Preface

“I have found a way of fixing the images of the camera! I have seized the fleeting light and imprisoned it! I have forced the sun to paint pictures for me!”

L. J. M. Daguerre, to Charles Chevalier at his Paris optical shop

Daguerre’s energized words—the inspiration for our title—reflect the powerful desire to make permanent, reproducible images through the action of light. These pages convey the fascination surrounding this process we call photography throughout its development over the centuries. Seizing the Light: A Social & Aesthetic History of Photography, third edition, offers a significantly expanded and thoroughly revised resource for history of photography courses while providing an accurate and comprehensible introduction to the photographic arts for the general reader. The new subtitle reflects the book’s outlook by examining the imaginative and resourceful individuals who have advanced the practice by challenging the aesthetic, conceptual, and technical conventions of the photographic arts. In turn, we see the societal and aesthetic shifts from the photograph as an unproblematic mirror of reality with a fixed meaning to that of a flexible human construction whose significance is determined by the viewer.

Corresponding to William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Open Door (1843), this third edition of Seizing the Light invites the reader to become acquainted with key imagemakers, processes, and ideas. In the manner of photography, this work continues to evolve with thousands of updates and revisions plus the addition of numerous new makers, topics, and references. As well as providing the latest information, I pursued a number of new goals for this edition while continuing to provide a revised and comprehensible introduction into photographic history. As an educator, I strive to provide a perceptive, chronological entryway to the artistic, commercial, scientific, and societal forces that have shaped Western photography, rather than presenting a glancing and overwhelming encyclopedic world survey. This emphasizes the perspective that one cannot begin to comprehend another society without first learning about one’s own roots. As a curator, I choose to offer a fundamental starting place to contemplate the diversity of imagemakers, inventors, issues, and applications. As a former director of photographic arts organizations and galleries, I seek to share my fascination with looking at pictures by presenting intriguing images that would inspire people to visit galleries, museums, and Internet sites devoted to photography. And as an imagemaker, I aspire to explore the artistic and critical aspects of the creative process that motivate people to make, share, look at, and interpret images, stressing how photography was a social medium long before the advent of social media. From a conceptual point of view, I aim to show in a concise and jargon-free manner how makers have responded to academic theories. The knowledge I gained from researching this project has deepened my comprehending of photographic practice; it is my hope that others will find the result to be an accessible starting point for open inquiry and discussion.

Overall, Seizing the Light examines how photography developed from centuries of Western imagemaking, and how photographers have struggled to discover the medium’s own visual syntax. The book also examines how capitalism and market forces have shaped photographic practices by standardizing equipment, materials, and procedures, as well as how public applications, desires, expectations, and demands affect our interpretation of images. It offers an initial site for thinking about why we have embraced photography as a medium so enthusiastically, and why and how we make, view, and decipher billions of photo-based images on a daily basis.

Seizing the Light provides a coherent, representational view of select people, events, processes, and movements as a starting pathway that defines the extensive roles and meanings of Western photographic practice. This approach builds a solid, in-depth foundation of how photography interacts and affects our lives. In addition to a variety of new topics, existing themes, from the photobooth to the wars in the Mideast to the Internet, have been given fresh coverage. Other featured themes, which provide a fuller realization of how photography can play with the meaning of cultural images, include the body, the landscape, the portrait, time and space concepts, typologies, and urban life.

Changing technology has always affected how information is shaped, transmitted, and understood; today’s digital technology is no exception. This book examines how the flux of the photographic processes over time has changed our notions about photographic truth and how it has affected our conception of galleries and museums as image presenters and repositories. This history continues to be written with research assistance from people all over the world through blogs, emails, Internet sites, listservs, and social media, which is a critical reminder that history is a living thing and its numerous meanings depend on those writing and interpreting it. As John Carey (Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford) puts it: ‘One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly, and painfully past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.’¹

I gratefully acknowledge and seek to represent the canon of photographic history composed of luminary figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston; however, Seizing the Light also aims for thorough coverage of photography since the 1960s. This has been a time of explosive growth in the number of people working within the photo-related arts, and it demands greater study if we are to recognize its diversity and richness. Attention is given to contemporary artists who are expanding the practice of photography and bringing their works to a broader audience, as well as to ethnically diverse and female photographers throughout photographic history. Furthermore, the text moves beyond the canon in focusing on certain overlooked vernacular genres of historic practice such as stereographs and snapshots, and how classic hands-on processes have been revitalized and influenced the field.

The history of photography is reverent to everyone in the visual arts because all photographs are made from other photographs. With this concept in mind, my new publisher and book team has striven to achieve high production values, including full-color reproduction, with large-sized images that pay special attention to maintaining the subtle tonal variations. Readers need to bear in mind that all reproductions are just approximations of the work—translations from silver and pixels into ink; viewers should make the effort to see actual pieces whenever possible. We hope the images chosen to represent a particular artist or movement will kindle a passion in our readership to further investigate the abundance of our photographic heritage. Due to the book’s physical limitations, the individuals featured act as representatives for their many fellow makers who could not be included. The text selectively concentrates on specific aspects of each maker’s practice to exemplify particular moments that have influenced photographic practice. It makes no attempt to represent the range of each maker’s body of work. Nor does it detail any of their technical processes. Information about these methods can be found in my other books, especially Photographic Possibilities: The Expressive Use of Ideas, Materials, and Processes, and online. A small portion of material has been gleaned and modified from my previous articles, books, and interviews. The text has been carefully fact checked, and endnotes have been limited to maintain readability.

The Select Bibliography of foundational books has been revised. However, monographs on individual artists, plus texts on photographic processes and technology, and artists’ books have been eliminated as these can be easily found with an online search or via the endnotes.

All images, except those in the public domain, are courtesy of each artist and/or their representative(s). They retain the copyright, and their work may not be reproduced without their written permission. Note: any maker’s name that appears in bold face font when that individual’s contribution is first introduced (i.e. Jane Doe) indicates that at least one reproduction of their work is included in the text. This is accompanied by their life date (i.e. 1900–1999).

For this third edition, I am particularly grateful to Dr. Andrew Hershberger, professor of art history at Bowling Green State University, for bringing his in-depth knowledge and research to this project by providing an extremely close and sympathetic editing of the manuscript for this edition, which has enhanced its accuracy and readability. I asked Dr. Hershberger to take on this task after reading his publication Photographic Theory: An Historic Anthology (2014), when I was struck by the uncanny overlap of the material he had selected that is also referenced in Seizing the Light. I highly recommend his book as an outstanding companion volume, since it provides especially accessible readings and references which complement Seizing the Light. Additionally, it turns out that Seizing the Light is required reading for Dr. Hershberger’s students, and he was thus familiar with its use in a classroom setting.

Professor Edward Bateman of the University of Utah worked diligently with me on creating the new Chapter 20 “Photography Becomes Digital Imaging” and on the division and reorganization of the former Chapter 18, “Thinking About Photography,” into two chapters, including the new Chapter 19 “The Politics of Representation.”

Thanks also to Samuel Ewing, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, the project’s in-progress technical editor, for his conscientious attention to detail and excellent suggestions which have added clarity to the text and references.

Mark Jacobs, an independent scholar and collector, continued to supply additional research assistance and images for this edition.

Jack and Beverly Wilgus shared their wealth of knowledge and images from their collection, which will be permanently housed at Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library in Dallas, TX.

I wish to thank Brian Taylor, professor of art at San Jose State University and Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, for his support, guidance, and humor.

At Routledge, I wish to thank development editor Kimberly Duncan-Mooney, project editor Judith Newlin, production editor Katie Hemmings, copyeditor Mary Dalton, marketing manager Sloane Stinson, and editorial assistant Elise Poston. Anne Muntges, my former right-hand assistant and photo researcher, along with Tricia Butski, managed a myriad of details relating to the database, image files, and permissions. I’d also like to thank the book designer Alex Lazarou and Patrick Foran for the page icons and proofreading.

At the George Eastman Museum, I am grateful to Director Dr. Bruce Barnes for continuing to support this publication and to Lauren Sodano, Digital Asset Coordinator and Barbara Galasso, photographic services supervisor.

I am indebted to institutions, such as The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian for their open content programs that have greatly facilitated research and access to images.

I especially want to thank the hundreds the artists, their estates and galleries, plus the museums and collections whose names appear throughout the credits for their support in making this project a reality

ROBERT HIRSCH
Buffalo, New York

© Robert Hirsch Projects. Ghosts: French Holocaust Children, Boxcar #3, 2015. 30 × 72 × 18 inches. Mixed media.

During World War II, over 11,000 Jewish children were deported from France to Nazi death camps. At most 300 of these children survived. Ghosts: French Holocaust Children is a three-dimensional installation that acts as an ethereal commemoration to these children’s abbreviated lives. The project is based on historic documents and photographs collected by author, lawyer, and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate Klarsfeld. Hirsch reinterpreted these materials to convey a haunting sense of lost human possibilities. Its post-documentary approach blends outer and inner realities, constructing stories that examine the extreme boundaries of human behavior regarding identity, loss, memory, racism, and wickedness.

COURTESY CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY