Category: History
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Gilpin’s Theory of the Picturesque
Gilpin’s Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (p. xii). Gilpin began to expound his “principles of picturesque beauty”, based largely on his knowledge of landscape painting. During the late 1760s and 1770s Gilpin travelled extensively in the summer holidays…
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Roger Fenton
Roger Fenton (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers. Roger Fenton was born in Crimble Hall, then within the parish of Bury, Lancashire, on 28 March 1819. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament.…
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Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), for example, was active in New York in the late 1890s and was initially a practitioner in the ‘artistic’ sense of documentary photography, trying to emulate or deliver what drawing and painting had been delivering. Photography was viewed as a replacement for painting so the thinking was that the practices and values…
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Peter Henry Emerson
As I stood admiring just before sunrise, the reed-tops bending under their beautiful crystal heads, rooks came flying from a wood near by, and a vast flock of peewits darkened the sky. As the yellow sun arose in frosty splendour mists began to rise on the river, and there followed a brief spell of magic…
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Origins of the Picturesque and aesthetic consumerism
In the second half of the eighteenth century, definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view distinguished between: the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights. See discussion in Part 1 Beauty and the Sublime In between came the picturesque, views…
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Eugene Atget
The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from 1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply…
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Matthew Brady
Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism. short documentary film on Brady Brady was born in Warren County, New York, the youngest of three…
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Robert Frank
Robert Frank The Americans Robert Frank (born 1924), along with Diane Arbus and others, was one of the founder members of the New York School of photographers in the 1940s and 50s. The Americans, by Robert Frank, was a highly influential book in post-war American photography. With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank secured a Guggenheim…
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Walker Evans
American Photographs (1938) by Walker Evans (1903–75) Other Google images From Wikipedia Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch…
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John Thomson
edited from Wikipedia article Google images John Thomson (14 June 1837 – 29 September 1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer and traveller. He was an accomplished photographer in many areas: landscapes, portraiture, street-photography, architectural photography. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artifacts of eastern cultures…