346
scription and critique of individual photographs. There
was much of both kinds of writing in the 1850s and ‘60s,
when the medium was growing into its technical and
commercial potential. After that, photography criticism
appeared intermittently (and on the model of painting
criticism), as a necessary feature of art photography
movements. Those movements and their twentieth-cen-
tury equivalents singled out certain early practitioners as
exemplary forebears; but nineteenth-century photogra-
phers and photographs received unprecedented critical
attention in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
when debates about the nature and quality of early pho-
tography sprung from two intertwined developments:
the maturity of photographic theory, and the medium’s
new presence in the art market.
Early criticism was centered around photographic so-
cieties and the exhibition venues they created. The great-
est number of texts are French, refl ecting the role Paris
played as the fi rst modern art capital, with a developing
market for painting avant-gardes and much attention
to the industry of art reproductions. Some of the best
French criticism has to do with photography’s relation
to Realism and Naturalism, or with the medium’s role
vis à vis traditional printmaking media. Francis Wey’s
writing is the chief example, and also the earliest. In
the course of 1851 Wey wrote twenty-three articles for
La Lumière. His attention to the medium subsequently
subsided, but Wey is the only fi gure in the nineteenth
century who engaged in programmatic photography
criticism: he attempted to identify photography’s rela-
tionship to other mediums, and some of its particular
qualities. Wey’s writing affected the thinking of other
writers for La Lumière, who often engaged in remark-
able descriptions of individual photographs, making that
journal the best source for early photo criticism. Henri
de Lacretelle praised Gustave Le Gray’s Mission Hé-
liographique photographs of the cloisters at Moissac and
Saint Trophime in these terms: “The arabesque unfurls,
the trefoil cuts a relief, the ogive arch lets the daylight
pass, the glass draws its legend with perfect transpar-
ency. M. Le Gray has a palette in photography: he
varies his tints to infi nity, clarity cannot go further. The
page itself seems of stone or marble.” Charles Gaudin,
reviewing one of Ernest Lacan’s photographic soirées,
had this to say about Charles Marville’s photograph
L’Ecole des beaux-arts sous la neige:
A thick layer of snow covers the ground, the statues of
the facade, and the architectural fragments that adorn this
courtyard. The effect of the snow is admirably rendered;
but what is most striking is the effect of the perspective.
The planes fade and withdraw in a vaporous atmosphere,
and the background details draw themselves with charm-
ing delicacy. I wish I could better describe this remarkably
beautiful work; it is one of the most surprising results that
has yet been obtained.Both descriptions are of architectural views, a subject
singled out by Wey and agreed upon almost universally
as apt to photography.
Wey’s conviction that photography was also the best
medium for artist’s studies, especially those of landscape
motifs with light and weather effects, found an echo in
the writing of Sir William Newton, a British miniaturist
and amateur photographer. In 1853 Newton delivered
a paper to the newly formed Photographic Society,
upon the topic of photography’s relation to the arts. He
suggested that when artists were making photographic
studies for use in the studio, they should throw camera
subjects a bit out of focus, to better record effects of light
and atmosphere. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake concurred
with Newton’s observations, fi nding the accumulation of
contrasting details in most photographs the quality that
removed them from visual “truth.” Eastlake praised the
calotypes of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
for their Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro. However, for
Eastlake, photography’s value lay less in its relation to
art than its ubiquitous social presence, and its ability
to render present absent loved ones. She wrote about
portraits of children: “the very shoes of the one, the
inseparable toy of the other—are given with a strength
of identity which art does not even seek.” Eastlake’s few
observations about the intimate relationship possible
between viewer and photograph resonate with pictures
by her contemporaries Julia Margaret Cameron and Cle-
mentina, Lady Hawarden. The same critical predilection
is widely elaborated in later photography and criticism,
notably the writing of Roland Barthes (q.v.).
Many early critics delighted in photographs’ masses
of details, precisely for the surplus of information they
brought. This is clear in reviews of another subject un-
derstood to be suited to the new medium, travel views,
especially when they were produced as stereographs.
The most interesting American voice from this period,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., popularized photography
in three essays for The Atlantic Monthly, between 1859
and 1863. His chief object was the stereoscope, but he
informed his readers about the technical production
of various kinds of photograph, and their possible ap-
plications, from criminal profi ling to the stereographic
exploration of great cathedrals. This is not criticism per
se, but Holmes’ passion for the medium makes him one
of its best writers:“A painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic fi gure
spares us nothing—all must be there, every stick,
straw, scratch, as faithfully as the dome of St. Peter’s,
or the summit of Mont Blanc, or the ever-moving
stillness of Niagra...Theoretically, a perfect photo-
graph is absolutely inexhaustible.”Holmes marveled at the profound disruption photo-
graphs caused in the experience of the world. He