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painters and sculptors continued to seek refuge away
from the camera and moved further and further towards
none representational and fi nally abstract art.
Photographers in the next century were to probe end-
lessly, and still are, Degas’ vision of that city life; think
of Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank,
and they were to do it using the same compositional
devices, that life’s continuum could be interrupted by
the camera and, if the photographer wished to place
meaning into the image, then the means to do so, along
with light and shade, would be to choose, recognise,
how exactly the world, the chaos, had to be interrupted,
composed now by photographic means, in order to do
so. Although Degas and others similarly infl uenced had
come up with a new vocabulary, a new way of seeing,
he was nevertheless still operating in the tradition of
Western realism. This tradition had brought into being
the camera but, as a result, had also brought into being a
new way of looking at the world, new ways of compos-
ing, which would be used to try and explain what our
human condition might mean.
By the end of the 19th century the discipline of the tri-
pod, the heavy plate camera, gave way to the hand-held
camera with its instantaneous interruption, as foreseen
by Fox Talbot, and was accepted as standard; the world
was now to be described verbally and visually as if it
were a photograph; little children brought up in the new
age describe reality as if it is the product of the camera,
later the movie, now, with us, alarmingly, the computer
play game. While ‘reality’ had become the capturing of
the images of light from that little hand-held camera
lucida, it had also become freed from the art conven-
tions of the past. Soon, by the end of the 19th century,
the street could be interrupted in all its chaos, and, in
the interruption, made meaningful by the static residue
captured in an instantaneous photograph. It heralded
‘The Decisive Moment,’ essentially the ‘photography of
the street,’ which was still to be rooted, albeit sometimes
skilfully camoufl aged, in that previous formula; that if
meaning is also to be transmitted (as distinct from only
providing documents), then precise composition is still
required, just as William Henry Fox Talbot had quietly
observed in his Pencil of Nature. When the middle of
the 20th century eventually came, both photographers
and artists, and a few art historians, suddenly began to
observe that what some visual artists were now doing
had already been observed by Fox Talbot and had been
articulated brilliantly in the paintings of Edgar Degas
whose eyesight was so bad that he found it diffi cult to
go too much into the sunlight.
The creation of ‘meaning,’ in the end, be it in the
photograph or the painting, is not arbitrary, irrational, by
chance, but the product of careful thought. As Degas said,
“Even when working from nature, one has to compose”
and he added (what many photographers also know),
“No art was ever less spontaneous than mine.”
Alistair Crawford
See Also: Calotype and Talbotype; Daguerreotype;
Talbot, William Henry Fox; Pencil of Nature;
Rejlander, Oscar Gustav; Ruskin, John; MacPherson,
Robert; and Degas, Edgar.Further Reading
Talbot, William Henry Fox. The Pencil of Nature, London
1844–1846. (Reprinted, De Capo Press, New York, 1968)
Kendall, Richard. (Ed.) Degas by himself, Macdonald Orbis,
London, 1987.
Scharf, Aaron. Art and Photography, Allen Lane The Penguin
Press, Harmondsworth, 1968.COMPTES RENDUS HEBDOMADAIRES
DES SÉANCES DE L’ACADÉMIE DES
SCIENCES
The Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de
l’Académie des sciences [Weekly reports on the ses-
sions of the Academy of Sciences] was founded in
1835 by physicist François Arago, then Secretary of
the French Academy of Sciences, to serve as a regu-
lar and complete chronicle of the proceedings of the
scientifi c body, which until then had only sporadically
published memoirs; it is still in existence, albeit with
a different format and title. In scope and frequency, it
was a novel kind of publication, which answered not
only the needs of scientifi c communication but also,
and perhaps more importantly, the emerging social
demand for vulgarization. As it was widely distributed
in Europe and North America, it quickly became an
international reference in science and technology. In
the mind of the buoyant Arago, who was also a lead-
ing left-wing Parliament member, the purpose was as
clearly social as it was scientifi c: the new periodical
was intended to publicize the progress and social utility
of science, in accordance with a broader agenda that
enlisted the Academy itself into scientifi c education
and even the promotion of inventions and inventors,
as happened with the daguerreotype. From the fi rst
disclosure of “Daguerre’s discovery” on 7 January
1839 to the famed announcement of photography to the
world on 19 August 1839, the Comptes rendus reported
week after week on the lengthy procedure of publica-
tion of the daguerreotype. Starting in early 1839, the
periodical continually printed reports by physicists
(especially Arago and his arch-enemy Jean-Baptiste
Biot), as well as claims from inventors and scientists
who, in France and abroad, had designed alternative
methods of photography (such as William Henry Fox