The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  And why should it not be possible? I asked myself.

  Talbot reflected that, though silver nitrate was known to be peculiarly sensitive to light, no one had used it to capture natural images. Would the action of light for creating images be rapid or slow? “If it were a slow one, my theory might prove but a philosophic dream.” Returning to England he tried different compounds of silver. In the bright summer of 1835 he made an image with the camera obscura on properly moistened paper with only ten minutes of exposure. And he found a way, still quite imperfect, of fixing the image. But it was difficult to keep the instrument steady and the paper moist during this whole exposure.

  The fact that light darkened the silver, and produced a faithful image would make photography possible. But in the photographic image, unlike the daguerreotype, lights and shadows were reversed from those in nature. This curse of the photographic pioneers seemed an insuperable problem until the inspired Talbot saw a simple solution. Why not just take a picture of the photograph? Then the lights and shadows would be reversed back to their true state in nature. This was Talbot’s epoch-making commonsense idea.

  Incidentally Talbot had thus conceived the two-step process of modern photography. His original exposed “photograph” on paper was “fixed,” then waxed to make the paper transparent and laid on a fresh piece of photographic paper. When exposed to sunlight, this would produce on the paper beneath it an image precisely like that in nature. Now any number of copies could be made. For the prints Talbot then invented his own “calotype” (from Greek kalos, beautiful) paper, which required a much shorter exposure for printing, and took a latent image, which he brought out by gallic acid. When Talbot’s friend Sir John Herschel offered negative as the name for the original and positive for the copy, he created the modern photographic vocabulary. By analogy to “telegraph” (already in use for writing at a distance) in 1839 Herschel made the first recorded use of the word “photograph” (from the Greek for “writing by light”).

  Following the advice of his mother who had encouraged him to be impatient for knowledge but not for fame, Talbot had experimented with photography for a decade and had made a photograph from nature as early as 1835. But he had not bothered to announce his new process nor tried to claim priority by securing a patent. In January 1839 he was stunned by the report from Paris that a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, had “invented” photography, and Talbot ruefully noted “the sensation created in all parts of the world by the first announcement of this splendid discovery.”

  The sensation stirred Talbot to reveal his own experiments and successes. On January 15, 1839, he showed his work to the Royal Institution, and six days later delivered a hastily prepared paper on his work to the Royal Society. But he was late in the popular sweepstakes. Arago had already secured for Daguerre the glory of the “inventor.” Although Talbot had not patented his original “photogenic drawing process,” on February 21, 1839, six months before Daguerre, he himself published its details. In February 1841 Talbot applied for a patent on his improved technique for making and replicating photographs on calotype paper. Talbot rationalized patents as a way to secure public compensation for impecunious inventors who had not his good luck of inheriting landed estates, and also to provide the technology essential to expanding British industry. But Talbot’s own pettifogging enforcement of his patent rights finally overshadowed public gratitude for his inventive genius.

  Talbot exhibited his achievement in his epoch-making Pencil of Nature, which appeared in three hundred copies of six elegant paper-covered installments (1844–46). As the first book ever illustrated by photography, it merits a place comparable to Gutenberg’s in the history of typographic man. Apologizing that the term “photography” was already too well known to need definition, he still offered his “Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art.” Twenty-four tipped-in photographs with brief texts displayed buildings, landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and copies of statues and manuscripts—“wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.” Variations of tint in the photographs showed how irregularly Nature used her pencil. Each photographic print was “separately formed by the light of the sun, and in our climate the strength of the sun’s rays is extremely variable even in serene weather.” When clouds intervened, the sun’s impression on the negatives was less dark.

  “The experiment of photographically illustrated books is now before the world,” The Athenaeum acclaimed. And photography could “hand down to future ages a picture of the sunshine of yesterday or a memorial of the haze of today.” For his calotype process Talbot was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. Despite his greedy enforcement of his patent rights he never achieved commercial success with his photography. Public criticism became so unpleasant that he returned to research in ancient history and languages.

  How could this new science of photography be useful to artists? Delacroix, a charter member of the French Society of Photography, welcomed the daguerreotype for the painter “as a translator, initiating us into the secrets of nature.” In his Modern Painters Ruskin saw the daguerreotype helping artists “accomplish the reconciliation of true and aerial perspective and chiaroscuro with the splendor and dignity of elaborate detail.” Courageous photographers, untroubled by whether they were scientists or artists, went on expanding the public experience. Roger Fenton made a record of the Crimean War, and Mathew Brady documented the American Civil War. But technical limits of wet-plate photography and the need to get back and forth to the traveling darkroom limited them to portraits, pictures of shattered buildings and bodies strewn on the battlefield. Most battle action was beyond their means.

  In Paris a celebrated caricaturist and balloonist, the flamboyant “Nadar” (Gaspard Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910), created his own photographic pantheon with portraits of Balzac, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Daumier, Wagner, Rossini, and others. “Photography,” he declared, “is a marvellous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds—and one that can be practiced by any imbecile.… But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light.… It is how light lies on the face that you as artists must capture.” On the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), wife of a British civil servant who at forty-eight received a gift of photographic apparatus from her family, made unexcelled portraits of her famous visitors—Herschel, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Browning, Longfellow, and many others. She also used her camera for “out of focus” fantasies in the Pre-Raphaelite painterly style, illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, children posed as angels or as “Venus chiding Cupid and removing his wings.” Women seizing the opportunity for liberation of their talents would be among the best and the boldest photographers. But like Julia Cameron, other photographers vacillated between being scientist and artist, between naturalism and sentimentality.

  The new freedom of the photographer to take natural images—call it science or art as you wish—came from a simple radical improvement in technique. The hectic wet-plate process had tied the photographer to his darkroom, where he could prepare and quickly develop his pictures. The long exposures required a tripod to hold the camera steady and keep it focused on the subject. And the wet-plate camera, like the muzzle-loading musket, had to be reloaded after each shot. Then the photographer had to hasten to his darkroom to develop his picture within ten minutes, before the image disappeared. In a whole day a wet-plate photographer in the field might make no more than six plates. Dry-plate photography would liberate the photographer to wander out of doors much as the oil paint in tubes had freed painters to go out into nature. An English amateur experimented with dry plates, and by 1878 they were on the market. Within twenty years they had transformed photography. The photographer now could take pictures as fast as he could load the plateholders, and he could develop them at leisure in his darkroom back home. The speedier dry plates made it possible to dispense with the tripod and to photograph
moving objects and people on the landscape. But it was the first hand-held cameras, called “detective” cameras from their ability to take pictures without a conspicuous tripod attached, that really opened the world to photography and photography to the world. Now, an advertisement for a hand-held camera explained, “a lady might without attracting any attention go upon Broadway and take a series of photographs.”

  Photography beckoned to amateurs. Instead of laboriously aiming for a perfect shot, amateurs could shoot at random, hoping for a good one in the lot. In wet-plate photography, each photographer had prepared his own plates at the site of the photograph. While the new dry-plate technique much simplified the taking of pictures, it left the preparation of the plates to professional companies.

  Still, none of this might have created a nation of photographers without the practical imagination and merchandising genius of George Eastman (1854–1932). Son of a teacher of penmanship who had established Rochester’s first commercial college, he had only seven years of schooling before becoming bookkeeper in a bank. As an early amateur photographer he had made his own wet plates. When he learned of the new dry plates, he saw their commercial promise and invented and patented a coating machine. Quitting his job at the bank, he invested his savings of three thousand dollars in the business, and at twenty-six he was on his way to making photography the American national hobby. Since glass plates had to be loaded one at a time, Eastman imagined the advantages of a flexible negative that could be rolled like a window shade past the focal plane. He first tried paper, then used celluloid. In 1888 his first “Kodak,” a box camera with a fixed focus, holding a roll with one hundred negatives, was on the market. It sold for twenty-five dollars, including the processing of the first roll, which the photographer sent back to Rochester, where the camera was refilled with film and returned. Soon the photographer received his neatly mounted contact prints.

  Eastman also had a talent for words. His slogan “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” enticed thousands of amateurs and entered American folklore. He had invented the word “Kodak,” he explained, with K, “a strong incisive sort of letter, at both ends.” It signaled his hope for a world market, since Kodak could be easily pronounced in any language that used the Roman alphabet. A new vocabulary proclaimed the new photographable world. “Snapshot,” originally a hunter’s term for a hurried shot fired without taking careful aim, was applied to photography by Herschel, and now described pictures taken by the Kodak, which at first had no finder and was simply pointed in the direction of the object. “Photography,” Eastman boasted, “is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees.”

  But was it art? “If you cannot see at a glance,” with his genius for overstatement, George Bernard Shaw declared in 1901, “that the old game is up, that the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation, then you will never make a true critic: you are only like most critics, a picture fancier.… Some day the camera will do all the work of Velasquez and Peter de Hooghe, colour and all.” Photographers and their critics never ceased to be haunted by this question. Everybody knew that an art had to be difficult. With its increasing ease and universality, how could photography be an art? Photographers, conceived in a chemist’s laboratory, envied the mystique of the artist’s studio.

  The most influential answer to the photographers’ troubling question was offered by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Photographers aspiring to be artists had understandably imitated painting, to give the newest of the graphic arts the prestige of one of the oldest. Stieglitz took the opposite tack. He became the apostle of photography as a unique art, and of America as its testing place.

  Although Stieglitz boasted of his Americanness, his education was mostly European. Born in Hoboken in 1864 to a retired prosperous German-Jewish woolen merchant of broad culture, he attended the New York public schools and the City College. For their education his father moved the family of six children to Europe in 1881. In Berlin Stieglitz entered the Polytechnic for mechanical engineering, enjoyed the friendship of painters, and frequented theater and opera. In 1883, five years before Eastman’s first Kodak, Stieglitz saw a little black-box camera on a tripod in a Berlin shop window.

  I bought it and carried it to my room and began to fool around with it. It fascinated me, first as a passion, then as an obsession. The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to a piano or a painter to a canvas. I found I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles; that I could do things which had never been done before. I was the first amateur photographer in Germany, or, for that matter, anywhere. But I had much to learn.

  Stieglitz shifted his course to photochemistry, bought another camera, took up the new dry-plate techniques, and began experiments of his own. At home he improvised a darkroom by swinging a door back to the wall and covering the space with a blanket. In one of his first efforts to test the limits of the new art, he took his camera down to the cellar to test the proposition that photographs required sunlight. And with an exposure of twenty-four hours to a primitive electric lamp he made a perfect negative.

  There in Berlin, Stieglitz, not yet twenty, started his crusade to have photography recognized as an art comparable to painting. His own photographs, for which he set the highest standard, were his best argument. In 1890, when he returned to the United States, he had charted the course of life from which he never deviated. A “born revolutionist,” he found photography an ideal laboratory.

  I … never drew—painted—had any art lessons—never desired to draw—never tried to—never dreamt that I might be or become an artist—knew nothing about any of these things when I started photographing.… I went to photography a really free soul—and loved it at first sight with a great passion.… There was no short cut—no fool-proof photographing—no “art world” in photography. I started with the real A.B.C.—at the rudiments—and evolved my own methods and own ideas virtually from the word go.…

  In 1892–93 he made his early classic photographs of New York in winter, The Car Horses at the Terminal, and Winter Fifth Avenue, which remained among his most celebrated work. He soon made history with the first successful photographs in rain, in snow, and at night. Among these his photograph of the new Flatiron Building in a heavy snowstorm celebrated the skyscraper like “the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America which was in the making.”

  At first he saw the hand-held camera as a menace to the art of photography. “It is amusing to watch the majority of hand-camera workers shooting off a ton of plates helter-skelter, taking their chances as to the ultimate result.” But by 1897 he applauded its new possibilities. In principle he opposed the awarding of medals in photographic competitions, but he submitted his own works and by 1910 had won more than 150 for himself. He was classified as an exponent of “straight photography,” which meant not retouching or tinting but “working in the open air, with rapid exposures, leaving his models to pose themselves, and relying for results on means strictly photographic.”

  Uncomfortable in other people’s organizations, in 1902 he founded his own group, which he called the Photo-Secession, after the German Secessionist painters who had revolted against academic art when the paintings of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) were rejected by a Berlin exhibition (1892). Urged on by his friend Edward Steichen, in 1905 Stieglitz set up the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. Three rooms, the largest only fifteen by seventeen feet, provided Stieglitz with a showcase for whatever was new in the visual arts. He quickly became a prophet of modern art in America. In the five years before the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, Stieglitz showed Americans the works of Rodin, Cézanne, Matisse, Brancusi, Braque, and Picasso. He also showed African sculpture. He displayed living American painters—John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Timid fellow photographers protested his enthusiasm
for modern painting, but he defended “291” as “a laboratory, an experimental station.”

  He was especially pleased that Picasso, then painting his Demoiselles d’Avignon, liked his photograph The Steerage, which he had made on the inspiration of the moment on an eastward sea voyage in 1907. Composed spontaneously, this became Stieglitz’s own favorite picture—“a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.” As a child he had enjoyed reading about the American Revolution, but George Washington was too conventional for his taste. He preferred Nathanael Greene, “who would make the English come after him, and then he would retreat. So that the English, without knowing it, would lose ground … whereas Greene would win while retreating. There was a sense of humour in his strategy.”

  When the Armory Show opened he urged all to see this, “The First Great Clinic to Revitalize Art.” At the same time in “291” he put on an exhibit of his own photographs in an effort to show what painting was not. Years before, in Berlin his painter friends would humor him by saying “Of course, this is not art, but we would like to paint the way you photograph.” And Stieglitz would firmly reply, “I don’t know anything about art, but for some reason or other I have never wanted to photograph the way you paint.” Stieglitz celebrated the uniqueness of both painting and photography with 175 exhibitions at “291” (1905–17), The Intimate Gallery, and An American Place (1929–46). And he documented his photographic faith in Camera Notes and the fifty numbers of Camera Work (1902–17).

  The two arts of photography and painting met in 1924, when Stieglitz, at the age of sixty, married Georgia O’Keeffe, then thirty-seven. She became the subject for one of his two masterworks. “To demand the portrait,” he explains, “that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.” So his “composite portrait” of Georgia O’Keeffe, made over many years, included more than four hundred photographs, “heads and ears—toes—hands—torsos,” revealing every sort of expression against varied backgrounds. “When I photograph,” Stieglitz said, “I make love.” But Stieglitz never limited his lovemaking to his camera. He had a stormy career as lover, not only of Georgia O’Keeffe.