1196
an objective account of appearances although, in her
opinion, somewhat limited in its formal properties. She
is most critical of photography in respect of its deaden-
ing effect on form and failure to represent the full tonal
range of its subject, what she refers to as ‘the falling off
of artistic effect’ (462). She observes: ‘If the cheek be
very brilliant in colour, it is as often as not represented
by a dark stain. If the eye be blue, it turns out as colour-
less as water; if the hair be golden or red, it looks as if
it had been dyed, if very glossy it is cut up into lines of
light as big as ropes’ (461) In landscape too, she fi nds
that photography fails to properly convey the ‘breadth
and gradations of nature’: ‘The fi nest lawn turns out but
a gloomy funeral-pall ... trees, if done with the slower
paper process, are black, and from the movement, un-
certain webs against the white sky.’ (463).
Eastlake’s essay appeared in the wake of the wet-
collodion process and she is ambivalent about the fi ne
detailing that the process afforded. Eastlake acknowl-
edges the ‘pictorial feats’ achieved by wet-collodion,
for example in its precise rendition of ‘Alpine masses’
but she retains an aesthetic preference for the soft papers
and gentler outlines of the calotype, setting up an op-
position between the former’s assertion of ‘facts’ and
the latter’s facility for the picturesque. The picturesque
is an important and recurring motif in Eastlake’s essay,
used specifi cally to mean the opposite of descriptive.
She presents picturesque conventions such as imprecise
outline, broad suggestion and pleasing irregularity in
the representation of nature as a benchmark of artistic
practice, stating: ‘If the photograph in its early and
imperfect scientifi c state was more consonant to our
feelings for art, it is because, as far as it went, it was
more true to our experience of Nature. Mere broad
light and shade, with the correctness of general forms
and absence of all convention, will, when nothing fur-
ther is attempted, give artistic pleasure of a very high
kind; it is only when greater precision and detail are
superadded that the eye misses the further truths which
should accompany the further fi nish.’(p. 460) It is not
only the fi ne detailing that Eastlake fi nds objectionable
in the improved ‘scientifi c state.’ She also laments the
lack of ‘mystery’ in the wet collodion print and she
sees portraiture as its chief casualty: ‘Every button is
seen—piles of stratifi ed fl ounces in most accurate draw-
ing are there,—what was at fi rst only suggestion is now
all careful making out,—but the likeness to Rembrandt
and Reynolds is gone! (p.461) Her repeated references
to Rembrandt in the essay reiterate her preferences
for the picturesque, where character studies are sug-
gested rather than the descriptive where physiognomy
is minutely told.
In reading Lady Eastlake’s Quarterly review her
connection to both the Royal Academy (her husband
was its President) and to the Photographic Society (her
husband had been its chair) should be borne in mind. It
is quite plausible that Eastlake’s essay was as much an
iteration of Victorian academicism as it was a critique of
photography. In her comparison of the ‘free-will of the
intelligent being’ to the ‘obedience of the machine’ she
is ostensibly distinguishing between the artist and the
camera but she may equally well be referring to the very
contemporary fashion for Pre-Raphaelitism. Knowing
that Eastlake frequently used the Quarterly Review to
settle old scores it is quite possible to read her reference
to the artist’s ‘... power of selection and rejection, the
living application of that language which lies dead in
his paint-box’ (466) as a further public rejection of the
strictures of John Ruskin.
Julie Sheldon
See also: Hill, David Octavius, and Robert Adamson;
Eastlake, Charles Lock; Calotype; Wet-collodion; and
Ruskin, John.Further Reading
Stevenson, Sara, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson:
Catalogue of their calotypes taken between 1843 and 1847
in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981.
Letter to JM Saturday October 7 1843. By permission of the
John Murray Archive.
‘Photography,’ Quarterly Review, vol. 101, April 1857, 442–
468.
Smith, Charles Eastlake (ed.), Journals and Correspondence of
Lady Eastlake, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1895.RIIS, JACOB AUGUST (1848–1914)
Dannish photographer
There are not many examples of photography changing
societies perception so as to render signifi cant social and
political change, indeed some would argue that pho-
tojournalism simply sells newspapers. One exception
would be Jacob Riis, (born Ribe, Denmark, emigrated to
USA 1870) who used photography to provide evidence
of the appalling conditions of the slums of New York
City which he photographed in the 1880s for 10 years,
often at night, and with an early use of magnesium
powder, culminating in the most famous of his books,
the fi rst of its kind: How the Other Half Lives (1890).
Packed 522 to the acre of mainly immigrants, New
York had the worst disease ridden slums in the world.
In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York
Tribune but found that his words, and indeed the printed
woodblock illustrations made from his photographs,
had little impact. But as a result of publishing his night
photographs, the fl op houses and police ‘5 cents a spot’
lodgings were abolished and a new era of treating the
poor and homeless began in the USA with Riis at the
forefront of the campaign. Known as the ‘Emancipa-