A History of Pictures by David Hockney & Martin Gayford

Author:David Hockney & Martin Gayford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500773765
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT

The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey, 1835

Photogenic drawing negative

It dates from as early as August 1835, when Talbot noted, ‘if the paper is transparent, the first [photogenic] drawing may serve as an object, to produce a second drawing, in which the lights and shadows would be reversed’. Therefore, whereas each daguerreotype was as unique as a painting, Talbot’s images could be reproduced, like an engraving, an indefinite number of times.

DH - That made a big difference. With the invention of a system of reproduction, photography became a mass medium. The daguerreotype was just a one-off thing.

MG - Some of the very earliest photographs are also among the best ones: as good as any that have been taken since. Talbot, who could not draw, turned out to be a photographer of great sensitivity. In 1840, he developed an improved system – allowing for much briefer exposures – that he dubbed the ‘calotype’, from the Greek word for ‘beauty’, kalos.

These were indeed beautiful, with deep Rembrandt-like shadows. Many of the finest early calotypes, however, were made not by Talbot himself, but by a professional though undistinguished painter, David Octavius Hill, working, as we have seen, in Edinburgh, in collaboration with a young chemist, Robert Adamson.

Hill and Adamson were the prototype for the division of roles in cinema between the director and cameraman; they also foreshadowed later partnerships between painters and photographic technicians. Yet there is a mystery about their collaboration. After Adamson’s early death in 1848 Hill worked with other photographers, but never again made such remarkable pictures. Perhaps Hill/Adamson were a little like the partnerships in contemporary art, such as Gilbert & George.

In the 1840s, at least in Edinburgh, there was no sharp division between painting and photography. Hill was happy to exhibit the calotypes as ‘preliminary studies and sketches’ for a painting. John Harden, a watercolourist, on seeing them in 1843, wrote that, ‘The pictures produced are as Rembrandt’s but improved so like his style & the oldest & finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting & effect must be the consequence.’ William Etty RA seems to have agreed, since he translated the Hill/Adamson portrait of him from 1844 into a self-portrait painted in a Rembrandt-like idiom of impasto and rich shadow. Etty was by no means the only painter who began to use photography almost as soon as it was developed.

DH - Many painters would have regarded photographs as something to follow, in the same way as earlier artists would have seen the optical projection of nature by the camera obscura as something to aim at. It would have been the most realistic-looking picture they would’ve seen. They would have registered all the little differences in tonality that the photograph revealed, and they would have noticed you see in a photograph more clearly than you do in ordinary vision. It’s done some editing for you.

MG - We can watch the transition from before 1839 into the brave new world of photography in the work of a long-lived artist such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867).

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