Portraiture (a continuiation)

From the medium’s beginnings, the portrait became one of photography’s most popular genres. Aside from small handfuls of skilled artists, portraiture throughout the world generally took on the form of uninspired daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and ambrotypes, and most portraitists relied heavily on accessories and retouching.

Such conventions were broken by several important subsequent photographers, notably Nadar, who we already learned about, and others such as his contemporary: Étienne Carjat, and also Julia Margaret Cameron.

Carjat depicted the prominent Parisian of his day in his book The Galerie contemporaine which is a high point in photographic publishing.

The illustrations were printed as woodburytypes–a photomechanical process that reproduced the continuous tones of photography but did so with printer's ink. These portraits display dignity and distinction like those of Nadar, his contemporary and rival, but with a sometimes startling level of intensity in the sitters’ gazes.

Both Nadar and Carajat were interested in showing a personality trait of a person, a sense of who they were through the photograph and not just a dull record, but it wasn't really until Julia Margaret Cameron that this approach was successful with a much more sensitive approach.

Cameron was given a camera at the age of 48 as a present from her family to cure her rich person boredom. She was using a soft focus approach introduced to her by David Wilkie Wynfield and the final look of the photos was often criticized for being, just...wrong.

Her connection through neighbor Alfred Tennyson and her sister's running an art house gave her exposure to many famous people of the time including Charles Darwin, among others. Although an amateur, she had a keen business sense and copyrighted all of her imagery, which is one of the main reasons so much of her work has survived today.

For her portraits, a number of which were shown at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Cameron used a lens with the extreme focal length of 30 inches (76.2 cm) to obtain large close-ups. This lens required such long exposures that the subjects frequently moved. The lack of optical definition and this accidental blurring was criticized by the photographic establishment, yet the power of her work won her praise among artists. This can be explained only by the intensity of her vision.

“When I have had these men before my camera,” she wrote about her portraits of great figures, "my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty toward them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner man as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus obtained has almost been the embodiment of a prayer."

Her photography can be broken down into 2 generes, one being soft focus portraiture, the other being religious imagery mostly of children as angels and cherubs.

What is great about her work is that it is technically a mistake. Isn't the whole point of photography to have an image as sharp and hyper real as possible? Let this be a lesson of developing your own art..sometimes the greatest work comes from something that may originally be unintentional or unconventional.

"I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied."