Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help

4. How does color focus our attention in Delaroche’s painting?

jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 276 12/9/17 10:16 AM Some early critics of photography complained that the camera does not offer the control over the subject matter that painting does. But the camera does offer the capacity to crop and select the area of the final print, the capacity to alter the aper- ture of the lens and thus control the focus in selective areas, as well as the capacity to reveal movement in blurred scenes, all of which only suggest the ability of the instrument to transform visual experience into art. Many early photographs exhibit the capacity of the camera to capture and control details in a manner that informs the viewer about the subject matter. For example, in his portrait of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1857), a great builder of steamships (Figure 11-2), Robert Howlett exposed the negative for a shorter time and widened the aperture of his lens (letting in more light), thus controlling the depth of field (how much is in focus). Brunel’s figure is in focus, but surrounding objects are in soft focus, rendering them less significant. The pile of anchor chains in the background is FIGURE 11-1 Paul Delaroche, Execution of Lady Jane Grey. 1843. Oil on canvas, 97 × 117 inches. National Gallery, London, Great Britain. Delaroche witnessed the first demonstration of photography in 1839 and declared, “From today painting is dead.” His enormous painting had great size and brilliant color, two ways, for the time being, in which photography could be superseded. ©HIP/Art Resource, NY 277 jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 277 12/9/17 10:16 AM 278 CHAPTeR 11 massive, but the soft focus makes them subservient to Brunel. The huge chains make this image haunting, but if they were in sharp focus, they would have distracted from Brunel. In Execution of Lady Jane Grey, almost everything is in sharp focus, while the white of Jane’s dress and the red of the executioner’s leggings focus our attention. Brunel’s posture is typical of photographs of the mid-nineteenth century. We have many examples of men lounging with hands in pockets and cigar in mouth, but few paintings portray men this way. Few photographs of any age show us a face quite like Brunel’s. It is relaxed, as much as Brunel could relax, but it is also impa- tient, “bearing with” the photographer. And the eyes are sharp, businessman’s eyes. The details of the rumpled clothing and jewelry do not compete with the sharply rendered face and the expression of control and power. Howlett has done, by sim- ple devices such as varying the focus, what many portrait painters do by much more complex means—reveal something of the character of the model. Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Sir John Herschel (1867) (Figure 11-3) and Étienne Carjat’s portrait of the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1870) (Figure 11-4) use a plain studio background. But their approaches are also different from each other. Cameron, who reported being interested in the way her lens could soften detail, isolates Herschel’s face and hair. She drapes his shoulders with a black velvet shawl so that his clothing will not tell us anything about him or distract us from his face. Cameron catches the stubble on his chin and permits his hair to “burn out,” so we perceive it as a luminous halo. The huge eyes, soft and bulbous with their deep curves of surrounding flesh, and the downward curve of the mouth are depicted FIGURE 11-2 Robert Howlett, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. 1857. This portrait of a great English engineer reveals its subject without flattery, without a sense of romance, and absolutely without a moment of sentimentality. Yet the photograph is a monument to power and industry. ©Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 278 12/9/17 10:16 AM fully in the harsh lighting. While we do not know what he was thinking, the form of this photograph reveals him as a thinker of deep ruminations. He was the chemist who first learned how to permanently fix a silver halide photograph in 1839. The portrait of Baudelaire, on the other hand, includes simple, severe clothing, except for the poet’s foulard, tied in a dashing bow. Baudelaire’s intensity creates the illusion that he is looking at us. Carjat’s lens was set for a depth of field of only a few inches. Thus, Baudelaire’s face is in focus, but not his shoulders. What Carjat could not control, except by waiting for the right moment to uncover the lens (at this time, there was no shutter because there was no “fast” film), was the exact ex- pression he could catch. One irony of the Carjat portrait is that Baudelaire, in 1859, had condemned the influence of photography on art, declaring it “art’s most mortal enemy.” He thought that photography was adequate for preserving visual records of perishing things but that it could not reach into “anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s soul.” Baudelaire was a champion of imagination and an opponent of realistic art: “each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.”1 An impressive example of the capacity of the photographic representation is Timothy O’Sullivan’s masterpiece, Canyon de Chelley, Arizona, made in 1873 (Figure 11-5). Many photographers have gone back to this scene, but none has treated it quite the way O’Sullivan did. O’Sullivan chose a moment of intense side- lighting, which falls on the rock wall but not on the nearest group of buildings. One question you might ask about this photograph is whether it reveals the “stoniness” of this rock wall in a manner similar to the way Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (see Figure 2-4) reveals the “mountainness” of the mountain. FIGURE 11-4 (right) Étienne Carjat, Charles Baudelaire. 1870. The irony of this striking portrait lies in the fact that the famous French poet was totally opposed to photography as an art. Source: The National Gallery of Art FIGURE 11-3 (left) Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir John Herschel. 1867. One of the first truly notable portrait photographers, Cameron was given a camera late in life and began photographing her friends, most of whom were prominent in England. After a few years she gave up the camera entirely, but she left an indelible mark on early photography. ©ReX/Shutterstock 1Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 230. 279 jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 279 12/9/17 10:16 AM 280 CHAPTeR 11 FIGURE 11-5 Timothy O’Sullivan, Canyon de Chelley, Arizona. 1873. The American West lured photographers with unwieldy equipment to remote locations such as this. Other photographers have visited the site, but none has outdone O’Sullivan, who permitted the rock to speak for itself. Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum EXPERIENCING Photography and Art 1. Do you agree with Baudelaire that photography is “art’s most mortal enemy”? What reasons might Baudelaire have had for expressing such a view? For some time, photography was not considered an art. Indeed, some people today do not see it as an art because they assume the photograph is an exact replica of what is in front of the camera lens. On the other hand, realism in art had been an ideal since the earliest times, and sculptures such as David (see Figure 5-8) aimed at an exact replica of a human body, however idealized. Modern artists such as Andy Warhol blur the line of art by creating exact replicas of objects such as Campbell’s soup cans, so the question of replication is not the final question in art. Baudelaire saw that painters could be out of work—especially portrait painters—if photog- raphy were widespread. Yet, his own photographic portrait is of powerful artistic interest today. For Baudelaire, photographs were usually Daguerreotypes, which means they were one of a kind. The “print” on silvered copper was the photograph. There was no nega- tive and no way of altering the tones in the print. Shortly after, when the Daguerreo- type process was superseded by inventions such as the glass plate negative, it became jac16871_ch11_276-298.indd 280 12/9/17 10:16 AM 281

PHOTOGRAPHY

The most detailed portions of the photograph are the striations of the rock face, whose tactile qualities are emphasized by the strong sidelighting. The stone build- ings in the distance have smoother textures, particularly as they show up against the blackness of the cave. That the buildings are only twelve to fifteen feet high is indicated by comparison with the height of the barely visible men standing in the ruins. Thus, nature dwarfs the work of humans. By framing the canyon wall, and by waiting for the right light, O’Sullivan has done more than create an ordi- nary “record” photograph. He has concentrated on the subject matter of the puni- ness and softness of humans, in contrast with the grandness and hardness of the canyon. The content centers on the extraordinary sense of stoniness—symbolic of permanence—as opposed to the transience of humanity, made possible by the ca- pacity of the camera to transform realistic detail. PhotograPhy and Painting: the Pictorialists Pictorialists are photographers who use the achievements of painting, particularly realistic painting, in their effort to realize the potential of photography as art. The early pictorialists tried to avoid the head-on directness of Howlett and Carjat, just as they tried to avoid the amateur’s mistakes in composition, such as inclusion of dis- tracting details and imbalance. The pictorialists controlled details by subordinating them to structure. They produced compositions that usually relied on the same un- derlying structures found in most nineteenth-century paintings until the dominance of the Impressionists in the 1880s. Normally, the most important part of the subject matter was centered in the frame. Pictorial lighting, also borrowed from painting, often was sharp and clearly directed, as in Alfred Stieglitz’s Paula (Figure 11-6). The pictorialist photograph was usually soft in focus, centrally weighted, and carefully balanced symmetrically. By relying on the formalist characteristics of possible to subtly alter details within the photograph much as a painter might alter the highlights in a landscape or improve the facial details in a portrait. This is a matter of craft, but it became clear that in careful selection of what is in the photographic print, along with the attention to manipulating the print, in the fashion of Ansel Adams’s great photographs of Yosemite, the best photographers became artists. Were Baude- laire alive to see how photography has evolved, he may well have changed his opinion. The work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Timothy O’Sullivan, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieg- litz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston changed the world’s view of whether or not photography is an art.