Friday, May 19, 2017

Getty Museum Photographs from Olden Days

Sir Coutts Lindsay
Oak Tree
ca. 1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Louis-Rémy Robert
Still-life with statuette and vases
1855
carbon print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"In these deplorable times, a new industry has developed, which has helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith and to ruin what vestige of the divine might still have remained in the French mind.  Of course, this idolatrous multitude was calling for an ideal worthy of itself and in keeping with its own nature.  In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly-wise is this: 'I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature. Thus, if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art.'  An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude.  Daguerre was his messiah.  And then they said to themselves: 'Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee  of exactitude' (they believe that, poor madmen!), 'art is photography.'  From that moment onward, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate.  A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshipers.  Strange abominations manifested themselves.  By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these 'heroes' to 'hold' their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and charming scenes of ancient history.  It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite.  I am convinced that the badly applied advances of photography  like all purely material progress, for that matter  have greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius, already so rare.  Poetry and progress are two ambitious men who hate each other with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along the same road one of them must give way."

 Charles Baudelaire, from his report on the Salon of 1859, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiliand and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Louis Fleckenstein
A Pastorale
ca. 1903
Kallitype
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Jabez Edwin Mayall
The Prince of Wales
ca. 1856
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Roger Fenton
Billiard Room at Mentmore
ca. 1858
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Gertrude Elizabeth Rogers
Gnarled Tree
ca. 1860
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri
Portrait of artist Rosa Bonheur
ca. 1861-64
albumen print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Charles Aubry
Peaches
ca. 1860-69
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Felice Beato
Pappenberg Island, Bay of Nagasaki
ca. 1865
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Adolphe Braun
Hunting Still-life, France
ca. 1867
carbon print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Giuseppe Ninci
View of Roman Forum
ca. 1868
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Braun, Clément & Co.
Roman Forum
ca. 1870
carbon print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

W. & D. Downey, Photographers
Sarah Bernhardt as Empress Theodora
1884
albumen print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Kusakabe Kimbei
Young woman standing near tree
ca. 1870-90
hand-colored albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles