[BBC.摄影演义].BBC.The.Genius.of.Photography.Part1.avi

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2008/03/19 20:54:37

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part 1 的部分听写笔记，详见 “英文视听在线 - 普特英语听力论坛”的确不错！ The Genius of Photography This is Meudon, a quiet Paris suburb, apart from the rumble of the occasional high speed train. In 1928, at roughly the midpoint between the invention of photography and our own digital age, Andre Kertesz, one of the great photographers of the 20th century came here and took some pictures. The photographs he took that day are as unremarkable as Meudon itself. But something about the place must have caught his eye, because a few days later, he came back, and turned the ordinary into something extraordinary. “Photography always transforms what it describes. That’s the art of photography is to control that transformation.” Kertesz’s Meudon encapsulates something of elusive genius of photography. Perhaps he had impressed in mind when he made it. But this edge of the same scene made a decade before, doesn’t tease us the way as photographic equivalent does. With a photograph, we can’t help but wonder who the figure in the foreground is, where he’s been, what he is carrying, and where he is taking it? How can something that reveals so much, keep so much to itself? “Photography is about the frame you put around the image. What comes in or what is cut off. And yet the story doesn’t end. It’s told beyond the frame through a kind of intuition.” In the course of our 170-year relationship, photography has delighted us, served us, moved us, outraged us and occasionally, disappointed us. But mainly it has intrigued us by showing the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearances. And that is photography’s true genius. The Genius of Photography 2 Photography, they say, was invented in 1839s. That was the year that a Frenchman Louis Daguerre and an Englishman Henry Fox Talbot announced rival processes that would, in the popular phrase of the day, fix the shadows. But the idea of photography has been arrived for much longer than that, as Abe Morell and his family and friends Aubert to demonstrate. "It looks like the light is getting better in the afternoon. It's getting actually more from the front, which is, it's a good side. Light is my, ah, my wisdom and my enemies, it's really a kind of amazingness. The photography is so perverse you know, you need darkness to see light. The pictures are negative, ah, things are upside-down, when you see through a camera. It's a kind of a weird nit you know inversion in photography. That's a, I think it's part of the ah...a charm of it,like magic or something. Almost ready?" "Oh, my God! Oh, that's wonderful! That's wonderful!" "That's wonderful." The camera obscura is an optical phenomenon that's simple to create and hard to believe, a blacked-out room and a small hole that allows a tight beam of light to enter. And with it, the outside world comes pouring in, upside-down and twice as natural. "I've been teaching photography for, you know, 20 years now. And one of the nicest way of introducing the classroom's through the other camera was actually put them in one, put them inside one. So I would turn the classrooms into a camera obscura. And it's guaranteed every time, very savvy, hip, visual. People are exalted, they're dumbfounded. And it just, it proves to me that there are something very deep and primitive about it. It's not something that one has invented, it's not like SONY has developed its new chip to make this happen. You know, this is totally natural." The desire for photography is an ancient one. The Roman writer Pleny recounts the legend of a young woman who traced the outline of her departing lover shadow on the wall. Inspired by this, her father made the first sculpture and so western art was born, but all the poor girl really wanted was a snapshot. It wasn't until the 1830s, that science found a way to satisfy her desire, that by then had it become a part of scientist "No, it's no accident that the only conceptions of the photography happened to coincide with the usual, that we call now romanticism, because many of the ideas in concerns of the other Romantic Movement, find themselves embodied in the experiments towards photography. Like that say Courige will be lying on a hillside and looking up in his half dazed eyes he sees dazzling sun and he thinks how can I possibly capture this evanescent moment. And photography, this thing which captures a moment from time and fixes it in place is a kind of answer to this romantic struggle. " It had been known for centuries what a camera optikos could do. The breakthrough came with the observation that certain chemicals were light-sensitive. "As if it was well-known for at least a century before 1839 that's for example, silver salts, silver colorize, silver nitrate reacted and responded to light, darkened and therefore images could be made. The problem that was difficult to solve was to stop the image being made to find a way, if you like fixing the image stop it developing and eventually becoming black. I mean we have, for example, an account published in 1802 by Hanfree Davian in the Journal of the Royal Institution where he discusses experiments that he and Tom Wager would have been making , if experimenting with these silver salts. They sought a piece of leather and they may try to make contact prince with a literally put a piece over technical space and after directly onto it, expose it to light and then for a moment, they actually saw an image come up and then heartbreakingly, I suppose, the image kept going black until it disappeared. So as early as 1802, well before the announcement of the. . . a marketable photographic persist in 1839, we find at least these two people and probably many more who have experienced photography momentarily. " Among the proto-photographers struggling to fix the fleeting shadows was Henry Fox Tolbert, M. P. the master of Lake Cork cabby and a world authority on botany and cuneiform writing. But there was one flaw in this polymath slice-tor of accomplishments, he couldn't draw photography. "Here is Henry Tolbert to his accomplished all certain of things, but he has absolutely no idea how to take that complicated colorful three dimensional world and get it down to lines on a piece of paper. And it was then he started thinking about the camera obscure and started thinking about chemistry and when he went back to Lake Cork in sometimes the spring of 1834, his photo mind started putting all these things together. " Tolbert experimented, using paper, coated with silver salts, and shoebox sized cameras. They were nicknamed “mousetraps”. Soon they began catching things never seen before – the strange mirror images from the ghost world of the photographic negative. “This was the achievement what have been, exactly what Tolbert was trying to get. It’s a negative. Tones are reversed, and it’s laterally reversed, left to right, which allowed a print when it was sent for another sheet of photographic paper to print up in the correct way around. But the negative itself is something that Tolbert appreciated and people in his day did as well, and today we kind of lose sight of that. But if you look at one of these things, from an abstract standpoint, it is… it’s a beautiful object.” Tolbert’s paper negatives were more than beautiful. They represented the breakthrough on which modern photography would be founded. “I think Tolbert’s most important inventions were not so much chemicals. They were conceptual. He understood immediately that he could make prints from these, so one of these first dots is that this is going to be a way to make it possible to reproduce images for the masses, and to produce books that never would have gotten done otherwise.” But while Tolbert quietly continued his experiments, he discovered that he had a rival. In January, 1839, Louie Dego, through the Prestigious Cadeby four seasons in Paris, with news of his own method for fixing the shadows. “Louie Dego was an academically trained French painter. Somebody who we think began his experimenting of photography in about 1824. That’s about the same time that he was also producing his diorama paintings, very lab-scale paintings, that he put into a darkened room and he sold seats to people much like an early cinematic experience.” “His background was as an entrepreneur, is a showman, as someone who was interested in spectacle and display and presentation, and indeed that was, that was acted it out when he presented his discovery to the world.” Dego’s discovery was very different from the methods Tolbert had been explored. Instead of a paper-based process, Dego fixed his images on a mirrored metal plate. And unlike Tolbert’s negative-positive process, Dego’s produced one-off images like a puron. Even so, according to the contemporary champions of the gary type like photographer Jerry span newly, it produces a visual experience that’s unique. "I remember my first experience with daguerreotype. I was just, I was stunned, you know as immediately stunned. It was like a miracle. It just looked like a protege of nature. You know the nineteenth century was refered to as a mirror with the memory. And I think that's a beautiful description of precisely what daguerreotype is. " "A daguerreotype is not a conventional operating system the way of photography is. That's the light operates differently with a daguerreotype. The silver grains of the image sit up on the surface in the way that they don't quite in a photograph. In the paper photograph they tend to sink into the surface. So what you see when you look at a daguerreotype is light reflected back through an image. And there are something about that that begins to approximate the actual experience of the taking of the photograph itself that particular moment when the image is captured. The people that you're looking at seem not exactly alive, but on the edge of being impressive. " "One of the things that are interesting about this process and much makes a different from a lot of other photographic processes is no separation between the material that you shoot with and the finished result, the plate that was in a camera is the same plate which will eventually be displayed. And for me, there is an immediacy in that relationship between the image and the actually physical artifact of the event. " " I always love daguerreotypes. Everything I love about photography is always there in the 1840's and 50's, incredible value arrange from absolute reflected bright white to the deepest darkest valveless blacks. Unbelievable about a detail, great usually, a great deal of differences in that field, because the lens as to so wide open and they are intimate. " "Now, I have to put it up onto a gilding stand and turn on a torch and get into that. If you don't gild it, you could wipe the image off with a slightest touch, even a brush stroke across the surface of daguerreotype will remove the image. " "I love daguerreotypes. They are marvelous. They are very pretty, but it's a dead end. Tolbert recognized that human communication was through paper. " "One big weakness of the daguerreotype was it could not make more reproductions from the original image and that's where ultimately Talbot's system dominated or kind of dominate the daguerreotype." "The cruel irony of history is that the Daguerre is a public showman trying to reach a huge market and what he invents is the most intimate of all photographic processes. It's something that only one person can see and Henry Talbot who's a tremendously private person trying to meet a private need invents the system that we know propagates photography throughout the world, so he unwillingly became the showman that Daguerre wanted to be." "The beginnings of photography were all about that. They were all about the kind of Darwinian struggle to see which process would triumph, but the determinant of that struggle were fairly clear: how quickly, how cheaply, how accurately could the image be made, how widely could it be distributed and you simply cannot write a static history for photography or even a merely technological history for photography without talking about money, because you have to talk about money in industry in order to get a sense of why the landscape for photography looks the way it does now." Talbot's process may have market forces on his side but its ultimate triumph was a long time coming. In his first decades, all photography whatever on paper, metal, glass, or tin was a matter of wonder, and even disbelief. "When the first daguerreotype was shown in London, there was a reviewer who wrote in the Times about that Lilliputian draftsmanship. So they have that wonder that sort of sense of impossibility how could somebody do that and how could you possibly draw a whole cityscape in, I don't know, ten minutes. It was both this incredibly fine, gossamer draftsmanship and this incredible speed at same time." Behind the magic ? camera, they have deeper mystery. And one that remains the source of medium's greatest power to this day. The photograph world it turned out was a strange place: a looking glass world resembling our own and everything except in the way things appeared. "Everybody assumed that they knew what these pictures were going to look like and it took a while for people to realize that in fact the photographic medium creates a lot of surprises. It doesn't describe the world just the way you expected it to." "The camera does it. Anything you've taken a picture of, you've put a frame around it and you've narrowed the kind of viewers' eyesight and said, 'look at this, this is special.' And sometimes it's almost random point of view, but because it's crapped off, it's no longer random. It's considered intentional. So that becomes 'look at this, this is special.' " "But the photographic medium itself doesn't care what's important and what's not. So if you pointed at something you think is important, it's going to register all the stuff, unimportant stuff around it with just the same precision and fullness." All seeing but undiscriminating, the camera reviewed the world teeming in detail. This study of Trafalgar Square by Talbot, it’s a film with smog and so you have the, you really have the atmospheric feeling of being right there in a smog-filled city. You see the bills that are pasted to those hoardings which with a look you can actually read, including the sign that says 'post no bills'. Henry James has this great phrase to seek the detail of London life, that’s what it is. And photography is uniquely suited to capture this, of course, because it’s a machine. It doesn’t have a hierarchy of psychological interest, just swallows everything up instantly. But this is also fascinating if you think about Nelson’s Column under construction which is a formal title of this when you look at it, the Column, tardily(?) in the picture. I think what Talbot was looking at here more was this was a period of the enormous destruction in 1844. This was a period of enormous destruction throughout Europe and all of the governments should be in threatened and the whole social orders being threatened. And Talbot, I think, was really trying to document the modern London in a modern social structure here, that he knew was on the verge of change. I think this photograph is really much more about that sense of change in the world. The world was changing. It was becoming recognizably modern thanks to the new technologies of the mid 19 century. Before the railway, people had moved no faster than the fastest horse; before the telegraph, the speediest form of communication was the carrier pigeon; before photography, time had moved forward inexorably like a river. By speeding up travel, making communications instantaneous and freezing time, these new technologies not only change the world, they change the way people understood the world. We start to enter not just industrial era of machines but the industrial era of precision and information and travel. The rail road, the telegraph, the photography and these other technologies that are speeding up the world and moving us through the world of solid objects to this world of information and images speeding by faster and faster. And this remarkable phrase comes from much earlier from Alexander Pope Poem, the isolation(?) of time and space that can be used over and over and over again in that period, I mean, it feels like it’s a part of this breaking apart of the organic flow of time into something, much more manipulable whether it’s by speeding it up through railway, freezing it through photographs. Photography and the railway would come together in one of most far-reaching achievements in the pioneer years, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous motion studies, the Picasso of cinema and the product of the wealth and the whim of the railroad baron, Leland Stanford. notes: 1. Trafalgar Square: Trafalgar Square is a square in London, England that commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), a British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars. 2. Nelson’s Column: Nelson's Column is the focal point of Trafalgar Square. It was built between 1840 and 1843 to commemorate Admiral Horatio Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar. 3. Alexander Pope: Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) is generally regarded as the greatest English poet of the early eighteenth century. 4. Eadweard Muybridge: Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) is a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement. 5. Leland Stanford: 1824–1893, American railroad builder, politician, and philanthropist. He was a railroad baron who made part of his fortune by dealing with Gold Rush miners. He and his wife founded and endowed Leland Stanford Junior University (now Stanford University) as a memorial to their son, at Palo Alto in 1891. Muybridge’s story exemplifies the surprising new possibilities of the modern world. Born in the ancient market town of Kingston upon Thames, his restless ambitions brought him to San Francisco, a boom city founded on gold rush wealth and sustained by the new trans-continental railway, financed by Leland Stanford. In this thoroughly modern metropolis, Muybridge established a reputation with *** played landscapes and spectacular panoramas, including an eye-boggling 360-degree view of the adopted city. Stanford came to Muybridge because he had a rich man’s problem. A passionate race horse breeder, he wanted to prove that a horse lifted all four feet off the ground when it trotted - something that had evaded human perception for millennia. This whole relationship between Muybridge and Stanford, I always think of this being proto-cinematic in the 19th century, a director and producer relationship that Stanford becomes very involved in the technology and funds it and backs it and recruits these engineers, jockeys and other people to help Muybridge, but Muybridge is the director. The direct stage was Stanford’s own private racetrack at Pala Alto. On a specially whited out section of track, Muybridge placed a row of 24 cameras with electric shutters, which would be triggered in sequence, four every second, as the horse passed by. By this means, Muybridge did more than freeze the moment; he took a scalpel to time itself. Muybridge's photographs were the first source of accurate information about the gait of a horse, and it's the beginning of this change where suddenly the camera allows human beings to see faster than our own eyes, to break down the world into dissect motion. And it's part of that kind of intrusion into the flow of time. For Stanford, the project was always about horses, whereas Muybridge understood that this was potentially about everything he could possibly find and really create an encyclopedia of zoological motion. With his mastery of the material world, the photographer was to the nineteenth century what the computer whisked is to the twenty-first. Scientist, artist, inventor, but most of all, an entrepreneur, these people were in it for the money. Once photography was invented, you could say then the question is well, what we do with this? By the 1850s, camera takes over and for the next half century or more, the overwhelming majorities of pictures that,photographys that are made are made for a commercial reason. And if you wanted to make serous money from photography, this was the way to do it. One important example of major innovation in photographic technology was introduction of cooper and zinc, a type of photography pattern to divide, in French name,in November 1864. As your postured,you'll photography eight times in a rapid sequence by a camera that had eight lenses on it. So you could have eight poses in a spacive few minutes and because these cards were small,they could be sent through the posts, tens of thousands,millions of these cards flew back and forth between the new world ,United Nations,and Europe. In effect,these cards turn photography into a true industry. People invented photography because it could go anywhere, you know, it has no fixed identity at this point.People realize that it, it is going to be able to do all these or other things,you know, it gonna to be able to go to war, to make documentary photography and of course, it's already tied up to literature, it's big scence. And by architects beginning to use it because suddenly they had these very detailed views of momumental of the world, and so they could make money out of all kinds of different aspects of photography. It's a global phenomena virtually since the day they get their announcement,photography was being made all over the world. People were shipping cameras and equipment to allthe parts of,certainly the colonized world. So it was an incredible global phenomena. Photographers may have been across the globe, but the heart of photography's empire remained the studio. Right now, we're in Skylike Studio. This is a studio that any 19th century photography would love to work in it, its beautiful light, it's consistent all day long. Generally in a 19th century studio what you're looking for is what the artists look for as well. In a photographer's studio, the public encountered alternalty in all links, in intriguing, intimidating strangeness. For the sitter to come to a photographic studio, the experience was one of, of wonder, to climb up three flights of stairs,are you out of breath? You're not sure what's going to be in the studio. They sit you down in the chair, they bring a hairstyle head stand to keep your head steady. And they wheel the camera like this, up to your face, like a cannon being aimed at you,then you smell different smells. You have the smell of ethol, you have the smell of alcohol, the smell of suli, the smell of oil,of lavender.And all these things are mixed together in a gamble that it is completely unfamiliar to you. And then they say try to have a natural expression. Natural expressions were not all that common in the 19th century. But one photographer who mastered the difficult art was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon also known as Nadar. This sort of portrayal is quite characteristic. He is looking toward the camera quite fairly directly. You can’t tell but his hair is red. But he had red hair so and he uses it when he opens a studio he reproduces his signature at large scale across the top of the facade on top of the building in red. And when he stamps the photographs of his, they are stamped in red. Nadar is a made-up name, it’s a professional name, and it becomes famous, it is sort of copyright if you will. And there is a famous lawsuit with his brother over whether or not the brother is allowed to use that name. And so this invents who knows how to put together a program of publicity. Nadar was the XX war hawk of the Bahia in Paris, a celebrity artist who photographed up and coming stars in a style that rewrote the rules. His portrayal of artists unrivaled because his photographing then is equals and he doesn’t have to dress them up or put them in sort of stupid settings with fake columns or huge thrones. He just photographs some standing in his daylight studio looking totally authentic and wonderful which is why they are probably the best portrayals of artists ever. He doesn’t attempt to flatter people. He’s unflinching in the way he looks at people but he’s never cruel. But he always isolates his sitters. They are against completely plain backgrounds. And unlike other photographers of the period there is nothing to indicate what the profession is. A writer is not holding up a pen and a painter is not holding up a brush. It’s the force of the personality alone that has to convey the character of the person. One Nadar’s photograph Sarabanha, she was nearly unknown she was very quite wonderful looking because her face is very fresh. He wrapped some large pieces of cloth around her to isolate that beautiful neck and face. And so there is really nothing else in the photograph except that. But it’s no longer about how expensive a frock you can afford to wear XX the ceiling. It is about how you can project yourself into another medium. So it’s a wave assuring your own in morality and part. But whatever his personal status, the status of Nadar's chosen profession was rather less certain. In its first decades, photography had proved itself able to do almost anything. But one doubt remained then as now: is it art? Here is the dilemma and strand of photography. It is the easiest medium in which to be competent. But it is the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable. There is the physicality to a photograph. There’s nothing there. Uh, some silver, er, the tyres and the evolvement process or some dyes in a color print. There is no physicalist,There’s nothing you can point to and say this is the work of that artist's hands. So how do you make a photograph that everybody immediately knows it’s the work of a particular artist? Well, that’s a very difficult and complicated thing, you know, to，uh, to come up with. When someone really ends up nailing down a particular kind of vision to such extent that they own that vision, you know that they’ve really done something. Photographers anxious to prove the claims of their medium instinctively turned to painting in search for inspiration and reassurance. I think photographers did plant their tripod feet in the place where the easels of the painters had stood. Roger Fenten went up one of the great Wales Rivers, to the exact spot where Samuel Pamer had painted a few decades before and photographed the scene of the Pamer painting. But it doesn’t look the same. It’s radically different actually. And you see it again and again and in the leading, the pioneer of photographers, they are making sharp modern versions of / old water colors, putting them through the gears into this new language. But they also were responding to this strange ground glass they were looking at, which was of very tight direct angle. And they, of course, were looking at the world upside down and back to front. And I think that encourage is the great abstraction as you / try to focus on some motifs. You look at it screaming around, not the right way around, outside down. You kind of homing on big blocks of light and shade because you need to grasp something and you know the genius of the medium itself is setting itself bit by bit. But whatever his personal status, the status of Nadar's chosen profession was rather less certain. In its first decades, photography had proved itself able to do almost anything. But one doubt remained then as now: is it art? Here is the dilemma and strand of photography. It is the easiest medium in which to be competent. But it is the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable. There is the physicality to a photograph. There’s nothing there. Uh, some silver, er, the tyres and the evolvement process or some dyes in a color print. There is no physicalist,There’s nothing you can point to and say this is the work of that artist's hands. So how do you make a photograph that everybody immediately knows it’s the work of a particular artist? Well, that’s a very difficult and complicated thing, you know, to，uh, to come up with. When someone really ends up nailing down a particular kind of vision to such extent that they own that vision, you know that they’ve really done something. Photographers anxious to prove the claims of their medium instinctively turned to painting in search for inspiration and reassurance. I think photographers did plant their tripod feet in the place where the easels of the painters had stood. Roger Fenten went up one of the great Wales Rivers, to the exact spot where Samuel Pamer had painted a few decades before and photographed the scene of the Pamer painting. But it doesn’t look the same. It’s radically different actually. And you see it again and again and in the leading, the pioneer of photographers, they are making sharp modern versions of / old water colors, putting them through the gears into this new language. But they also were responding to this strange ground glass they were looking at, which was of very tight direct angle. And they, of course, were looking at the world upside down and back to front. And I think that encourage is the great abstraction as you / try to focus on some motifs. You look at it screaming around, not the right way around, outside down. You kind of homing on big blocks of light and shade because you need to grasp something and you know the genius of the medium itself is setting itself bit by bit. But it wasn’t just photographers who recognized the cameras’ new way of seeing. Photography was also making an impression on real artists. There are several features, which show, particularly with Daga, that he looked in photographs, that he had been influenced by them. In this framing, which counts a person and the wheel of a carriage in half and whether real subject is pushed over to the right edge. You can see neither the horse is pulling it, nor the coachman. Clearly, it’s very daring. The way photographs catch the world did help change the fine art tradition, progressive painting, bits of figures are just cut off, and you get that same cutting-off in photographs, too. So has this sort of very similar to the new way of looking You see the world as fragments, not these perfect wholes. He was also looking for a new kind of naturalness of natural gestures, for example, a hand in a pocket which can mean just as much as someone’s face. That was something that he was able to see in the Starry’s ~ views, which show people walking on boulevards whose gestures are recorded in a very natural way, which had never been seen before. The way someone held their umbrella or put their hand in their pocket, or turned their head. Like this teacher, for example, leaning on his cane, or these young girls crutching her back, it’s the type of pose you could only see in the famous Starry’s photos in the boulevards. But even though he was influenced by it, Daga never saw photography as anything more than a useful tool Deep down, he had a contempt for photography, like all artists or real creatives. For them, photography wasn’t an art form; it was despised because it was becoming totally commercialized. Indeed, photography has become an industry. This is the first photograph taken by the man who did more than anyone to transform photography from a specialized craft, haunting the doorstep of art into a mass map of industry. It’s a view of Rochester, the hometown of a young man called George Eastman. Initially, Mr. Eastman was working in a bank as a bank teller. He became interested in photography, as he wanted to document a vacation that he was planning on taking. He actually much more interested in photography than going on a vacation he never did go. Eastman revolutionized photography by degrees. First by producing something we now take for granted—a roll of film. But that, was just the beginning. A few years later, Eastman takes a same sort of concept, and remarks it as an electric camera, called the Kodak. Kodak means nothing. He was playing on the grounds with his mother one night, and somehow it happened upon the word, and he liked it because he thought the letter K was a strong and incisive letter, and it meant nothing. So he thought what better way to sell a product than to have a name that people are gonna remember because the letters are strong and because it’s a name that has no alternate meanings that hasn’t trafficed in American society before. People will remember it because it’s unique, and he was right. Suddenly photography has this great moment when the Americans as their so brilliant tags turned into an area of mass production and factory standardization, and put it into the hands of everyone. It’s really simple an operation,/ the string is used to cut the shutter. Shutter releases on this side. The famous slogan which we will remember, uh, how does it go? You press the button, we do the rest. What it promises is all you have to do is a very ,very simple act, and we will take care of everything, we will take care of the shipping, the developing, the printing, we will mail it all back to you, and we will include another roll of film that we’ve already loaded back into your camera because with the first set of camera, that’s what you did. You took your camera, you shipped it back, and they developed it for you, put in the new roll and then shipped it back to you. To reduce the price of cameras and actually promote it, Eastman came up with something called the brownie camera. This is from 1900, very simple an operation. A little key on the top is used for advancing the film. The lever is the shutter relives. Initially it was intended to be a child’s camera, sold for one dollar. Roll films for the brownie was 15 cents, processing was 40 cents. So obviously from 25 dollars down to 1 dollar, 10 dollars down to 40 cents, makes photography really available, but not just anybody who wants to try it. The Kodak revolution turned the empire of photography into a republic, and the emblem of revolution, with the distinctive circular prince of the first generation of amateurs who are nicknamed the Kodak fins. No one was safe from the Kodak fins. Not the dull son, paul, who became the Kodak rep in France. Not the first patron of the royal photographic society, snapped about moral by her daughter-in-law, the photo mad, / princess Alexandra. But Kodak didn’t just change behaviors from behind the camera, it changed what is happening in front of it. With snap shots in abundance, people for more or less the first time looked the camera in the eye, and said cheese. What the Kodak camera did was to make it fun by to make it an adventure, and as part of that adventure the idea was take as many as you can because there is always more to be had and we will take care of the mess for you. And so the advent of the smile comes in where all of a sudden now taking a photograph means enjoying yourself and capturing an enjoyable moment and people are encouraged through Kodak ads to smile at a camera rather than make it into a serious enterprise. Along with the fun, came experiments, discoveries and accidents. In the hands of carefree consumers, uninhibited by the aspiration of the artist, all the perfectionism of the professional, Photography revealed its true nature as an open-ended, unruly medium. The art of photography is created without theories and without a continuous artistic tradition, But by amateurs who are making pictures, discovering in the process. Oh, I see it does that and so then the next time they have a chance to anticipate how it might behave the next time. Of course that's what invented the history photography in the20s and 30s when the new art-minded people looked at these old pictures and said :” I don’t care whether that is art or not, I am gonna learn from it ” There are no accidental masterpieces in a painting but there are accidental masterpieces in photography. I have no idea who these people were. It's a picture that turned up in a shoe box at a flee market. But everything about the picture is absolutely perfect. Even if you look at the terms purely and formal qualities. It is absolute perfection that tells the relations of the heights of the people in the photograph against the sky against the station wagon, and the position from which the photographer is photographing the people at a slight angle to the car. But the people were facing us directly. It’s amazing, look at a picture like this. And If I'm ever getting jaded about what photograph can do. A picture like this shows me I’m, I'm wrong. The amateurs’ snapshot is merely one sub-category in a genre of photography known as the vernacular. This contains journalistic photography, touristic photography, scientific photography, uh, forensic photography, insurance records, court documents, passport photographs, postcards, boxing match records, every kind of photography that ‘s into every use acceptable art. The vernacular contains some of the photography’s greatest naturally occuring riches, a gift of the medium itself rather than a product of the genius of the individual photographer. I was researching the history of New York City, and I wanted intimate view. I wanted to see what people’s apartments look like. Not rich people, ordinary, working-class, poor people, what they live like. When I first came upon these New York crime scene photographs, for example, I saw here is an unknown master. These were like the tombs of the ferals that has been intered with all their possessions. As I looked further into it I realized that there were between 4 and 7 different people involved. And further more, most of them seem to be policemen in the finger print identification department. They were taken with / very, very wide angle lens almost official, and so the body is in the center, often lit as if it was suspended in mid air. The camera is looking straight down, and the coverage research you can see a low trial part in the photograph. And then out on the edges on the fringe there are the feet of the detectors, and then there are the personal affects of the deceased, and they are all the way there. It couldn’t be better if it had been planed. Somehow these men just carrying out orders, trying for full coverage of the area, lighting as thorough as possible, as much information in the frames possible for forensic reasons, somehow they devolved to great static style. And that’s one of the greatest wonders in the mysteries of all these. There is some kind of genius of the medium. Photographers all like to hear this, by the way. But when you looked enough, vernacular photography divorces thoughts. You begin to think that it’s the camera that’s doing this work rather than the human operator who is just the one pushing the button. The paradox of photography, its’ unpredictable generosity and democratic inclusiveness is exemplified in the story of Yack OV. Lartigue. Late in his life, Lartigue would be hailed as one of the founders of modern life photography. In reality, he was the alternate amateur who was in a remarkable series of family albums assembled to portrait of tunnel the century France as appeared to the eyes a fun-loving boy from the age of 8 to 18 When you look through the pictures of these albums, this kind of, uh, life of lartigue, uh, taught by Lartigue and shot by Lartigue and that was in fact the core of these photography work albums. He was from a wealthy family, so he was lucky to this opportunity, and photography, we can say, was lucky to have found this little boy. 50 years after these pictures were taken. Lartigue was discovered by the photographic establishment and repackaged as a kind of primitive precursor of cutting edge photographers like Garry Winnergroun who achieved by design what a child genius that discovered through instant. In fact Lartigue’s photographs are a testament to the rich cultural amateurism which nurtured his precautious talent. He has no style. I mean that he is quite sponge that is very sensitive to the spirit of the time and when you look at the albums of Lartigue, you will feel that these were taken by several photographers and you feel that’s really it’s a kind of tribute to 20th century amateur photography. It’s a kind of work which would sum up all the amateur photography of the…of the 20th century. He’s essentially a gift amateur. He’s got the exercise to all these best equipments, settle all the equipments and he is a father who has passion about the photography. He is a subscriber to all these magazines. He’s just got all these advantages but he is also throughout all his entire life to understand this about him that he understands a sort of they look of the world at any given moment to understand how things look, how women look at certain period in time. To capture that essence of that moment whatever form that’s in. It was the very joy for the family, you know, they are the happy blood. Any weather on whispering, we can see even if they are home in Paris, you know, country, uh, how was on Paris, uh, always displaying. And everyone champac. Striking what they are, Latigue’s pictures are not with our precedent. Instant photography which arrested a movement for humorous effect was the cliché of the amateur *. Latigure simply did whatever what else was doing, but with more flare and more daring. He wrote on this page of the album, Bishenard also jumps from my snapshots. Bishenard with his cousin, and this photograph which has become very well-known really intrigued people. They often ask Tiny, “How did you do it”. And he would tell them, “I didn’t do anything, I just told her to jump.” All the jumping and flying in Latigue’s photographs, I mean, it looks like the whole world that the turn of the century is on spring or something. There is a kind of spirit of liberation what’s happening at the time, and Latigue matches that of with what, * photography can do and see you’ve got these really dynamic pictures. And for Latigue, uh, the joke, part of the joke, most of the dimes is that these people look out again but they are doing their crazy stuns. The exuberant gusto, Latigue’s snapshots is all the greater. When they are placed along side what passed for periods for photography at this time. This was the era I’ll put was called “pictorialism”, mean, moody and occasionally magnificent. Pictorialism was photography at its most po-faced. These very small self-elected leads to the turn of the century, who tried to establish photography as a ranch of the fine arts. Were * from the vernacular explosion that was actually the great creator of achievement of that period. And these, uh, leads in order to establish the steadiness withdrew into a very narrow world. That was imitating pre-making a drama, things like that, whistler and * type of art. And it was an absolutely artistic dead end.

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crocodilee

2008/03/19 20:49:53

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part 1 的部分听写笔记，详见 “英文视听在线 - 普特英语听力论坛”的确不错！ The Genius of Photography This is Meudon, a quiet Paris suburb, apart from the rumble of the occasional high speed train. In 1928, at roughly the midpoint between the invention of photography and our own digital age, Andre Kertesz, one of the great photographers of the 20th century came here and took some pictures. The photographs he took that day are as unremarkable as Meudon itself. But something about the place must have caught his eye, because a few days later, he came back, and turned the ordinary into something extraordinary. “Photography always transforms what it describes. That’s the art of photography is to control that transformation.” Kertesz’s Meudon encapsulates something of elusive genius of photography. Perhaps he had impressed in mind when he made it. But this edge of the same scene made a decade before, doesn’t tease us the way as photographic equivalent does. With a photograph, we can’t help but wonder who the figure in the foreground is, where he’s been, what he is carrying, and where he is taking it? How can something that reveals so much, keep so much to itself? “Photography is about the frame you put around the image. What comes in or what is cut off. And yet the story doesn’t end. It’s told beyond the frame through a kind of intuition.” In the course of our 170-year relationship, photography has delighted us, served us, moved us, outraged us and occasionally, disappointed us. But mainly it has intrigued us by showing the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearances. And that is photography’s true genius. The Genius of Photography 2 Photography, they say, was invented in 1839s. That was the year that a Frenchman Louis Daguerre and an Englishman Henry Fox Talbot announced rival processes that would, in the popular phrase of the day, fix the shadows. But the idea of photography has been arrived for much longer than that, as Abe Morell and his family and friends Aubert to demonstrate. "It looks like the light is getting better in the afternoon. It's getting actually more from the front, which is, it's a good side. Light is my, ah, my wisdom and my enemies, it's really a kind of amazingness. The photography is so perverse you know, you need darkness to see light. The pictures are negative, ah, things are upside-down, when you see through a camera. It's a kind of a weird nit you know inversion in photography. That's a, I think it's part of the ah...a charm of it,like magic or something. Almost ready?" "Oh, my God! Oh, that's wonderful! That's wonderful!" "That's wonderful." The camera obscura is an optical phenomenon that's simple to create and hard to believe, a blacked-out room and a small hole that allows a tight beam of light to enter. And with it, the outside world comes pouring in, upside-down and twice as natural. "I've been teaching photography for, you know, 20 years now. And one of the nicest way of introducing the classroom's through the other camera was actually put them in one, put them inside one. So I would turn the classrooms into a camera obscura. And it's guaranteed every time, very savvy, hip, visual. People are exalted, they're dumbfounded. And it just, it proves to me that there are something very deep and primitive about it. It's not something that one has invented, it's not like SONY has developed its new chip to make this happen. You know, this is totally natural." The desire for photography is an ancient one. The Roman writer Pleny recounts the legend of a young woman who traced the outline of her departing lover shadow on the wall. Inspired by this, her father made the first sculpture and so western art was born, but all the poor girl really wanted was a snapshot. It wasn't until the 1830s, that science found a way to satisfy her desire, that by then had it become a part of scientist "No, it's no accident that the only conceptions of the photography happened to coincide with the usual, that we call now romanticism, because many of the ideas in concerns of the other Romantic Movement, find themselves embodied in the experiments towards photography. Like that say Courige will be lying on a hillside and looking up in his half dazed eyes he sees dazzling sun and he thinks how can I possibly capture this evanescent moment. And photography, this thing which captures a moment from time and fixes it in place is a kind of answer to this romantic struggle. " It had been known for centuries what a camera optikos could do. The breakthrough came with the observation that certain chemicals were light-sensitive. "As if it was well-known for at least a century before 1839 that's for example, silver salts, silver colorize, silver nitrate reacted and responded to light, darkened and therefore images could be made. The problem that was difficult to solve was to stop the image being made to find a way, if you like fixing the image stop it developing and eventually becoming black. I mean we have, for example, an account published in 1802 by Hanfree Davian in the Journal of the Royal Institution where he discusses experiments that he and Tom Wager would have been making , if experimenting with these silver salts. They sought a piece of leather and they may try to make contact prince with a literally put a piece over technical space and after directly onto it, expose it to light and then for a moment, they actually saw an image come up and then heartbreakingly, I suppose, the image kept going black until it disappeared. So as early as 1802, well before the announcement of the. . . a marketable photographic persist in 1839, we find at least these two people and probably many more who have experienced photography momentarily. " Among the proto-photographers struggling to fix the fleeting shadows was Henry Fox Tolbert, M. P. the master of Lake Cork cabby and a world authority on botany and cuneiform writing. But there was one flaw in this polymath slice-tor of accomplishments, he couldn't draw photography. "Here is Henry Tolbert to his accomplished all certain of things, but he has absolutely no idea how to take that complicated colorful three dimensional world and get it down to lines on a piece of paper. And it was then he started thinking about the camera obscure and started thinking about chemistry and when he went back to Lake Cork in sometimes the spring of 1834, his photo mind started putting all these things together. " Tolbert experimented, using paper, coated with silver salts, and shoebox sized cameras. They were nicknamed “mousetraps”. Soon they began catching things never seen before – the strange mirror images from the ghost world of the photographic negative. “This was the achievement what have been, exactly what Tolbert was trying to get. It’s a negative. Tones are reversed, and it’s laterally reversed, left to right, which allowed a print when it was sent for another sheet of photographic paper to print up in the correct way around. But the negative itself is something that Tolbert appreciated and people in his day did as well, and today we kind of lose sight of that. But if you look at one of these things, from an abstract standpoint, it is… it’s a beautiful object.” Tolbert’s paper negatives were more than beautiful. They represented the breakthrough on which modern photography would be founded. “I think Tolbert’s most important inventions were not so much chemicals. They were conceptual. He understood immediately that he could make prints from these, so one of these first dots is that this is going to be a way to make it possible to reproduce images for the masses, and to produce books that never would have gotten done otherwise.” But while Tolbert quietly continued his experiments, he discovered that he had a rival. In January, 1839, Louie Dego, through the Prestigious Cadeby four seasons in Paris, with news of his own method for fixing the shadows. “Louie Dego was an academically trained French painter. Somebody who we think began his experimenting of photography in about 1824. That’s about the same time that he was also producing his diorama paintings, very lab-scale paintings, that he put into a darkened room and he sold seats to people much like an early cinematic experience.” “His background was as an entrepreneur, is a showman, as someone who was interested in spectacle and display and presentation, and indeed that was, that was acted it out when he presented his discovery to the world.” Dego’s discovery was very different from the methods Tolbert had been explored. Instead of a paper-based process, Dego fixed his images on a mirrored metal plate. And unlike Tolbert’s negative-positive process, Dego’s produced one-off images like a puron. Even so, according to the contemporary champions of the gary type like photographer Jerry span newly, it produces a visual experience that’s unique. "I remember my first experience with daguerreotype. I was just, I was stunned, you know as immediately stunned. It was like a miracle. It just looked like a protege of nature. You know the nineteenth century was refered to as a mirror with the memory. And I think that's a beautiful description of precisely what daguerreotype is. " "A daguerreotype is not a conventional operating system the way of photography is. That's the light operates differently with a daguerreotype. The silver grains of the image sit up on the surface in the way that they don't quite in a photograph. In the paper photograph they tend to sink into the surface. So what you see when you look at a daguerreotype is light reflected back through an image. And there are something about that that begins to approximate the actual experience of the taking of the photograph itself that particular moment when the image is captured. The people that you're looking at seem not exactly alive, but on the edge of being impressive. " "One of the things that are interesting about this process and much makes a different from a lot of other photographic processes is no separation between the material that you shoot with and the finished result, the plate that was in a camera is the same plate which will eventually be displayed. And for me, there is an immediacy in that relationship between the image and the actually physical artifact of the event. " " I always love daguerreotypes. Everything I love about photography is always there in the 1840's and 50's, incredible value arrange from absolute reflected bright white to the deepest darkest valveless blacks. Unbelievable about a detail, great usually, a great deal of differences in that field, because the lens as to so wide open and they are intimate. " "Now, I have to put it up onto a gilding stand and turn on a torch and get into that. If you don't gild it, you could wipe the image off with a slightest touch, even a brush stroke across the surface of daguerreotype will remove the image. " "I love daguerreotypes. They are marvelous. They are very pretty, but it's a dead end. Tolbert recognized that human communication was through paper. " "One big weakness of the daguerreotype was it could not make more reproductions from the original image and that's where ultimately Talbot's system dominated or kind of dominate the daguerreotype." "The cruel irony of history is that the Daguerre is a public showman trying to reach a huge market and what he invents is the most intimate of all photographic processes. It's something that only one person can see and Henry Talbot who's a tremendously private person trying to meet a private need invents the system that we know propagates photography throughout the world, so he unwillingly became the showman that Daguerre wanted to be." "The beginnings of photography were all about that. They were all about the kind of Darwinian struggle to see which process would triumph, but the determinant of that struggle were fairly clear: how quickly, how cheaply, how accurately could the image be made, how widely could it be distributed and you simply cannot write a static history for photography or even a merely technological history for photography without talking about money, because you have to talk about money in industry in order to get a sense of why the landscape for photography looks the way it does now." Talbot's process may have market forces on his side but its ultimate triumph was a long time coming. In his first decades, all photography whatever on paper, metal, glass, or tin was a matter of wonder, and even disbelief. "When the first daguerreotype was shown in London, there was a reviewer who wrote in the Times about that Lilliputian draftsmanship. So they have that wonder that sort of sense of impossibility how could somebody do that and how could you possibly draw a whole cityscape in, I don't know, ten minutes. It was both this incredibly fine, gossamer draftsmanship and this incredible speed at same time." Behind the magic ? camera, they have deeper mystery. And one that remains the source of medium's greatest power to this day. The photograph world it turned out was a strange place: a looking glass world resembling our own and everything except in the way things appeared. "Everybody assumed that they knew what these pictures were going to look like and it took a while for people to realize that in fact the photographic medium creates a lot of surprises. It doesn't describe the world just the way you expected it to." "The camera does it. Anything you've taken a picture of, you've put a frame around it and you've narrowed the kind of viewers' eyesight and said, 'look at this, this is special.' And sometimes it's almost random point of view, but because it's crapped off, it's no longer random. It's considered intentional. So that becomes 'look at this, this is special.' " "But the photographic medium itself doesn't care what's important and what's not. So if you pointed at something you think is important, it's going to register all the stuff, unimportant stuff around it with just the same precision and fullness." All seeing but undiscriminating, the camera reviewed the world teeming in detail. This study of Trafalgar Square by Talbot, it’s a film with smog and so you have the, you really have the atmospheric feeling of being right there in a smog-filled city. You see the bills that are pasted to those hoardings which with a look you can actually read, including the sign that says 'post no bills'. Henry James has this great phrase to seek the detail of London life, that’s what it is. And photography is uniquely suited to capture this, of course, because it’s a machine. It doesn’t have a hierarchy of psychological interest, just swallows everything up instantly. But this is also fascinating if you think about Nelson’s Column under construction which is a formal title of this when you look at it, the Column, tardily(?) in the picture. I think what Talbot was looking at here more was this was a period of the enormous destruction in 1844. This was a period of enormous destruction throughout Europe and all of the governments should be in threatened and the whole social orders being threatened. And Talbot, I think, was really trying to document the modern London in a modern social structure here, that he knew was on the verge of change. I think this photograph is really much more about that sense of change in the world. The world was changing. It was becoming recognizably modern thanks to the new technologies of the mid 19 century. Before the railway, people had moved no faster than the fastest horse; before the telegraph, the speediest form of communication was the carrier pigeon; before photography, time had moved forward inexorably like a river. By speeding up travel, making communications instantaneous and freezing time, these new technologies not only change the world, they change the way people understood the world. We start to enter not just industrial era of machines but the industrial era of precision and information and travel. The rail road, the telegraph, the photography and these other technologies that are speeding up the world and moving us through the world of solid objects to this world of information and images speeding by faster and faster. And this remarkable phrase comes from much earlier from Alexander Pope Poem, the isolation(?) of time and space that can be used over and over and over again in that period, I mean, it feels like it’s a part of this breaking apart of the organic flow of time into something, much more manipulable whether it’s by speeding it up through railway, freezing it through photographs. Photography and the railway would come together in one of most far-reaching achievements in the pioneer years, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous motion studies, the Picasso of cinema and the product of the wealth and the whim of the railroad baron, Leland Stanford. notes: 1. Trafalgar Square: Trafalgar Square is a square in London, England that commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), a British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars. 2. Nelson’s Column: Nelson's Column is the focal point of Trafalgar Square. It was built between 1840 and 1843 to commemorate Admiral Horatio Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar. 3. Alexander Pope: Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) is generally regarded as the greatest English poet of the early eighteenth century. 4. Eadweard Muybridge: Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) is a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement. 5. Leland Stanford: 1824–1893, American railroad builder, politician, and philanthropist. He was a railroad baron who made part of his fortune by dealing with Gold Rush miners. He and his wife founded and endowed Leland Stanford Junior University (now Stanford University) as a memorial to their son, at Palo Alto in 1891. Muybridge’s story exemplifies the surprising new possibilities of the modern world. Born in the ancient market town of Kingston upon Thames, his restless ambitions brought him to San Francisco, a boom city founded on gold rush wealth and sustained by the new trans-continental railway, financed by Leland Stanford. In this thoroughly modern metropolis, Muybridge established a reputation with *** played landscapes and spectacular panoramas, including an eye-boggling 360-degree view of the adopted city. Stanford came to Muybridge because he had a rich man’s problem. A passionate race horse breeder, he wanted to prove that a horse lifted all four feet off the ground when it trotted - something that had evaded human perception for millennia. This whole relationship between Muybridge and Stanford, I always think of this being proto-cinematic in the 19th century, a director and producer relationship that Stanford becomes very involved in the technology and funds it and backs it and recruits these engineers, jockeys and other people to help Muybridge, but Muybridge is the director. The direct stage was Stanford’s own private racetrack at Pala Alto. On a specially whited out section of track, Muybridge placed a row of 24 cameras with electric shutters, which would be triggered in sequence, four every second, as the horse passed by. By this means, Muybridge did more than freeze the moment; he took a scalpel to time itself. Muybridge's photographs were the first source of accurate information about the gait of a horse, and it's the beginning of this change where suddenly the camera allows human beings to see faster than our own eyes, to break down the world into dissect motion. And it's part of that kind of intrusion into the flow of time. For Stanford, the project was always about horses, whereas Muybridge understood that this was potentially about everything he could possibly find and really create an encyclopedia of zoological motion. With his mastery of the material world, the photographer was to the nineteenth century what the computer whisked is to the twenty-first. Scientist, artist, inventor, but most of all, an entrepreneur, these people were in it for the money. Once photography was invented, you could say then the question is well, what we do with this? By the 1850s, camera takes over and for the next half century or more, the overwhelming majorities of pictures that,photographys that are made are made for a commercial reason. And if you wanted to make serous money from photography, this was the way to do it. One important example of major innovation in photographic technology was introduction of cooper and zinc, a type of photography pattern to divide, in French name,in November 1864. As your postured,you'll photography eight times in a rapid sequence by a camera that had eight lenses on it. So you could have eight poses in a spacive few minutes and because these cards were small,they could be sent through the posts, tens of thousands,millions of these cards flew back and forth between the new world ,United Nations,and Europe. In effect,these cards turn photography into a true industry. People invented photography because it could go anywhere, you know, it has no fixed identity at this point.People realize that it, it is going to be able to do all these or other things,you know, it gonna to be able to go to war, to make documentary photography and of course, it's already tied up to literature, it's big scence. And by architects beginning to use it because suddenly they had these very detailed views of momumental of the world, and so they could make money out of all kinds of different aspects of photography. It's a global phenomena virtually since the day they get their announcement,photography was being made all over the world. People were shipping cameras and equipment to allthe parts of,certainly the colonized world. So it was an incredible global phenomena. Photographers may have been across the globe, but the heart of photography's empire remained the studio. Right now, we're in Skylike Studio. This is a studio that any 19th century photography would love to work in it, its beautiful light, it's consistent all day long. Generally in a 19th century studio what you're looking for is what the artists look for as well. In a photographer's studio, the public encountered alternalty in all links, in intriguing, intimidating strangeness. For the sitter to come to a photographic studio, the experience was one of, of wonder, to climb up three flights of stairs,are you out of breath? You're not sure what's going to be in the studio. They sit you down in the chair, they bring a hairstyle head stand to keep your head steady. And they wheel the camera like this, up to your face, like a cannon being aimed at you,then you smell different smells. You have the smell of ethol, you have the smell of alcohol, the smell of suli, the smell of oil,of lavender.And all these things are mixed together in a gamble that it is completely unfamiliar to you. And then they say try to have a natural expression. Natural expressions were not all that common in the 19th century. But one photographer who mastered the difficult art was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon also known as Nadar. This sort of portrayal is quite characteristic. He is looking toward the camera quite fairly directly. You can’t tell but his hair is red. But he had red hair so and he uses it when he opens a studio he reproduces his signature at large scale across the top of the facade on top of the building in red. And when he stamps the photographs of his, they are stamped in red. Nadar is a made-up name, it’s a professional name, and it becomes famous, it is sort of copyright if you will. And there is a famous lawsuit with his brother over whether or not the brother is allowed to use that name. And so this invents who knows how to put together a program of publicity. Nadar was the XX war hawk of the Bahia in Paris, a celebrity artist who photographed up and coming stars in a style that rewrote the rules. His portrayal of artists unrivaled because his photographing then is equals and he doesn’t have to dress them up or put them in sort of stupid settings with fake columns or huge thrones. He just photographs some standing in his daylight studio looking totally authentic and wonderful which is why they are probably the best portrayals of artists ever. He doesn’t attempt to flatter people. He’s unflinching in the way he looks at people but he’s never cruel. But he always isolates his sitters. They are against completely plain backgrounds. And unlike other photographers of the period there is nothing to indicate what the profession is. A writer is not holding up a pen and a painter is not holding up a brush. It’s the force of the personality alone that has to convey the character of the person. One Nadar’s photograph Sarabanha, she was nearly unknown she was very quite wonderful looking because her face is very fresh. He wrapped some large pieces of cloth around her to isolate that beautiful neck and face. And so there is really nothing else in the photograph except that. But it’s no longer about how expensive a frock you can afford to wear XX the ceiling. It is about how you can project yourself into another medium. So it’s a wave assuring your own in morality and part. But whatever his personal status, the status of Nadar's chosen profession was rather less certain. In its first decades, photography had proved itself able to do almost anything. But one doubt remained then as now: is it art? Here is the dilemma and strand of photography. It is the easiest medium in which to be competent. But it is the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable. There is the physicality to a photograph. There’s nothing there. Uh, some silver, er, the tyres and the evolvement process or some dyes in a color print. There is no physicalist,There’s nothing you can point to and say this is the work of that artist's hands. So how do you make a photograph that everybody immediately knows it’s the work of a particular artist? Well, that’s a very difficult and complicated thing, you know, to，uh, to come up with. When someone really ends up nailing down a particular kind of vision to such extent that they own that vision, you know that they’ve really done something. Photographers anxious to prove the claims of their medium instinctively turned to painting in search for inspiration and reassurance. I think photographers did plant their tripod feet in the place where the easels of the painters had stood. Roger Fenten went up one of the great Wales Rivers, to the exact spot where Samuel Pamer had painted a few decades before and photographed the scene of the Pamer painting. But it doesn’t look the same. It’s radically different actually. And you see it again and again and in the leading, the pioneer of photographers, they are making sharp modern versions of / old water colors, putting them through the gears into this new language. But they also were responding to this strange ground glass they were looking at, which was of very tight direct angle. And they, of course, were looking at the world upside down and back to front. And I think that encourage is the great abstraction as you / try to focus on some motifs. You look at it screaming around, not the right way around, outside down. You kind of homing on big blocks of light and shade because you need to grasp something and you know the genius of the medium itself is setting itself bit by bit. But whatever his personal status, the status of Nadar's chosen profession was rather less certain. In its first decades, photography had proved itself able to do almost anything. But one doubt remained then as now: is it art? Here is the dilemma and strand of photography. It is the easiest medium in which to be competent. But it is the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable. There is the physicality to a photograph. There’s nothing there. Uh, some silver, er, the tyres and the evolvement process or some dyes in a color print. There is no physicalist,There’s nothing you can point to and say this is the work of that artist's hands. So how do you make a photograph that everybody immediately knows it’s the work of a particular artist? Well, that’s a very difficult and complicated thing, you know, to，uh, to come up with. When someone really ends up nailing down a particular kind of vision to such extent that they own that vision, you know that they’ve really done something. Photographers anxious to prove the claims of their medium instinctively turned to painting in search for inspiration and reassurance. I think photographers did plant their tripod feet in the place where the easels of the painters had stood. Roger Fenten went up one of the great Wales Rivers, to the exact spot where Samuel Pamer had painted a few decades before and photographed the scene of the Pamer painting. But it doesn’t look the same. It’s radically different actually. And you see it again and again and in the leading, the pioneer of photographers, they are making sharp modern versions of / old water colors, putting them through the gears into this new language. But they also were responding to this strange ground glass they were looking at, which was of very tight direct angle. And they, of course, were looking at the world upside down and back to front. And I think that encourage is the great abstraction as you / try to focus on some motifs. You look at it screaming around, not the right way around, outside down. You kind of homing on big blocks of light and shade because you need to grasp something and you know the genius of the medium itself is setting itself bit by bit. But it wasn’t just photographers who recognized the cameras’ new way of seeing. Photography was also making an impression on real artists. There are several features, which show, particularly with Daga, that he looked in photographs, that he had been influenced by them. In this framing, which counts a person and the wheel of a carriage in half and whether real subject is pushed over to the right edge. You can see neither the horse is pulling it, nor the coachman. Clearly, it’s very daring. The way photographs catch the world did help change the fine art tradition, progressive painting, bits of figures are just cut off, and you get that same cutting-off in photographs, too. So has this sort of very similar to the new way of looking You see the world as fragments, not these perfect wholes. He was also looking for a new kind of naturalness of natural gestures, for example, a hand in a pocket which can mean just as much as someone’s face. That was something that he was able to see in the Starry’s ~ views, which show people walking on boulevards whose gestures are recorded in a very natural way, which had never been seen before. The way someone held their umbrella or put their hand in their pocket, or turned their head. Like this teacher, for example, leaning on his cane, or these young girls crutching her back, it’s the type of pose you could only see in the famous Starry’s photos in the boulevards. But even though he was influenced by it, Daga never saw photography as anything more than a useful tool Deep down, he had a contempt for photography, like all artists or real creatives. For them, photography wasn’t an art form; it was despised because it was becoming totally commercialized. Indeed, photography has become an industry. This is the first photograph taken by the man who did more than anyone to transform photography from a specialized craft, haunting the doorstep of art into a mass map of industry. It’s a view of Rochester, the hometown of a young man called George Eastman. Initially, Mr. Eastman was working in a bank as a bank teller. He became interested in photography, as he wanted to document a vacation that he was planning on taking. He actually much more interested in photography than going on a vacation he never did go. Eastman revolutionized photography by degrees. First by producing something we now take for granted—a roll of film. But that, was just the beginning. A few years later, Eastman takes a same sort of concept, and remarks it as an electric camera, called the Kodak. Kodak means nothing. He was playing on the grounds with his mother one night, and somehow it happened upon the word, and he liked it because he thought the letter K was a strong and incisive letter, and it meant nothing. So he thought what better way to sell a product than to have a name that people are gonna remember because the letters are strong and because it’s a name that has no alternate meanings that hasn’t trafficed in American society before. People will remember it because it’s unique, and he was right. Suddenly photography has this great moment when the Americans as their so brilliant tags turned into an area of mass production and factory standardization, and put it into the hands of everyone. It’s really simple an operation,/ the string is used to cut the shutter. Shutter releases on this side. The famous slogan which we will remember, uh, how does it go? You press the button, we do the rest. What it promises is all you have to do is a very ,very simple act, and we will take care of everything, we will take care of the shipping, the developing, the printing, we will mail it all back to you, and we will include another roll of film that we’ve already loaded back into your camera because with the first set of camera, that’s what you did. You took your camera, you shipped it back, and they developed it for you, put in the new roll and then shipped it back to you. To reduce the price of cameras and actually promote it, Eastman came up with something called the brownie camera. This is from 1900, very simple an operation. A little key on the top is used for advancing the film. The lever is the shutter relives. Initially it was intended to be a child’s camera, sold for one dollar. Roll films for the brownie was 15 cents, processing was 40 cents. So obviously from 25 dollars down to 1 dollar, 10 dollars down to 40 cents, makes photography really available, but not just anybody who wants to try it. The Kodak revolution turned the empire of photography into a republic, and the emblem of revolution, with the distinctive circular prince of the first generation of amateurs who are nicknamed the Kodak fins. No one was safe from the Kodak fins. Not the dull son, paul, who became the Kodak rep in France. Not the first patron of the royal photographic society, snapped about moral by her daughter-in-law, the photo mad, / princess Alexandra. But Kodak didn’t just change behaviors from behind the camera, it changed what is happening in front of it. With snap shots in abundance, people for more or less the first time looked the camera in the eye, and said cheese. What the Kodak camera did was to make it fun by to make it an adventure, and as part of that adventure the idea was take as many as you can because there is always more to be had and we will take care of the mess for you. And so the advent of the smile comes in where all of a sudden now taking a photograph means enjoying yourself and capturing an enjoyable moment and people are encouraged through Kodak ads to smile at a camera rather than make it into a serious enterprise. Along with the fun, came experiments, discoveries and accidents. In the hands of carefree consumers, uninhibited by the aspiration of the artist, all the perfectionism of the professional, Photography revealed its true nature as an open-ended, unruly medium. The art of photography is created without theories and without a continuous artistic tradition, But by amateurs who are making pictures, discovering in the process. Oh, I see it does that and so then the next time they have a chance to anticipate how it might behave the next time. Of course that's what invented the history photography in the20s and 30s when the new art-minded people looked at these old pictures and said :” I don’t care whether that is art or not, I am gonna learn from it ” There are no accidental masterpieces in a painting but there are accidental masterpieces in photography. I have no idea who these people were. It's a picture that turned up in a shoe box at a flee market. But everything about the picture is absolutely perfect. Even if you look at the terms purely and formal qualities. It is absolute perfection that tells the relations of the heights of the people in the photograph against the sky against the station wagon, and the position from which the photographer is photographing the people at a slight angle to the car. But the people were facing us directly. It’s amazing, look at a picture like this. And If I'm ever getting jaded about what photograph can do. A picture like this shows me I’m, I'm wrong. The amateurs’ snapshot is merely one sub-category in a genre of photography known as the vernacular. This contains journalistic photography, touristic photography, scientific photography, uh, forensic photography, insurance records, court documents, passport photographs, postcards, boxing match records, every kind of photography that ‘s into every use acceptable art. The vernacular contains some of the photography’s greatest naturally occuring riches, a gift of the medium itself rather than a product of the genius of the individual photographer. I was researching the history of New York City, and I wanted intimate view. I wanted to see what people’s apartments look like. Not rich people, ordinary, working-class, poor people, what they live like. When I first came upon these New York crime scene photographs, for example, I saw here is an unknown master. These were like the tombs of the ferals that has been intered with all their possessions. As I looked further into it I realized that there were between 4 and 7 different people involved. And further more, most of them seem to be policemen in the finger print identification department. They were taken with / very, very wide angle lens almost official, and so the body is in the center, often lit as if it was suspended in mid air. The camera is looking straight down, and the coverage research you can see a low trial part in the photograph. And then out on the edges on the fringe there are the feet of the detectors, and then there are the personal affects of the deceased, and they are all the way there. It couldn’t be better if it had been planed. Somehow these men just carrying out orders, trying for full coverage of the area, lighting as thorough as possible, as much information in the frames possible for forensic reasons, somehow they devolved to great static style. And that’s one of the greatest wonders in the mysteries of all these. There is some kind of genius of the medium. Photographers all like to hear this, by the way. But when you looked enough, vernacular photography divorces thoughts. You begin to think that it’s the camera that’s doing this work rather than the human operator who is just the one pushing the button. The paradox of photography, its’ unpredictable generosity and democratic inclusiveness is exemplified in the story of Yack OV. Lartigue. Late in his life, Lartigue would be hailed as one of the founders of modern life photography. In reality, he was the alternate amateur who was in a remarkable series of family albums assembled to portrait of tunnel the century France as appeared to the eyes a fun-loving boy from the age of 8 to 18 When you look through the pictures of these albums, this kind of, uh, life of lartigue, uh, taught by Lartigue and shot by Lartigue and that was in fact the core of these photography work albums. He was from a wealthy family, so he was lucky to this opportunity, and photography, we can say, was lucky to have found this little boy. 50 years after these pictures were taken. Lartigue was discovered by the photographic establishment and repackaged as a kind of primitive precursor of cutting edge photographers like Garry Winnergroun who achieved by design what a child genius that discovered through instant. In fact Lartigue’s photographs are a testament to the rich cultural amateurism which nurtured his precautious talent. He has no style. I mean that he is quite sponge that is very sensitive to the spirit of the time and when you look at the albums of Lartigue, you will feel that these were taken by several photographers and you feel that’s really it’s a kind of tribute to 20th century amateur photography. It’s a kind of work which would sum up all the amateur photography of the…of the 20th century. He’s essentially a gift amateur. He’s got the exercise to all these best equipments, settle all the equipments and he is a father who has passion about the photography. He is a subscriber to all these magazines. He’s just got all these advantages but he is also throughout all his entire life to understand this about him that he understands a sort of they look of the world at any given moment to understand how things look, how women look at certain period in time. To capture that essence of that moment whatever form that’s in. It was the very joy for the family, you know, they are the happy blood. Any weather on whispering, we can see even if they are home in Paris, you know, country, uh, how was on Paris, uh, always displaying. And everyone champac. Striking what they are, Latigue’s pictures are not with our precedent. Instant photography which arrested a movement for humorous effect was the cliché of the amateur *. Latigure simply did whatever what else was doing, but with more flare and more daring. He wrote on this page of the album, Bishenard also jumps from my snapshots. Bishenard with his cousin, and this photograph which has become very well-known really intrigued people. They often ask Tiny, “How did you do it”. And he would tell them, “I didn’t do anything, I just told her to jump.” All the jumping and flying in Latigue’s photographs, I mean, it looks like the whole world that the turn of the century is on spring or something. There is a kind of spirit of liberation what’s happening at the time, and Latigue matches that of with what, * photography can do and see you’ve got these really dynamic pictures. And for Latigue, uh, the joke, part of the joke, most of the dimes is that these people look out again but they are doing their crazy stuns. The exuberant gusto, Latigue’s snapshots is all the greater. When they are placed along side what passed for periods for photography at this time. This was the era I’ll put was called “pictorialism”, mean, moody and occasionally magnificent. Pictorialism was photography at its most po-faced. These very small self-elected leads to the turn of the century, who tried to establish photography as a ranch of the fine arts. Were * from the vernacular explosion that was actually the great creator of achievement of that period. And these, uh, leads in order to establish the steadiness withdrew into a very narrow world. That was imitating pre-making a drama, things like that, whistler and * type of art. And it was an absolutely artistic dead end.

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kingdog

2012/05/02 01:05:18

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呵呵，下来看看，谢了

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kissme371751

2012/04/29 12:37:22

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谢谢o~ 最近对这很感兴趣

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sduke130

2012/04/17 02:30:31

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望有源~~！！！

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xdw1901

2012/01/07 16:27:22

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好东西,谢谢了.

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海带大王

2011/11/23 21:10:08

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想看啊！！ 回复

cdmac

2011/07/31 10:36:38

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谢谢，来晚了，不知道还能下载否。经典中的经典啊！！！

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聪明了

2011/07/15 12:52:12

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好东西，谢谢楼主。

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phoenix714

2011/06/04 23:44:29

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楼主给个源吧！！跪谢跪谢

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pxh71

2011/05/04 11:39:09

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太好了，支持！

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雨霏时节

2011/02/13 20:23:56

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好好收藏，实体书只有摄影技术的，前几天找摄影历史问题，没找到。
谢谢

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smilenet

2011/01/24 00:48:08

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收藏;mark之，很好的。

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姿势要正确

2011/01/15 23:57:02

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感谢！唯一的不足就是没有Ansel Adams 的介绍，对不起《The Genius of Photography》这个名字啊

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whzlsh

2010/12/23 19:03:25

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[quote name='blindness' date='2010-04-30, 02:29 PM' folder='217059:8413938']

[/quote]
多谢！等了一段时间了：）

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