ITAP Photography 1

ITAP Photography 1

1)    What is photography’s “true genius”?

The true genius of photography is the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearance, the isolation of a moment.

2) Name a proto-photographer?

 Henry Fox Talbot was one of the first proto-photographers. In the 1800’s an account was published, by Humphrey Davie, who reported on Fox Talbot impregnating a leather sheet with silver salts, placing leaves on top then exposing it to light. An image of the leaves appeared for a tantalizing moment, but was lost to the darkness as they didn’t have anyway of stopping/fixing the exposure.  

  
3)  In the 19^th century, what term was associated with the daguerreotype?

The term that was associated with the daguerreotype was “mirror with a memory’. 

The daguerreotypes was, and still is, a more sophisticated replication of reality, than the negative offers, being printed on glass, it appeared to give a spacial awareness, similar to a 3D effect. 

The fact that the processed image couldn’t be replicated, along with size limitations and cost, meant that daguerreotype fell out of favor, in a market that was to become dominated by mass replication. 

4)    What is the vernacular?

     

    The vernacular is a term used to encompass the images created in all aspects of photography and referrers to the wonders of the medium, not the practitioner, who would have been amateurs or unknown photographers.  

5)    How do you “fix the shadows”?

How to fix the shadows was a term used by Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot to explain the processes they had developed of obtaining and retaining photographic images. “Shadows”, was the term used to describe the images cast from optical obscurers, which had been discovered century’s before, but the process of fixing or making permanent proved to be illusive until Talbot and Daguerre each found different methods of doing so in 1839. 

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 6)   What is the ‘create de visite”?

Create de visite was a photographic calling card that would have the portrait of the caller. It was patented by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1834. He developed a camera with four lenses that would take 8 individual images on a single plate, which reduced studio time and there buy the cost and making portraiture more assessable to the masses. The idea found popularity for many years and developed from portraits to the likes of a postcard, the standardised size meant that people could build and share their albums.

7)   Who was Nadar and why was he so successful?

Nadar was a trade name and branding devised and used by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, ‘He was a showman, the Andy Warhol of Paris of the time,” he broke convention of the stayed portraiture of the period, with all its props, back drops, and ostentatious clothing that denoted status, 

and produced intimate, natural, engaging images of celebrity’s of the day, his work made his studios one of the most successful studios in Paris.

 8)    What is pictorialism?

Pictorialism was described as an artistic dead and perpetuated by the elite art photographers. They were in a world of the past, while the vernacular was plugged into the excitement of the now.