JF Ptak Science Books

Early Steps in the History of Photographic Self-Interest: the Photo Booth Pre-Selfie

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2562

Before $999 selfie sticks, and before cell phones, there still was life! The agitations of great need for making self portraits has existed no doubt before this semi-delusional time, except of course there wasn't immediate and total access to the possibility of addressing the somewhat narco-curiosity to self aware recording. Nowadays you can have your own broadcasting service all about yourself all of the time and share it to yourself or to anyone else who can find your conceptual conceit--in the past, not so much so.  

The antiquarian notation of the idea of the selfie finds itself in the invention of the photo booth. It is perhaps the first true invention that could address this notion of photographic self-allegiance, except that you can't fit it into your pocket like a cell/sel(f) phone because you fit inside of it.  But it certainly was the only way that you could halfway address an instant need for making a photo of yourself, and do so without undue muss or fuss, and to be able to do it on your own.

The photo booth was the early version of radical expression of photographic self-interpretation made possible by a hands-free invention.

The results of the photo booth (around since about 1890 but not fabulously well accepted and ubiquitous until Mr. Anaotl Josepho with his Photomata in 1925) can be charming, and revealing, and be all that you wished it to be, or not.  I've collected some examples (below) from the 1930's-1950''s--the results can be mixed, but almost always interesting.  

The young Miles Davis is terrific. 

Miles Davis, aged 9. [Source, Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/31454897367684842/]

For an interesting piece on artistic photo booth self portraits by artists, see Jonathan Jones on the Surrealists and the first photobooth in Paris, 1928, in The Guardian, here: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/jun/16/1

This is fascinating: 445 photo booth images of/by one unidentified man:

•  See the article by Pricilla Frank, "Exhibition Features 445 Vintage Photobooth Portraits From A Single Unknown Man" in the Huffington Post, here: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/04/445-photobooth-portraits_n_5077544.html]

Yves Tanguy [Source, PBS, here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CO-mBeXUEAASyM8.png]

 

Curious Hand-Illuminated Victorian Photo Album (ca. 1862)

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 2525

I found this collection of photographs a number of years ago, mostly for the way that some of the decorated panels were not outfitted with photographs.  The photographs were made in the early 1860s (one is dated 1862) and the decorations I take it were made by hand at the same time or thereabouts.  

One of the most interesting images is this family portrait--it has one of the most elaborate manuscript "frames", and it also depicts a space ship in the background. Well, not really--but it is an interesting design for what I suspect was an (iron?) conservatory or greenhouse.  Also handling the photograph in person led me to the very minor discovery that the curled up and sleeping dog was an extra and "photoshopped"--that is, added after the photo was made, a cutout of the dog pasted onto the print. No doubt it would have been difficult to have a dog sitting there for a long period of time with the family without moving given the relatively slow exposure time in 1862.  I find that detail, that the family though enough of the dog to paste it into the final/finished project, to be very touching.  

Each sheet measures about 16"x 16"   The originals are available on the blog's bookstore, here.

 

 

 

 

Camera Obscura at War, II--Zep Buster

JF Ptak Science Books, Quick Post

Earlier in this blog I wrote about an unexpected military use of the camera obscura, here ("The Camera Obscura at War, 1885").  Today I found another use, which was a guided/guiding anti-aircraft weapon.  I assume that this was mostly employed against the slower moving zeppelins (although in 1915 airplanes weren't moving that much faster) due to its very limited range of fire.  The camera obscura itself didn't move, and the relatively small occulus offered not that big a range of sky to work with. But that said the weapon was an ingenious and simple mechanism, an early and primitive semi-machine-directed anti-aircraft gun.  There is no mention of whether or not any of these were actually deployed, and compared to the AA guns that actually appeared in the first and second yer of the war, this attempt looks a little antiquated for the time.  The article also makes no mention of the artillery to be used, which is a major consideration.  

The article appeared in Popular Mechanics, April 1916 (pp 486-7)

Dancing at the Edge: Yosemite, 1890's

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

These are remarkable photos of folks standing at the edge of the world in Yosemite National Park.  They were made by George Fiske, a New Hampshire boy who left for San Francisco and moved to Yosemite at age 44 in 1879. He worked there for decades, producing beautiful and iconic work before running out of steam after the turn of the century, and in the end committing suicide in 1918 because as he said he lost interest in being alive.  

I came to Fiske today because of the dancing ladies, hanging out at the edge of the overhanging lock, a photo made by him in the 1890's at Glacier Point in Yosemite. That led me to another photo that Fiske made of his co-author Galen Clark, made at the same place some years later at the same famous spot, in 1910.  

Detail of the dancing ladies, 1890's:

And the full image:

And a clearer image Galen Clark:

[Image source:  wikipedia ]

Notes:

James Mason Hutchings, In the Heart of the Sierras (1888), with many illustrations including a number of photos by Fiske. Great digital copy at yosemite.ca.us here. 

Galen Clark, The Yosemite Valley (1910) with more photographs by Fiske.

A Composite Photo of Mistakes, 1885 (Or: Imaginativeness vs. Comb-overs?)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2097  

Building on some reaching and questionable physical identification work of Sir Francis Galton, Raphael Pumpelly tried to make photographs of what scientists looked like. 

At a scientific meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington,  D.C.,  Pumpelly (along with Dr. (Thomas Mayo) Brewer and the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, (Spencer F.) Baird) undertook the experiment to determine whether or not there was a certain composite "type" in groups of academicians.  He employed the justly-named head of the photography department at the NAtional Museum, Mr. (Thomas Mayo) Smillie, to make a series of 2-second exposures of the scientists upon a single glass plate.  Two seconds per portrait was not long enough to make a defined portrait for a single sitter, but if there 15 or 30 such exposures on the same plate it was seen that collectively a strong impression would be produced.  The resulting portraits are interesting in their own way, but probably not so interesting without the backstory.

The problem of course is the interpretation and what could come of classifying external characteristics for internal capacities, which would make this exercise as useful as cranial bump reading or body mole mapping. 

Also it is unclear that if you didn't identify these images as composites of leading American scientists but were told that they were pictures of murderers or meat thieves or sneak burglars, it would be as easy to believe.  Instead of identifying their characteristics of "intelligence" and "imaginativeness", changing the grid-of-explanation to criminality would certainly change those readings to something else.

[The original paper is available via our blog bookstore, here.]

Things That Almost Were but Weren't: a Photographic Image (1839) and Radio Television (1928)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2068

Here are two examples of Things That Almost Were But Weren't:  Photography (1839) and Television (1928). The first item contains a woodcut of a heliotype (being the first image of a photograph produced by non-photographic means); the second displays the method for receiving images of radio shows but is not a television. 

First:  The first published non-photographic image of a non-photograph or "sunpicture", 1839

General Stores and Juke Joints: FSA Photographs in Color, 1942-1945

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Books   

The following images were made by Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographers during World War II and are part of the famous FSA photography series that I  have written about here.  The color photographs--which were made in the first decade or so of the use of this new medium--represented only about 1,600 of the collection of 160,000 images in the FSA archive, and are far less known than their black-and-white complements, many of which are new iconic symbols for this period.  The color images are beautiful works, and somehow seem to bring these historic images a little closer to the present.

[Source: the Library of Congress,   http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fabout.html]

Negro migratory workers by a "juke joint" (?), Belle Glade, Fla.

Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990, photographer.

 

Living quarters and "juke joint" for migratory workers, a slack season; Belle Glade, Fla. Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990, photographer.

 

A cross roads store, bar, "juke joint," and gas station in the cotton plantation area, Melrose, La.

 

General store, Chacon, N[ew] Mex[ico] Collier, John, 1913-1992, photographer.

General store, near Questa, Taos County, N[ew] Mex[ico]

Collier, John, 1913-1992, photographer.

General Merchandise store, Main Street, Pie Town, New Mexico

Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, photographer.

Brockton, Mass., Dec. 1940, second-hand plumbing store   Delano, Jack, photographer.

Natchez, Miss.    Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990, photographer.

Natchez, Miss.  Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990, photographer.

Natchez, Miss.	Natchez, Miss.
A cross roads store, bar, "juke joint," and gas station in the cotton plantation area, Melrose, La.	[Grand Grocery Co.], Lincoln, Neb.	A store with live fish for sale, vicinity of Natchitoches, La.

Solomon Butcher, Part III: Creating the Landscape and Giving Form to the Imagination

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Part of the Zoomology series

This is a quick follow-up to an earlier post on Solomon Butcher in which there two two photographic images that are clearly "manufactured"--one is created in the darkroom (simply adding trees in a tress-less landscape), while the other (below) is an unlabelled recreation of an event.  This is in the lines of Timothy O'Sullivan and Matthew Brady dressing up their images a bit by posing the dead or giving them added bits (like muskets and so on) to enliven the picture.  This one though is entirely theatre--as it happens there are very few 19th century photographs depicting a crime-in-progress.  Butcher just decided to show his audience what the crime probably looked like.  In any event if not for a little Zoomology the scene could've perhaps passed for real. 

This is a detail from the full-plate glass negative, printed out so:

Without the enlargement it is difficult to tell what sort of instruments the ranchers were holding.  But up close the wire cutters are simply suggestions of that too, being made of wood and all. 

The Sunburn in the 19th Century

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1912

When Solomon Butcher laid his head down on his final pillow he evidently thought of himself as a half-failure.  His work as a photographer in a life full of travel through the Great Plains lead to not-much-"success" save for one book¹, and his work wasn't recognized for the impact that it would have in the decades to come. Perhaps he wondered if his ways were all worth it, hauling his family and his enormously heavy collection of full-plate glass negatives from one house to the next.  Of course that would change in death--not the money part, but certainly the recognition.  His photographs are outstanding glimpses into late 19th century American frontier life, and especially so for the work he did making images of families and their belongings in the long rolling landscape of pioneer Nebraska.

I’m not sure exactly what Solomon Butcher told his subjects when he photographed them outside of their frontier houses out there in the Great Plains in the 1880’s.  His spectacular portraits included not only the family of the house, but in many cases, everything that the family owned.  Possessions were



(Image via the Nebraska State Historical Society, with caption² below.)

encumbrance making your way across the country in the mid/19^th century, especially if you didn’t have very many to begin with.  These families—the first generation in their mostly sod-built houses—would’ve been farmers scratching out a minimum trade and decent subsistence.   City/town goods would’ve been not-usual in these circumstances, and evidently whatever it was they had of these things wound up outside, displayed around the house and on the roof, when Mr. Butcher arrived in his photographer’s wagon. 

(Who was it, I wonder, who came up with the initial idea of displaying the family’s possessions:  did Butcher set out with that idea, or did it happen spontaneously?  I wonder what it was the families thought as Butcher was packing up his equipment, his horse fed, his cameras stowed away, climbing up onto the driver’s bench.  Did they wait until he was a spot on the horizon to put away their things?  Did they gather everything up as Butcher gathered up his own material, or did they just wait for the stranger to disappear before pulling the family back together? Sitting their surrounded by the things that they owned, did these families feel a quiet pride, or were they embarrassed have their pictures made together with their frontier opulence?)

There's much to look at in these images, and the Nebraska Historical Society does a very good job at it here, espcially when they work at some digital magic, making some of the disappeared stuff that lurks in the shadows of the interiors of the cabins appear. What is of interest to me today are the sunburns--this issue was brought up yesterday in another post on the invention of the satirical photograph, where the self-portrait shows a man with heavily sunned face and hands, the marks of a working man with dark settling on light becomes a little remarkable.

This is seen in Butcher's photographs from time-to-time. In the series of photographs of homesteads, he often captured images of men without hats--seldom the case, I guess, in the normal routine of a day.  The men's faces are deeply tanned except for where the hat is pulled down to the middle of their forehead, where we see a much lighter complexion: 

Which makes sense, of course, since these were pioneers and farmers, and working pretty much all of the time outdoors.

I remember being surprised the first few times I noticed this, and then not so. This is much like seeing all of those non-smiling photographic portraits of the 19th century and wondering about the sombreness, when the general explanation for the seriousness was far simpler: given the length of time for an exposure, it was took simply too much effort to hold the same smile for a minute or three, and so the rigid face became a necessity. The brands of the faces of these men was there simply because they wore hats outdoors doing hard work in the High Plains sun. 

There's a world going on in these photographs, but for right now I'm just looking at faces.The Library of Congress site has an excellent collection of this images online, and there's a lot of micro-photo inspection to be done. 

Another example, here:

Which is a detail from:
(Source: The Library of Congress, "Rev. and Mrs. E.D. Eubank on Clear Creek west of Lee Park, Custer County, Nebraska".)

The Invention of Satirical Photography (1840)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1911

“Nothing is falser than people's preconceptions and ready-made opinions; nothing is sillier than their sham morality...” (atribued to) Petronius, The Satyricon

(Image source, Gerry Badger blog, who also has some interesting things to say about the work as momento mori.)

The road in determining who was the first person to what discovery is sometime a bit rocky--so with the invention of the computer (ask Mr. Atanatsoff), and the telephone (ditto Mr. Gray) and the television (and so to with Dr. Korn).  This is also the case with photography, the rights for the discovery of the process contested in the first year following the announcement of the process. 

The response to rejected claims for priority in discovery are almost (?) never recorded visually, but in he case of photography the rejected party did make a visual response, which I think was a prosimentrum of sorts, a photographic novella, and the appearance of the first use of satire in photography.

Louis Daguerre's epochal publication in the Comptes Rendus in 1839 would bring about the general recognition of the birth of photography--his process was described in that article and was immediately set to use by hundreds of adventurers people even in the first few weeks after publication. IT may well be that there are legitimate claimants working on the "photogenic" science before this time but it is Mr. Daguerre who published his findings first.

Among the many "firsts" in the first year of photography (reckoned as PD or post Daguerre

[Source here.]

Generally though the first photographic portrait has been recognized as being the work of Robert Cornelius, who was among the earliest practioners of the new science of the Daguerreotype.  This is his work, dated 1839, made in his father's gas light importing business on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia:

(Both subjects have interesting hair issues.)

is is fine and remarkable, though the images simply record the bodies of the humans that are pictured.  The first human portrait with an edge, with a political or social axe too grind and point to make, an  image bent on a decisive end, belongs to a man who mildly and then hotly contested Daguerere's claim to the birth  of photography--Hippolyte Bayard. 

Bayard (1807-1887) experimented in the photographic science before the publication of Daguerre's paper and had shared some of his successes at this early date with members of the French Academy of Sciences (the publishers of  the esteemed Comptes Rendus, the vehicle for Daguerre's paper). He was even in communication with Francois Arago, who as it turns out was the champion of Daguerre, and who introduced the paper to the world.  After the appearance of Daguerre's paper Bayard--no doubt somewhat envious of the attention and money/funding that Daguerre was receiving) petitioned for help from Arago to establish his own claim and a chance for the experimenter's lament (funding). He was told in no uncertain terms by Arago to cease the attention, as it would hurt the chances of Daguerre to establish his priority and have the honor of the invention of photography to stay in France.  It is a longer story than this, obviously, but suffice to say, Bayard's interests were mostly ignored, his priority claims relinquished.  (He was later able to collect a few thousand francs for his scientific work, but the larger prizes eluded him.

And so in 1840, full of his own defeat and thoroughly impressed by Daguerre's success, Bayard composed the (above) portrait of himself as a drowned and dead man.  On the reverse he wote:

"The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay."   (From Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, with Alison Gernsheim, London: Thames & Hudson, 1965)

It seems that the use of satire in photography was not common in the first few decades following 1839, which makes Bayard's first use of he genre in 1840 even more remarkable.  Satire in general has been aroudn for thousands of years, mostly in the form of drama and literature, and then in (Western, at least) painting in the Renaissance), right up through the Brueghels and Hogarth and Chaplin's Great Dictator and Dr. Strangelove. But it seems to me that the first photographic use of the genre came with the overtaken Bayard, who at least deserves this honor of "firstness". 

Note:

I just wanted to remark on the hands and head of Bayard in his self-portrait--I believe that the man is just sunburned.  It si common to see in 19th century photographs of working people that--when their hat is removed and so on--we see a big sun/tan line ont heir forehead.  This is particularly the case in the work of Solomon Butcher, who recorded the lives of families on the SOdbuster Fronter in the 1880's and 1890's in Nebraska. 

(Source, Nebraska State Historical Society.)

Zoomology: Chain Gang, Pitt County, North Carolina, 1910

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Part of the Zoomology series

From the photography collection at the Library of Congress, offering deep and big graphic files. The file photograph looked interesting, but on closer inspection the magnificent central figure is revealed:

"Chain gang of convicts engaged in road work. Pitt County, North Carolina. Autumn 1910. The inmates were quartered in the wagons shown in the picture. Wagons were equipped with bunks and move from place to place as labor is utilized. The central figure in the picture is J.Z. McLawhon, who was at that time county superintendent of chain gangs. The dogs are bloodhounds used for running down any attempted escapes."

The full image:

[Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8e04044/?co=fsa]

Zoomology: Dorothea Lange and the Rex Theatre for Colored People, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Zoomology Series

This is a short visit with one of Dorothea Lange's (who I've written about several times on this blog, as in this case) interesting FSA photographs. 

Photographs of American Jobs, Mid-19th (1840-1860) Century

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

These images from the Library of Congress daguerreotype collection offer a photographic glimpse into the everyday working life of Americans 150 years ago. Not as many of these jobs are as extinct as their expectations for extinction:

Peddler

Zoomology: Beautiful Ruination at the Beginning of Photography

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is a continuation of sort of this morning's post, "Massive 500-Daguerreotype Mosaic", though this one concentrates on the sumptuous ruination and decay that has occurred within and to some of these photographic images.  I've looked closely at only five of these images, and within each of these five images there are five more. And, if you manipulated the largest downloadable file of these (which range up to about 150 megs), there are five more within the five within the five. And all that before you start to imagine the artistic fantasies int he non-representational forms, and that before adding color.  So five is all that will be here, for the present.



Massive 500-Daguerreotype Portrait Mosaic--1840-1860

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I take no credit whatsoever for the images below--they are all from the fabulous Library of Congress site, specifically from their daguerreotype collection of portraits.  I simply wanted to see what they all might look like as a continuous mosaic, and I think the result is pretty remarkable, even given the limitations of my (soon to be rectified with Wordpress) limited Typepad account.

,Each image is clickable, linked to the Library of Congress site, with full explanation and catalog entry, and also with expanded choices for expanding the image.