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As it reproduces pictures of nature with extreme accuracy,
and often with a perfection and fi nish that the cleverest
draughtsman would not know how to achieve, those who
see in art only an imitation of nature have had to accept
photography as the fi nal and most complete expression
of art. Many, therefore, have allowed themselves to be
seduced by this idea and, applying themselves to the
mechanical side of reproduction, they believe they have
in photography reached the extreme limits of perfection,
when they have managed to fi x on the paper a sharp,
clear image, fi nely detailed, of some scene. The more
exact the copy is, the more it seems to them they have
succeeded.
One of the seminal discourses on photography in the
1850s was written by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake in 1857,
and published, unattributed, in the London Quarterly
Review. Her husband, Sir Charles Eastlake was, at the
time President of both the Royal Academy, and the
Photographic Society of London. In a perceptive essay,
and drawing on her understanding of Hunt’s writings on
the actinic values of light, she observed that
So impatient have been the blues and violets to perform
their task upon the recipient plate, that the very substance
of the colour has been lost and dissolved in the solar pres-
ence; while so laggard have been the reds and yellows and
all tints partaking to them, that they have hardly kindled
into activity before the light has been withdrawn.
Thus it is that the relation of one colour to another is
found changed and often reversed, the deepest blue being
altered from a dark mass into a light one, and the most
golden-yellow from a light body into a dark.
It is obvious, therefore, that however successful
photography may be in the closest imitation of light and
shadow, it fails, and must fail, in the rendering of true
chiaroscuro, or the true imitation of light and dark.
Despite her clear understanding of the limitations of
the ‘ordinary’ blue sensitive emulsions of all the early
processes, Lady Eastlake went on to overlook those
same failures which she had just been considering
And this brings us to the artistic part of our subject, and to
those questions which sometimes puzzle the spectator, as
to how far photography is really a picturesque agent, what
are the causes of its successes and its failures, and what in
the sense of art are its successes and failures? And these
questions may be fairly asked now when the scientifi c
processes on which the practice depends are brought to
such perfection that, short of the coveted attainment of
colour, no great improvement can be further expected.
More than a decade and a half would pass before
the spectral sensitivity of plates was extended—thanks
to Hermann Vogel’s discovery of dye sensitisation in
1873—but despite the limitations of negative materi-
als sensitive to only blue and violet, some of the fi nest
photography of the nineteenth century had already been
created by the time Lady Eastlake wrote her essay.
The decade thus saw the emergence of debate about
whether or not photography was an art or a science, about
what constituted an artistic photograph, and whether or
not the true art of photography was the ‘perfection’ with
which it could replicate nature. While many proposed
that to be accepted as an art, the new medium ought to
borrow the traditions and trappings of painting, others
argued that there was a unique photographic aesthetic
which ought to be explored and developed, establishing
photography as an independent art. Others saw photog-
raphy as the death of art itself.
Baudelaire, writing in 1859, was not alone in his
belief that photography was, “the refuge of every would-
be painter, every painter to ill-endowed or too lazy to
complete his studies ... [and that] ... I do not believe,
or at least I do not want to believe; but I am convinced
that the ill-applied progress of photography, like all
purely material advances, have contributed much to the
impoverishment of the French artistic genius already
so rare. Baudelaire’s dismissive remarks may have
contained a germ of truth, but amounted to an unsus-
tainable generalisation. Many of the fi nest examples of
the art of photography produced in France in the 1850s
were created by photographers who had fi rst trained
as painters—Charles Nègre, le Gray, Henri le Secq,
André Giroux, Charles Marville and Edouard Baldus
amongst them.
The understanding of the photographic perspective,
the importance of light and shadow—so ably demon-
strated in the early 1840s by Talbot—or the potential for
creative interpretation rather than simple representation,
which would help defi ne and develop the photographic
aesthetic, would take many more years to permeate the
growing photographic community.
John Hannavy
See also: Gros, Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis; Le Gray,
Gustave; Talbot, William Henry Fox; Fenton, Roger;
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All
Nations, Crystal Palace, Hyde Park (1851); Brady,
Mathew B.; Whipple, John Adams; Werge, John;
Archer, Frederick Scott; Diamond, Hugh Welch;
Mudd, James; Laroche, Martin; Snelling, Henry Hunt;
Cutting, James Ambrose; Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-
Désiré; Du Camp, Maxime; Greene, John Beasly;
Bisson, Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie; Sutton,
Thomas; Foster, Peter le Neve; Fry, Peter Wickens;
Gurney, Jeremiah; Southworth, Albert Sands, and
Josiah Johnson Hawes; Bourne, John Cooke; Waxed
Paper Negative Processes; Mestral, O.; Keith,
Thomas; Prevost, Charles Henry Victor; Williams,
Thomas Richard; Kilburn, Benjamin West and
Edward; Claudet, Antoine-François-Jean; Sparling,
Marcus; Kinnear, Charles George Hood; Szathmari,
Carol Popp de; Langlois, Jean Charles; Martens,HISTORY: 4. 1850s