Fixing the Shadows

1. Photography's true genius is its ability to reveal the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearances.
   
   
2. Henry Fox Talbot was a proto-photographer who experimented with ways of fixing the shadows. He wasn't very good at drawing, which caused him to start thinking about the camera obscurer and chemical processes. Talbot experimented with paper coated in silver salts and shoe-box sized camera, nicknamed mouse traps. The images he produced were negatives that could be continuously reproduced.
   
   

3. 

   An example of an 1860s
   daguerrotype

   In the 19^th century, Louis Daguerre created the daguerreotype, a way of fixing the shadows on a mirrored metal plate, which is why is was known as “a mirror with a memory”. Daguerreotypes cause the ink to sit up in the surface, instead of sinking into the image like a photograph, which is why light is reflected back . Unlike Henry Fox Talbot's method, it didn't allow an image to be reproduced as it didn't create any negatives.
   
   
4. Vernacular photography is amateur photography. Even though the photo has been purposely taken, the artistic nature of the image is often accidental or unintentional. Vernacular photography includes every type of art and photography, with categories including everyday life like family portraits and school photos.
   
   
5. Fixing the shadows is done by using a camera obscurer and light sensitive chemicals. At the time of the invention of photography, there were two people who were in competition against each other to be the first to “fix the shadows”. These were Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, who invented different ways of doing this. Henry Fox Talbot used paper coated in silver salts and shoe-box sized camera (mouse traps). Louis Daguerre created the daguerreotype, a way of fixing the shadows on a mirrored metal plate. Talbot's method proved to be more successful because it allowed him to make multiple reproductions of the same image, unlike the daguerreotype.
   
   
6. The carte de visite was created in 1854, and was used to produce portraits. A person is photographed eight times in rapid sequence with a camera that has eight lenses, meaning the photographer could take several images with different poses in a few minutes. These photographs where printed on to small pieces of card.
   
   

7. 

   An example of pictorialism.
    "Fading away" (1858) by
   Henry Peach Robinson

   Nadar is well known a was very successful because he was able to take photographs of people with natural expressions, Also, he photographed up and coming stars of that time.
   
   
8. Pictorialism is a type of photography that where the images are mean, moody and occasionally magnificent. It started when a number of the top photographers of that time wanted to try and bring photography into the fine arts. Pictorialism was photography at its most po-faced.