear caps and their mouths are covered by surgical masks, although in some of the paintings the red lips bleed through the masks. The final presentations preserve the title and nurse image from each of the book covers, though all else is obscured.
He was first interested in art created by the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. “I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative” (Richard Prince, June 1, 2000, Fairchild Publications). Prince was growing up during the height of Pollock’s career, thus making his work very accessible. The 1956 publication of Time Magazine’s article that dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” made the thought of pursuing art as career all the more possible. After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18. He traveled the continent via train, making a point to track down the museums that housed famous artworks he had seen in textbooks.
He returned home and attended Nasson College in Maine. He describes his school as being one without grades or real structure. From Maine he was drawn to New York City. Prince has said that the attraction for NYC was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio. Prince described the picture as displaying “a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio” (Nancy Spector, Richard Prince). We see here the significant influence Pollock’s idea of being comfortable with solitude had on Prince. It pushed him to look for a new kind of life in NYC.
Prince arrived in the city in 1977 and began to slowly immerse himself into the downtown art scene. He had entered the big city in a time of an “anything goes” attitude. From the East Village to the Lower Eastside to SoHo, emerging artists, writers, musicians, and dancers found refuge in a Club scene infused environment that promoted the growth of collaboration, in the ways of artistic demonstration as well as creativity. Prince found himself in a city that had been dominated by the works of the Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rauschenberg and the other greats of the 60’s, but also a city that was open to the orchestration of the new. He struggled in his early days in the city and one could observe that he has struggled for the majority of his career, until recently.
Prince’s first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, NY.[2] The pamphlet Menthol Pictures was published as part of that residency .[3]
In the fall of 2007, Prince was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a show that encompassed every facet of his career, displaying it in chorological order, along the upward spiraling walls. This show has continued onto the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will eventually come to its end in the summer of 2008 at the London Serpentine Gallery. Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has said, “He is absolutely essential to what’s going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It’s not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives.”
Prince has built up one of the greatest private collection of Beat books and papers in existence. Prince has several copies of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, including one inscribed to Kerouac’s mother, one famously read on The Steve Allen Show, the original proof copy of the book and an original galley, as well as the copy owned by Neal Cassady — aka Dean Moriarty, which has Cassady’s signature and marginal notes within.[4]
[edit] Career
Over the last 59 years, Richard Prince’s career has played out much like how he once described his work methodology. In a 2005 New York Magazine interview he said, “It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.” Prince has been about experimenting and working with the results. He has said that a governing factor of his work is the spontaneity of it. At the end of the day, what he is creating is just paint on canvas. If his work stood next to a de Kooning or a Picasso, there would be no difference in the medium. It is the subject that is radical.
[edit] Rephotography
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Richard Prince is an appropriation artist - one who pulls from the works of others and the world he lives in to create his own work. Appropriation art became popular in the late 70’s and it has been said Prince was the father of it. Other appropriation artists such as Sherry Levine, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Mike Bidlo all came into prominence around the same time as Prince, but Prince has accredited himself to be the first.[citation needed] He has even said[citation needed] that Levine called him early in his career to ask permission to play with his newly developing technique.
During this early period, he spent his days working in New York for the Times Magazine’s tear sheets department. At the end of each work day, he would be left with nothing but the torn out advertising images from the eight or so magazines owned by Time-Life. It was almost destiny[citation needed] that the images that he looked through day after day and was exposed to would become his subjects. Prince was engaged with the media and corporate America’s advertising to such an extent, that he was infected with a heightened sense of the their role and presence in everyday life.
Prince had very little experience with photography, but he has said in interviews[citation needed] that all he needed was a subject, the medium would follow- whether it be paint and brush or camera and film. He compared his new method of searching out interesting advertisements with “beachcombing.” His first series during this time focused on models, living room furniture, watches, pens, and jewelry. All the luxurious and material things that appear daily in our media drenched society.
He began to shuffle through the highs and lows of the media infused pop culture and brought both moods to the surface. Pop culture became the focus of his work, deconstructing the media and all its false illusions. He wanted to present what the magazines provided him with as naturally as possible. By zooming in on particular aspects of the ads, he was able to distort them to such an extent that the female wearing the oversized, fashionable hat, now appeared to the “in” and stylish world as though she was an alien. Prince removed the subjects of his photographs from the context of the advertisements they came from, displacing them and presenting them naked and relocated.
In these early photographs, he was highlighting the fictive side of the media, the falsities that lay at its foundation. He was unveiling, exposing the truth of American life. He was showing the distance that lies between the fictional characters created by the media, which are often displayed as a representation of a brand, and that of real life.
This is most seen in his series known as the Cowboys, produced from 1980 to 1992. Prince’s most famous group of “rephotographs,” as his style became known, were taken from Marlboro Cigarette advertisements, images of the Marlboro Man, the ideal figurine of masculinity, the real American man. The Marlboro Man was the iconic equivalent of a present day company like Ralph Lauren who uses the polo pony image to identify and associate with their brand. “Every week. I’d see one and be like, Oh that’s mine, Thank you” (Richard Prince, May 2, 2005 New York Magazine”).
[edit] Cowboys
Prince’s Cowboys displayed men who were accompanied by 10-gallon hats, boots, horses, lassoes, spurs and all the fixings that make up the stereotypical image of a cowboy. They were set in the Western U.S., in drastically arid landscapes with stone outcrops flanked by cacti and tumbleweeds and they had backdrops of desert sunsets. The advertisements were staged with the utmost attention to detail so as to make the revival of a “dead” generation of people as successful as possible.
The greatest irony lies within these photographs, for Prince is showing just how false the media is in the depiction of “fake” cowboys. He is playing with the reality that these images are of people imitating the real. His works raise the question of what is real, what is a real cowboy, and what makes it so? Prince’s photographs of these advertisements help us to decide for ourselves just how real the media images are. He also lets us question the authenticity of life in general. While these works guide us though a search for the meaning of “real”, they also push us to question the boundaries of ownership.
The subjects of Prince’s rephotographs are the photos of others. He is merely photographing the works of other photographers, who in the case of the cowboys, had been hired by Marlboro Cigarettes to create images depicting cowboys. Prince describes his process in a 2003 interview with Artforum International Magazine’s Steve Lafreiniere as, “I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually I had no skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom.”[5]
Prince was a spectator to the imagery of others and decided to approach it in a new manner, interpret it in his own way, while challenging the socially accepted. Prince’s naivety to photography can potentially be accredited with the success of his earth shaking work. Just where do you draw the line as to what is a reflection of inspirational works and what is just down right thievery? But through his thievery he is creating something new, something Richard Prince. At the end of the day he is still dismantling the original, whether it is greatly noticeable or not.
[edit] Gangs
Prince’s rephotographs led to his series known as the Gangs. The Gangs followed the same technique of appropriating images from magazines much as the Cowboys did, but now the subjects turned away from advertisements and mass media and looked towards the niches within American society.
Prince used this series to pay homage to the “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” nestled throughout American life, hidden within small subcultures. He is shining a light on the bizarre types of people found in different subculture prescribed by magazines. Looking through the publications, he became exposed to little known groups of people; from the motorcycle obsessed, to hot rod enthusiasts, to surfers, to lovers of heavy metal music.
These Gangs are most recognized in his series Girlfriends that featured Biker Girls. One edition of a motorcycle magazine that he used, featured photographs of motorcycle fans girlfriends. They were sprawled out straddling their men’s bikes. Rather than criticize, Prince is almost celebrating these people.
These new artworks consisted of a single sheet of white paper covered with a grouping or “ganging” of 9x12, 35 mm photographs. Prince did not wish for there to be any distinct relationship between all of the “ganged” photographs. He felt it was not necessary, although sometimes there was a relationship. An example can be seen in such works as his 1984 Velvet Beach that featured 12 ektacolor photographs of waves, massive waves, clearly from some sort of surf periodical. Also his 1986 Live Free or Die, which was created by gathering 9 images of loosely dressed women, sexually posing upon motorcycles.
A gang is made up of individuals, with a common interest or affiliation, whether it be obvious or not and it is in these clusters of images that he is immersing this idea into his work. Again Prince provides us, with these gangs, a look into the world of monster truck fans, the porn addicted, and transvestite punk rockers, highlighting all of the stereotypes that surround each. He is bringing to light the rebellious side of American culture, those who oppose conversion to the social norm. He is using the subject of his work to protest against mass media’s influence on daily life by showing off those who refuse to accept it, very much like Prince himself.
Prince has clearly said numerous times that he would like to be a biker chick, thus helping us to see the parallel between Prince and the subject of his rephotographs. These photographs have unsettled the art world, not only because of the method in which they are created, but also because of the way in which the money side of the art world has responded to them. Richard Prince has on two occasions set and broken the highest amount received at auction for a photograph.
[edit] Paintings
[edit] Joke Paintings
Prince has continued with his appropriation through his entire career. However, next rather than extract inspiration from the photography of others, he moved into the realm of text, with great attention given to jokes. In the mid-80’s, Prince began to search out comedic lines that had been used so often by different comedians and films that he considered them to be overplayed, overused. These jokes had been used by such an array of individuals, that their originators were no longer attached to them at all, nor were they recognizable as any one person’s joke. Prince again uses his joke works to explore the extent of ownership and its significance in life and more so in art. He is testing the limits of right to possession by helping these jokes to continue further on their journey, away from their authors. He is widening the gap between the creator and the user.
Prince’s first joke piece came about in 1985, in New York, when he was living in the back room of the 303 Gallery, located on Park Avenue South. His first “Joke” was about psychiatrists, a subject he later worked with often. Prince described the discovery of the idea for the Jokes beginning when he posted up a small 11 x 14 inch handwritten joke on paper. He realized that if he had walked into a gallery and had seen it hanging from the wall, he would have been envious. Prince’s Jokes come in several forms. His first Jokes were hand written, taken from joke books. His jokes grew into more substantial works as he began to incorporate them with images, often pairing jokes with images that had no relevance with one another, creating an obscure relationship. An example of one of these peculiar combinations can be seen in his 1991 Good Revolution, a piece that depicted black and white images of a male torso in boxing shorts set amongst doodles of a kitchen stove. These were set above the text “Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman that will give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong home, that’s what it means.” In the late 80’s/early 90’s Prince, like his contemporaries Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, was one of the first to play with image and text, a style that was becoming increasingly popular. Prince would often put jokes amongst cartoons, often from the New Yorker, that’d he’d copy by hand. Prince described his early discovery of jokes and his sense of humor, as “I never really started telling, I started telling them over. Back in 1985, in Venice, California, I was drawing my favorite cartoons in pencil on paper. After this I dropped the illustration or image part of the cartoon and concentrated on the punch line” (Modern Painter’s Special American Issue, Autumn 2002”) Prince’s jokes were primarily “one-liners”. They were very satirical, poking fun at topics such as religion, the relationship between husband and wife, his relations with women, and so on. The jokes are all quite simple and straight to the point, often relying on a punch line; “I took my wife to a wife-swapping party, I had to throw in some cash” or “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my names”. Prince commonly repeats his jokes over and over in one piece, immediately after the first finishes, the same one starts up again. This repetition works to fuel the continual break down of the joke’s originality and significance. He is aiding in the destruction of these, sometimes tasteless, textual parodies.
Prince has stated that he does not censor his choice of jokes. There are no limitations, although he has made it clear that the only boundary that he will never cross is “Why did the Nazi cross the road?” Jokes became the complete subject of his prints, set atop monochromatic backgrounds red, orange, blue, yellow, etc. These works range in size from 56 x 48 inches as seen in his 1994 Untitled, to 112 x 203.5 inches, as seen in his 2000 work Nuts. His early jokes were modestly sized, but as they caught on he began executing larger pieces. These Monochromatic Jokes question the importance of the unique, in high art. What is it that set these jokes apart from one another, the background color, the color of the text, the jokes themselves? If you look at any of the artists working around the same time period as Prince, even the other appropriation artists, we see a distinct quality between works and series. Works are distinguishable from one another or identifiable as a particular artist, but with Prince’s Monochromatic Jokes, we are presented with yellow text upon a blue background a seen in his 1989 Are You Kidding? If you were to look at the works of Jeff Koons, another appropriation artist, and what he was creating in the late 80’s in the same environment and time period as Prince, there’d be a striking difference. Not only between the technique and style, but also the significance given to making the artwork identifiable. An example of this can be seen if we look at what each artist created in the same year. For example, in 1988 Koons was working with porcelain sculptures like his Michael Jackson and Bubbles and Pink Panther. These are two works produced in this year that are both identifiable from one another. In the same year, 1988, we can look at Prince’s Fireman and the Drunk and his Untitled (Joke). What sets these two works apart? The subject of the jokes, the burnt orange background in the one and the lime green in the other?
Prince used his Jokes to disturb the balance that had governed the art world, as well as incorporate painting into his career. Jokes provided Prince with the means to demonstrate his talent with paint. This is seen in the increasingly diverse backgrounds of his jokes. In a 2000 interview with Julie L. Belcove, Prince called the joke paintings “what I wanted to become known for.” When asked of the artistic genre of his jokes Prince once responded “The Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.” (Artforum International Magazine, March 1, 2003). Since Prince’s emergence as an appropriation artist, he has taken the technique into the realm of a multitude of mediums. We look at the recently discussed series as his most significant because they set the groundwork for a career of appropriation. Yet following the rephotopraphs, Gangs, and the Jokes, we see more. Prince continues to keep up his theme of the trialing of authorship and the questioning of reality and its presence in the materialist infused media culture. Other notable series have been his Celebrities, Car Hoods, Check Paintings, and Nurse Paintings.
[edit] Celebrities
Celebrities is a series that plays with the American obsession with movie stars. As seen in his earlier works, Prince continues his obsession with collecting in this late 90’s series. Prince would search out headshots of actors and actresses and then proceed to sign them to himself, using the featured actor’s signature. He is working with the American dream in these works, the possibility that anyone can find fame, as well as the idea that our culture is so obsessed with the famous, that they would desire an image of a celebrity signed to them. Again subtly altering the works of another and forever making them him own.
[edit] Car Hoods
Car Hoods are a series that works off of the early Gangs series. It featured images from car enthusiast magazines, as well as Prince’s own interest with automobiles. Prince ordered car hoods of all different models of classic vehicles sold by stores that advertised in the magazines he photographed. He would than take the hoods and cast molds, which he would then wash in different colors. He created something very Rothko-esc with these hoods. There is something about the simplicity of color that interacts separately, yet together with one another. It brings back a memento mori of the color field artist. The peculiar host of the paint, the mold of a car hood, rather than the traditional canvas, pushes the viewer to look beyond the actuality of the piece and see life within the paint, the “poetry behind the process”.
[edit] The Check Paintings
The Check Paintings series is like the Celebrities. It was made possible by Prince’s addiction with collecting. Prince began to seek out canceled checks from famous figures in history ranging from Jack Kerouac to Andy Warhol. He would put these checks onto paint-covered canvases and often paired them with images of the individual they once belonged to. It again plays with the idea of America’s interest in the famous and the fact that these “celebrities” are real people, no different from you or I. They aren’t untouchable or elites, they too get their checks cashed and cancelled.
[edit] The Nurse Paintings
The Nurse Paintings are Prince’s most recent series. These nurses are inspired by the covers and titles of inexpensive novels that were commonly sold at newspaper stands and delis (pulp romance novels). They were cheap and trashy entertainment, hence Prince’s attraction to their reflection of what the American people want. Prince scanned the covers of the nurse books with his computer and then using the modern invention of inkjet printing, transferred the images to canvas. He then personalized the pieces with acyclic paint, adding an air of mystique to them. They first debuted in 2003 at Barbara Gladstone Galleries, who along with Larry Gagosian, represents Prince.[6] They received mixed responses at their premier, not even able to sell for the asking price of 50-60 thousand. Presently a work from the Nurse series, which he stopped at 42 nurses, sells for a minimum of 5-6 million. Each nurse is distinguished by a personalized name such as Surfer Nurse, Naughty Nurse, Millionaire Nurse, and Dude Ranch Nurse. These are all like the images appropriated from the books they were sourced from. At an auction in New York, two different Nurses went up for sale and surpassed their high estimates. It is like Prince said “The problem with art is, it’s not like the game of golf, where you put the ball in the hole or you don’t put the ball in the hole. There’s no umpire. There’s no judge. There are no rules. It’s one of the problems, but it’s also one of the great things about art: It becomes a question of what lasts.”. Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse album used nurse paintings for their album, and even named a song "Dude Ranch Nurse" after Prince's work.
[edit] Technique
Actual covers of books were scanned to create the foundation for the paintings — the titles and the images of the nurses. They are ink jet print on canvas with acrylic overlay and are fairly large in scale.
Richard Prince used the technique of modern rephotography and this series is notable for the technique of layering digital and analogue media: the application of an analogue medium (acrylic) to a digitalized print (ink jet) of a digitalized image (scan) of an analogue print (book cover) of an analogue artwork (original art portrayed on the book cover).
[edit] Subjects
In the series of paintings, the nurses all wear caps and their mouths are covered by surgical masks, although in some of the paintings the red lips bleed through the masks. The final presentations preserve the title and nurse image from each of the book covers, though all else is obscured.
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