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ART PHOTOGRAPHY
In 1867, a decade before his election to the papacy
as Leo XIII (1878-1903), Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci
composed a Latin poem entitled “Ars Photographica.”
The poem proclaims that photography surpasses even
the achievement of the ancient Greek painter Apelles,
portraitist of Alexander the Great:
Drawn by the sun’s bright pencil,
How well, O glistening stencil,
You express the brow’s fi ne grace,
Eyes’ sparkle, and beauty of face.
O marvellous might of mind,
New prodigy! A design
Beyond the contrival
Of Apelles, Nature’s rival.
(Translated by Robert M. Adams)
Some years after becoming Pope, Leo XIII commis-
sioned a fresco celebrating the new art of photography.
Situated in the vault of the Galleria dei Candelabri, the
mural depicts personifi cations of Painting, Sculpture and
Architecture paying homage to Ecclesia; Photography
is depicted in a lower realm, accompanied by Weaving.
Despite being sanctioned by the pope, photography con-
tinued to occupy an ambiguous position in the hierarchy
of art, science and craft during the second half of the
nineteenth century.
In 1860, in a paper read to the South London Pho-
tographic Society, the Victorian portrait photographer
Cornelius Jabez Hughes proposed to divide photogra-
phy into three classes: “Mechanical [or literal] pho-
tography, Art-photography, and, for want of a better
term, High-Art photography.” In the fi rst category, he
suggested, the photographer aims at “a simple repre-
sentation of the objects to which the camera is pointed
... where all the parts are to be equally sharp and
perfect.” Art Photography, by contrast, “embrace[s] all
pictures where the artist, not content with taking things
as they may naturally occur, determines to diffuse his
mind into them by arranging, modifying, or otherwise
disposing them, so that they may appear in a more
appropriate or beautiful manner than they would have
been without such interference.” For Jabez Hughes
High-Art Photography was a discrete category of Art
Photography limited to “pictures which aim at higher
purposes than the majority of art-photographs, and
whose aim is not merely to amuse, but to instruct, to
purify, and ennoble.”
Some years earlier, in a paper presented at the Royal
Society of Arts in 1852, Roger Fenton had already
acknowledged the diffi culties facing the photographer
when he or she attempted to represent the ideal by photo-
graphing the particular. Fenton recommended, as a par-
tial solution, that practitioners should always select the
best and most appropriate models. This recommendation
echoes classical notions of ideal beauty, exemplifi ed
most famously by Zeuxis when he undertook to execute
a painting of Helen of Troy for the citizens of Croton. It
will be remembered that Zeuxis selected as his models
the fi ve most beautiful virgins in Croton and combined
in his painting the best features of each woman. Zeuxis’s
emphasis upon selection prefi gured Fenton’s recom-
mendation that photographers should choose the best
models, but his practice of combining the best features
of his models was incompatible with the literal nature of
photography. Fenton’s still-lifes and game-pieces con-
fi rm that he chose his models carefully. In addition, they
link the practice of photography to venerable pictorial
traditions, most particularly those of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Italian, Netherlandish and Spanish
painting. Fenton’s still-lifes also link photography to
ancient mimetic traditions, exemplifi ed most famously
by two paintings executed by Zeuxis and Parrhasios.
Zeuxis’s trompe l’oeil of grapes appeared so real that
birds came to peck at it, but Parrhasios’s painting of a
curtain deceived Zeuxis himself. Similar to Fenton’s
artistic still-lifes and hunting pictures are photographs
made contemporaneously in France by Charles Aubry,
Adolphe Bilordeaux and Adolphe Braun.
William Henry Fox Talbot in the first years of
photography created pictures that prefi gured Fenton’s
and Jabez Hughes’s defi nitions of art photography. In
particular, Talbot’s Fruit Piece, in The Pencil of Nature,
anticipated Fenton’s still-lifes by more than a decade.
Talbot selected, arranged and composed his subjects,
while also exploring various effects of light and shade.
In some notable instances he produced alternative ver-
sions of the same composition, and in other cases he
returned again and again to the same subject. Between
1843 and 1848, in Edinburgh, David Octavius Hill and
Robert Adamson also produced architectural views,
conversation pieces, portraits and tableaux vivants
that transcended literal recording. Hill approached the
practice of photography with a painter’s training and eye
and worked with composition, pose, light and shade to
create pictures that were, in some respects, equivalents
in the new medium to portraits by Henry Raeburn, for
instance, or to etchings by Rembrandt. Hill and Adam-
son, like Talbot, were evidently more concerned with
mood and effect than with the literal recording of their
subjects. A photograph such as that entitled The Fairy
Tree at Colinton demonstrates that Hill and Adamson
could be as much concerned with magic and imagination
as with the transcription of nature.
In 1868 in a review published in the Art Journal
the anonymous author observed on seeing an album of
photographs by the so-called father of Art Photography,
Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “If, a few years ago, we had
been asked the question, ‘Has Photography produced
anything worthy of being called a work of Art?’ we