1271
jamin Brecknell Turner). Often photographers tried to
achieve an empty sky for stylistic reasons. Japanese
photographs were closely linked to the woodblock
tradition that made use of large single-tone spaces:
Kusakabe Kimbei’s ‘Fujiyama’ (c.1880) is a coloured
albumen print with a fl at sky. The empty sky in Car-
leton E. Watkin’s 1860s photographs (of the type
to be disseminated as artistic prints and postcards),
highlights the sublime in the iconic landscape of the
American west at Yosemite. In the 1890s, the British
photographer Peter Henry Emerson sometimes used
a white, blank sky to evoke distance and fi n-de-siecle
emptiness (for example ‘The Bridge,’ a photo etching
from Marsh Leaves, 1895).
J. M. W. Turner, discussing paintings, breached the
artistic concern of making an opaque two-dimensional
surface refl ect light. In photography, the appearance of
the sky depended on the characteristics of the methods
and paper used, and how light would refl ect off the sur-
face. The mirror surface of the daguerreotype refl ected
light and added interest to void skies (Horatio Ross’s
daguerreotype ‘Craigdacourt,’ 1848, for example).
Watercolourists and calotypists both used Turkey Mill
paper to render the sky mottled and interesting. Hill
and Adamson’s work reveals the blurred effect, creat-
ing texture and shape, caused by the way in which the
paper absorbed chemicals. Journals suggested improv-
ing blank, white skies when using a paper negative by
blackening the verso with ink, and when using a glass
negative by painting the verso red or yellow.
Imaging clouds demanded technical skill and as-
tounded viewers, who were unused to seeing romantic
symbols in such a scientifi c context. It was a technical
challenge until photographic papers became more re-
active than the early albumen papers of the 1850s, and
so alternative methods were used. Clouds were often
painted onto the backs of negatives. Farnham Maxwell
Lyte revealed in 1861 that tufts of cotton could be placed
the glass negative and the printing frame to achieve
clouds. Alternatively, the part of the negative showing
the sky could be covered during exposure in the dark-
room, so that the detail was not lost.
It became common practice to superimpose one nega-
tive of clouds onto a negative of a landscape, creating a
photomontage to achieve detailed sky and land in one
photograph. Frenchmen Camille Silvy and Gustave Le
Gray, and Englishmen F. M. Lyte and Roger Fenton were
amongst the nineteenth-century photographers who used
this innovation. Silvy’s ‘River Scene, France’ (1858), is
an early example of this technique, and was praised in
The Photographic Journal (5, 1859) for its ‘exquisite
and varied detail,’ although Silvy was also criticised for
using ‘artifi ce to make picture, not take a picture” (Paris
review by Louis Figier, 1859).
Roger Fenton’s study ‘September Clouds’ (1859),
emulating Constable’s paintings of clouds, was used
in a number of different landscapes to give a model
sky to each image. His photographs were fi rst shown
in Britain and sold well to an international market. The
blatant manipulation of superimposing negatives to
artistic ends was a concern for Le Gray, who insisted
that photographs preserve the ‘truth’ but who also used
photography as an artistic printmaking process, as in
‘The Solar Effect—Ocean’ (1857). Sky and cloud made
Le Gray famous; his many seascapes selling well.
Nineteenth-century photography of sky and cloud was
caught between the contemporary concerns of art and
science. Echoing the painterly obsession with imaging
the atmosphere, it acted as a catalyst for technical inno-
vations in the 1800s, and the development of scientifi c
skill and artistic taste. Photographs of sky and cloud sold
brilliantly to a large market as fi ne art prints, postcards,
or stereoscopic views. The subject was used to varying
effect in different situations: highlighting majesty of
mountains, emphasising vastness of land or sky, con-
tributing to propaganda of empire, documenting new
theories and discoveries, aiding explanations of natural
processes, and advancing photography as an art.
Sophie Leighton
See also: Aerial photography; Fenton, Roger;
Le Gray, Gustave; Lunar photography; Night
Photography; Pictorialism; Silvy, Camille.Further Reading
Weaver, Mike (ed.), British Photography in the Nineteenth
Century: The Fine Art Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Clair, Jean, Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde,
Munich, Prestell, 1999.
Coe, Brian, and Haworth-Booth, Mark. A Guide to Early Photo-
graphic Processes, London, V&A Museum, 1983.
Ruskin, John, Modern Painters, London, 1843.
Quand Passent Les Nuages, Galerie de Photographie 1988, Paris,
Bibliotheque Nationale.
Hamblyn, Richard, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur
Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, London,
Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001, and ‘A Celestial Journey’ in Tate
Etc Issue 5 (Autumn 2005).SLINGSBY, ROBERT (d. 1895)
English photographer
Robert Slingsby was a professional photographer
working in Lincoln from circa 1859 where he was also
described as a stationer and dealer in artistic supplies.
He joined the Photographic Society in 1869 and was a
regular exhibitor of work in the Society’s annual exhibi-
tion from 1863 initially showing examples of his portrait
work and local views but gradually showing more staged
genre and art studies.