Christmas is over, the gifts have been opened, the wrapping paper thrown in the trash. I’m ready to bet that some readers got a new tablet or pad, a new smartphone or some other electronic device. If Santa was feeling less generous, or if you were not so very good, you may have only received a selfie stick or a case for your cell phone.
For those readers who spent Christmas day surrounded by grandchildren, I invite you to think back to Christmas fifty years ago. That year too, there was a “high-tech” gift on many wish lists. We were hoping for a Polaroid Swinger, an instant camera that squeezed out, in a minute flat, the photo we just snapped.
I was one of the lucky ones, I found a Swinger under the Christmas tree that year, and my sisters and I spent our Christmas day snapping our recently acquired poodle, the first dog we’d ever had.
The photos were small, bad and fascinating. Sometimes they were streaky, sometimes sprinkled with white spots, or only partially developed, leaving half the photo blank, looking as if it had been ripped in two. Also, there was that distinctive chemical smell and often, if we were too hasty in handling our photo, we left the smudge of our fingertips.
My father had a small motion-picture camera, we also had a Kodak Brownie, but the camera my sisters and I loved best was the Swinger because using it, we felt in control and got instant results.
As I write, if I turn my head, I see a group of adolescents in the street below. They’re taking group selfies. No sooner is the photo snapped, they crowd together to see the result. I’m not sure they’d have the patience to wait the minute it used to take for the Swinger to place a finished photo in our hands.
Fifty years ago, we “met” the Swinger (some of you may remember the ad with Ali McGraw and the $19.95 price tag). If we go back one hundred years more, we arrive at a period when photography was an extremely demanding craft and an emerging art form.
In early December, while in England to visit a friend, this was brought home to me in an “electrifying and delightful way” (to use the words of the photographer whose work I went to see) at an exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the British museum of art and design. The photographer is Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), one of the 19th century’s greatest and among the first to understand that photography is art.
Julia Margaret Cameron, who was born in Calcutta, was introduced to the very new process of photography in 1842 by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel when they met in South Africa, where Herschel was surveying the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. Cameron became interested in the process and followed its developments, but it was not until 1863 that she received her first camera.
Two years later, this extraordinary woman, whose enthusiasm for photography was equaled only by the confidence she placed in herself and her art, had her first “one-woman” show in the South Kensington Museum, later renamed the Victoria & Albert. In 1868, the museum’s director assigned her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, making her the museum’s first “artist-in-residence.”
Cameron photographed many of the greats of her day, her friend the astronomer Herschel, Charles Darwin, and the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbor on the Isle of Wight, where she and her husband settled upon their return from India.
On that island off the south coast of England, Cameron began her first experiments, taking pictures of her famous neighbor, but also of island children, her family and her maids.
From the start, Cameron conceived of her work as art and sought to “combine the real and the Ideal.” She did not document events, as did her American contemporary Mathew Brady. On the other side of the Atlantic, he was revolutionizing photography in his way as he created the profession of photojournalist through his documentation of the bloody reality of the Civil War.
Cameron preferred historical, allegorical or biblical scenes. She composed her photographs as if they were paintings. In fact, her series of portraits of Virgin and Child are inspired by the Renaissance masterpieces of Raphael. Her photographs also illustrated some of Tennyson’s narrative poems, such as his retelling of the tale of King Arthur.
Yet, Cameron’s particular genius does not concern what she chose to photograph. Her innovations were technical and in her day, she was criticized for her unconventional techniques. In one article, I could never do them justice nor would I know how to explain them well. However, to give readers an idea of what it meant to take a photo in those days, I include this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eastman/sfeature/wetplate_step1.html
On this PBS site, you can learn the eight steps of the collodion process of photography that used wet glass plates the same size as the final print. Cameron’s photographs are quite large, meaning she used fragile glass plates of the same size, coating them with several substances before finally producing a photograph. To arrive at a final print, patience, knowledge of chemistry, and some luck were involved.
Often, the final result contained “flaws.” Cameron’s genius was to recognize them as art. The substances coating the plate often turned into swirls or smears in the print. Scratches might also appear; there could even be the smudge of a fingertip. For Cameron, they were part of the process and an ingredient of her art.
In the end, each of her photos was a “hand-made” object, a print containing the imprint of the artist’s unique personality.
Pottsville photographer George Bretz used the same process as Cameron when in 1884, he was hired by the Smithsonian Institute to document the Kohinoor Mine at the Shenandoah Colliery. His were the first photo shoots underground and his photos, the first of the underground workings of a mine, opening a new era in mine photography.
How many of us today would have the patience to work like Cameron or Bretz? Their techniques belong to the past; their patience may as well—something to think about in 2016.
On that note, I wish all my readers a happy, healthy new year. I look forward to “meeting” you again in 2016 for our seventh year together.
