706
original ASA system (1943) and the BS / DIN / ASA
international standards of 1960–62.
The scientifi c fi ndings of Hurter and Driffi eld led
Emerson in 1891 to renounce the art claims he had made
for photography. A great artist, he said, had shown him
that the reproduction or translation of nature was not
art. The fallacy of this argument was based, of course,
in the defi nition of art. It appeared that ‘art’ and ‘paint-
ing’ was almost synonymous to Emerson when he wrote
his retraction. What really happened was that Emerson
preaching on differential focusing led to the use of very
focusing lenses and other blurring effects such as the use
of very coarse paper. Emerson dramatically announced
his views in a black-bordered pamphlet The Death of
Naturalistic Photography.
In his book Emerson had a good deal to say about
photographic exhibitions. He felt that they were poorly
organized. He recommended that photographs be framed
in simple white molding and that they be exhibited on
one line in galleries, not plastered over the wall with
the frames practically touching them. He rightly felt
that pictorial photographs should be isolated, instead
of being lumped together with work done for scientifi c,
technical, and other no aesthetic purposes.
Dissatisfaction with the scientifi c bias of the Pho-
tographic Society under the presidency of Sir William
Abney caused a split in the society in 1892. A group of
pictorially minded members, under the leadership of H.
P. Robinson and George Davison, formed a society for
the exclusive purpose of furthering ‘the development of
the highest form of art of which photography is capable.’
The society was named Linked Ring. They held annual
exhibitions which they referred to as salons, a name
borrowed from the painting world, and which demon-
strated their artistic motivation. By 1901 it was their
proud boast that ‘through the Salon the Linked Ring
had clearly demonstrated that pictorial photography was
able to stand alone and that it had a future quite apart
from that which is purely mechanical.’
Meanwhile Edward S. Curtis was considering what
was eventually to be one of photographer’s major en-
trepreneurs. In 1896 he had begun a survey of Indian
Life in North America. Needing fi nancial assistance,
he eventually turned to J. Pierpont Morgan and in 1907
published the fi rst of the twenty volumes, which fi nally
made up The North American Indian. The project oc-
cupied Curtis until 1930. He began his survey with
reports on Apaches, Jicarillas and Navahoes and ended
with Eskimo tribes in Alaska.
When Kodak introduced the $1.00 Brownie box roll-
fi lm camera in February of 1900, it was an immediate
success, but with one problematic fl aw—the shoebox-
style, cardboard back wore out quite quickly, leaving the
roll fi lm inside more susceptible to light leaks. To fi x the
problem, Kodak engineers created a metal latch to hold
a new rear cover in place, and the problem was fi xed.
The original Brownie Camera was only in production
for about two months, and is quite rare today. Eastman
Kodak company records indicate that many of these
fi rst Brownie Cameras (about 15,000) were shipped to
England. The Brownie Camera with its new back door
design would go on to be known as the No. 1 Brownie
Camera in 1901, when the larger No. 2 was introduced
necessitating a new name and model designation. This
was the same procedure Eastman Kodak used when it
released both the original Kodak Camera, and the fi rst
Folding Pocket Kodak camera.
During the nineteenth century, photography struggled
to establish itself as art but failed to fi nd an identity. Only
under extraordinary conditions of political upheaval and
social reform did it address the most basic subject of
art, which is life itself. In developing an independent
vision, photography would combine the aesthetic prin-
ciples of the Secession and the documentary approach
of photojournalism with lessons learned from motion
photography. At the same time, modern painting, with
changes in photography undermining its aesthetic as-
sumptions posed new challenges to its credentials as one
of the arts. Like the other arts, photography responded to
the three principal currents of our time: Expressionism,
Abstraction and Fantasy. But because it has continued
to be devoted for the most part to the world around us,
modern photography has adhered largely to realism and,
hence, has followed a separate development. We must
therefore discuss 20-century photography primarily in
terms of different schools and how they have dealt with
those often-confl icting currents.
The course pursued by modern photography was
facilitated by technological advances. It must be em-
phasized, however, that these have enlarged but never
dictated the photographer’s options. Surprinsgly, even
the introduction of color photography by Louis Lumière
in 1907 had relatively little impact on the content,
outlook, or aesthetic of photography, even though it
did remove the last barrier cited by nineteeth-centrury
critics of photography as an art. Photography did create
a new art form, the cinema. An outgrowth of motion
photography also came to perfection in 1894 thanks to
Lumière and his brother. Unfortunately, we are unable
to treat it in our surrey, because the printed page cannot
reproduce continuous action or sound.
Other photographers used the medium far more
directly, as a means of registering people, setting and
experiences. This specifi c dimension of photography
was eminently refl ected in the work of the documentary
photographers, showed plied their trade in the far corner
of the globe. Despite their commercial concerns, they
had ample opportunity to record their exotic surround-
ings, and they often did so with considerable inspiration.
Their cameras enabled them to record not only every-HISTORY: 8. 1890s