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  • Szarkowski 1990 George Eastman and Alfred Steiglitz

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    Material de apoio Semana 2 do Curso Seeing Through Photographs (MOMA)

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    Material de apoio Semana 2 do Curso Seeing Through Photographs (MOMA)

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    23 views52 pages

    Szarkowski 1990 George Eastman and Alfred Steiglitz

    Uploaded by

    ivanespaulo
    Material de apoio Semana 2 do Curso Seeing Through Photographs (MOMA)

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 52
    Adam Clark Vroman. Interior of (Me) Hooker’ House, Sichimovi. 1902 5. George Eastman and Alfred Stieglitz Itmight be argued that the principal architect of modern photography was neither a photographer nor a scientist but a businessman: George East- man, In the years of his rise Eastman was thoroughly knowledgeable about, the technical bases on which his triumphs rested; nevertheless, his genius Jay not in the realm of chemical wizardry but in his understanding of the almost ecological interdependence of technology and commerce. He understood that if photography were to become a universal activity it would. require a simple, cheap, and effortless technology. He also understood that such a technology would be so expensive to put in place and maintain that it could be supported only by virtually universal use. The solution to the conundrum was clear: the whole world must become photographers simultaneously Eastman took up photography as an amateur in. 1878, and found the ‘wet-plate system recalcitrant and messy, an opinion shared by all who had. tried it. In consequence he studied carefully the published experiments, chiefly from England, that sought to develop a practical dry system. The largest single step in the slow evolution toward that goal was made by Dr: Richard Leach Maddox, an English amateur who in 1871 published the results of a marginally successful experiment that produced usable dry plates! He concluded his brief report by saying, “So far as can be judged, the process seems quite worth more, carefully-conducted experiments, and, if found advantageous, adds another handle to the photographer's wheel”? The figure of speech is unfamiliar, but Maddox clearly meant that dry plates would give the photographer a leg up. His recipe produced an emulsion that was much slower than the wet plate, but other experimenters, pursued the idea, and by 1878 at least three English firms were producing small quantities of dry plates commercially. Early that year another English amateur, Charles Harper Bennett, demonstrated that the emulsion was made much more sensitive if it was aged at go” F. for several days before it ‘was coated onto the plate. Eastman tried this, made some adjustments of his own, and by the summer of 1878 was getting satisfactory: results with dry plates that he had made at home; soon he was making them for a few Rochester acquaintances. By 1880 his plates were being sold by E. & H. T. 125, 126, Anthony, the leading American photographic supply house of the day: In the fall of that year Eastman quit his job at the bank, withdrew $3,000 in savings, and started business in earnest. By the mid-eighties the wet plate was being used only by the stubborn (and in the reproductive graphic arts, where it survived until recent years). In 1877, in the exhibition of the Edinburgh Photographic Society, one picture out of eight was made by a dry or semi-dry process; five years later, at the exhibition of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, only one picture in seventy was made in collodion? Ic is customary to say that the invention of the dry plate greatly simplified photographic technology. It would be more accurate to say that the dry plate so radically complicated photographic technology that it could no longer be left in the hands of the photographers. In the early 1880s photographers stopped making their own plates; a few years later they stopped sensitizing their own printing papers. The earlier craft tech- nology had been replaced by an enormously sophisticated industrial tech- nology; in the century since, photographers have worked with those materials that the photographic industry has seen fit to make available to them. ‘Those photographers who had learned their craft in the days of collodion continued, for the most part, to make pictutes much like those they had made before. It is not likely that one could distinguish on stylistic grounds the landscapes that William Henry Jackson made earlicr on collodion from those he made later, more easily, on gelatin’ But new entrants, not cursed (or blessed) with the old habits of thinking, came to a photography that had changed profoundly. ‘The wer-plate system was not only difficult but slow—not slow in terms of its sensitivity to light, but rather in the plodding deliberateness of the whole complicated process. The wet-plate camera might be compared to the muzzle-loading rifle. Afier taking one shot the photographer was disarmed, until the machine was laboriously made ready again. The Gernsheims estimate that a photographer working in the field was fortu- nate to make six plates in a day;® an experienced worker with an assistant could doubtless do better, but not a great deal better. Colonel William. Prescot told his troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill nottto fire their muzzle- loaders until they could see the whites of the Redcoats’ eyes, but the troopers that Frederic Remington painted a century later had repeating rifles, and they fired from galloping horses at distant Indians who were also

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