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limited color sensitivity of the materials then in use.
The black mirror more truthfully exhibited the sort of
tonal relationships which would be created on a pan-
chromatic material—something that was still decades in
the future. The blue sensitivity of calotype, waxed paper
and wet collodion actually exaggerated the impact of
aerial perspective, lightening the middle distance and
distance more than was apparent to the naked eye, due
to the increased blueness of the light which reached the
camera from those distances.
In photography, linear perspective is a function of
the relationship between the focal length of the lens,
and the lens to subject distance. If the lens to subject
distance remains constant, then so does perspective even
if the focal length of the lens is changed. If, however, a
wide-angle lens is used, and the camera is moved closer
to the foreground subject, then the relationship changes
and a distortion is introduced. That distortion appears
to change perspective, and has been an issue which has
had to be confronted and addressed ever since lenses
were fi rst used as an aid to drawing.
Early illustrators using the camera lucida as an aid to
drawing quickly recognized the change in spatial read-
ing, which a short focal length lens gave to them. Such
effects are visible in the railway illustrations of John
Cooke Bourne in the 1840s, who, for example, would
later take up the camera himself as the photographer
on the construction of Charles Vignoles’ bridge over
the Dneiper in Kiev. Users of both the camera lucida
and the camera obscura had long understood that un-
less their instruments were level, a distortion caused by
changes in vertical perspective would ensue. Talbot and
his circle recognized this problem early on in the history
of photography—where the tendency to tilt the camera
upwards to include the topes of buildings introduced a
horizontal perspective effect which we know today as
‘converging verticals.’
In a letter to Talbot in June 1839, quoted in Schaaf
(2000), his uncle, William Fox Strangways, offered a
criticism of his early photogenic drawings, with the
observation:
I wish you could contrive to mend nature’s perspec-
tive—we draw objects standing up & she draws them lying
down which requires a correction of the eye or mind in
looking at the drawings.
Cameras would later be fi tted with rising lens panels
to correct this distortion, enabling the tops of buildings
to be included while keeping the instrument perfectly
level. Others asserted that the creation of a true or
natural perspective was beyond the capability of the
camera. Writing in the Journal of the Photographic
Society in June 1853, John Leighton believed that the
single photograph would always suffer from the fact that
“linear perspective [appears] comparatively fl at when
contrasted with binocular perspective as exemplifi ed in
the stereoscope.” That comparative fl atness was in fact a
realistic representation of perspective, not a distortion.
Many artists saw the perspective created by the
camera lens as being as being a distortion, an unnatural
reading of the subject. Yet, as would later be proved, the
camera’s perspective was entirely natural—it was the
expansion of perspective which was commonplace in
paintings which was false. The painter George Fred-
erick Watts (1817–1904) believed that photography
“has unfortunately introduced into art a misconception
of perspective which is as ugly as it is false,” and the
American artist Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) was so
disillusioned by the perspective created by the camera
that he abandoned using photographs as reference.
For much of the second half of the nineteenth century,
the lenses used in architectural and landscape photogra-
phy were of relatively long focal length, requiring quite
a substantial camera to subject distance in the case of
churches and cathedrals. Such lenses—with a fi eld of
view of between 10 ̊ and 30 ̊—were essential if large
format images were to be created which exhibited the
degree of sharpness demanded by early photographers.
Until optical manufacturing techniques advanced
suffi ciently to eliminate spherical aberration, long fo-
cal length lenses were the surest way of achieving a
perfectly fl at image fi eld across the entire plate area.
The effect of that was to create a slight compression
of perspective—the fl atness about which Leighton,
Watts, Pennell and others complained. By the end of
the century, with wide-angle lenses offering fi elds of
view of between 50 ̊ and 80 ̊, photography was able to
create the same sort of enhanced perspective so beloved
of painters.
Kuei-ying HuangSee also: Delamotte, Philip Henry; Keith, Thomas;
and Talbot, William Henry Fox.Further Reading
Delamotte, Philip Henry, The Practice of Photography – A
Manual for Students and Amateurs, London: Photographic
Institution, 1855 (reprint New York: Arno Press, 1973)
Schaaf, Larry, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot,
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000
Scharf, Aaron, Art & Photography, Harmondsworth: Pelican
Books, 1974PERU
In September of 1839, a major Lima newspaper (El Co-
mercio), offered its readers news of the new Daguerrean
process. Peruvian engagement with photography was not
far behind that of more affl uent countries (an in some
cases it was ahead). In July of 1842, Maximiliano Danti