Oscar Rejlander and Art Photography

Oscar Rejlander contributed photographs to Charles Darwin's work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Published in 1872, the book was one of the first to be illustrated with photographs, and it was unusual at the time to see photos showing such expressions.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 1863 by Oscar Gustav Rejlander

Oscar Rejlander took a carefully composed portrait of Alice-in-Wonderland author Lewis Carroll.

He provided reference photographs to assist painters such as Lawrence Alma Tadema. Finally, Rejlander pioneered an ambitious approach to art photography, producing in 1857 a moralistic photomontage called "The Two Ways of Life."

The Two Ways of Life by Oscar Rejlander, 1857

Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer

"This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows a man being lured to paths of vice or virtue by good and bad angels. The image's partial nudity, which showed real women as they actually appeared and not the idealized forms then common in Victorian art, was deemed 'indecent' by some. Rejlander was also accused of using prostitutes as models, although Rejlander categorically denied this and no proof was ever offered. Reservations about the work subsided when Queen Victoria ordered a 10-guinea copy to give to Prince Albert." —Wikipedia

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Wikipedia: Oscar Rejlander and Art Photography
Book: Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer

Skyfish Rods

"Skyfish rods" are strange visual artifacts that have appeared on people's digital photos. 

When you enlarge them, they appear to be some sort of multi-winged flying fish. Sometimes they appear to have a dark body and four or six diaphanous wings. 

In reality it's a familiar insect whose wingbeat action is stretched out along their path of movement.

Wikipedia says: "Some paranormal proponents claim them to be extraterrestrial lifeforms, extradimensional creatures, or very small UFOs. However, these artifacts appear naturally in video and outdoor photography as the result of an optical illusion due to motion blur, especially in interlaced video recording, and are typically afterimage trails of flying insects and their wingbeats."
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Rods (Optics) on Wikipedia
More examples and explanation

Make Your Own Curved Track Dolly

Putting a camera on a curved dolly can add production value to a low-budget video. It's easy and inexpensive to build one. (Link to 13 minute YouTube video)

If the curvature is a section of a circle, and the camera is pointed toward an object placed on the center of a circle, that object will stay in the center of frame.

The movement of the camera is controlled with a geared down Lego motor. This one travels about one foot every 15 minutes, or about an inch minute.  

The cart is also made from Lego. I remove the tires from normal wheels and run the cart on the rims. The track is made from flexible Pex pipe, which you can get from the hardware store. 

Francesco Paolo Michetti's Use of Photography

The use of photography was a big turning point for for Francesco Paolo Michetti (Italian 1851-1929). 

With photography, "I stole from nature more than a secret," as Michetti put it, so much so that it gave me "a new vision of art and life."

Michetti made excursions to villages around Naples specifically to acquire photographic reference, capturing countless human types on film: from peasants to priests, children and women with their innumerable expressions, from laughter to tears, from joy to melancholy.

A trove of photos by Michetti and his artist friends came to light in 1966, discovered in a former convent-turned-studio. Many of the photos document village festivals or daily life "in the wild" in rural Italy. 

Other photos by Michetti show models in the controlled conditions of the studio. He shot not only still photographs, but also stereoscopic images, and a film (now lost) 

For Michetti, the archive of photos provided a sense of authenticity and naturalness that he was not able to achieve any other way.

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Online Articles: Francesco Paolo Michetti: Photography as an Aid in Painting

Wikipedia on Francesco Paolo Michetti
Francesco Paolo Michetti Fotografo

Previously: Shishkin and Photography
Using Photo Reference
Book: Francesco Paolo Michetti: Dipinti, pastelli, disegni (Italian Edition)

Motion Blur in Old Master Art

Did any artists from before the era of photography capture the effect of motion blur?

Diego Velázquez, Detail of Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), 1655-1660

A good place to look are images of spinning wheels. The spokes dissolve into a blur when it really gets spinning.

Esaias Boursse, Interior with an Woman at a Spinning Wheel, 1667

Painting the spokes that way is a remarkable choice, because it means allowing the impression to  overrule the knowledge of the actual structure. Once the era of photography arrived, artists were fascinated by motion blur, but only a few have used it in their paintings.

It has shown up as a joke in this Charles Dana Gibson cartoon, and it also appears in the wildlife art of Manfred Schatz.
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Previous posts that mention motion blur
Manfred Schatz: Wildlife in Action

Electron Microscope Images

(Link to YouTube) The way things look at a tiny scale seems so alien, but so logical at the same time.
There are so many repeating textures of a fractal, organic nature, but very few straight lines or right angles. By scaling up those forms you can provide a lot of originality to your concept art.

Collecting Art Images Before Google

How did people collect art images before Google? Here's how it worked in 1891. In the back of an art magazine, you would see a small ad like this: 

First thing you would do is find an envelope, put 15 cents in stamps or coins into it, and mail it to the Boston address.

Wait a week, and you receive a printed catalog showing—or perhaps just listing—the names of all the images they have on offer. Now choose carefully. "Ancient" would include sculptures and paintings through the Renaissance. "Modern" would include what we think of now as contemporary academic realism.

These "cabinet size" (or postcard size) prints are only in black and white. They're thin paper prints, not mounted to stiff cardboard, as at right. They will cost you the equivalent in today's dollars of about $3.00 each, or about $35 per dozen.

The catalog would have an order form printed in the back or they might give you separate order forms. You would fill one out, enclose payment (cash or check) and mail it back to Boston. Wait another week and the photographic prints would arrive in your mailbox.

Total elapsed time: between two weeks and a month, depending on where you live.

What then would you do with these cherished images? You could frame them, pin them up on your studio wall, mount them into a photo album, place them in individual cardboard folders with a cutout window, or classify them in separate folders in a filing cabinet.
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Tip: If you want to collect images online, don't use Google. Use DuckDuckGo, which lets you view and download an image file directly, and doesn't track your searches..
Thanks, Keita

Book Review: Homer and the Camera

A new exhibition called ‘Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting’ opens this Saturday at Bowdoin College in Maine.

The show and the associated catalog examine the longstanding engagement of Winslow Homer (1836-1910) with various aspects of photography: its purely visual effects, its usefulness as a picture-making tool, and its role in shaping the artist’s public image.

"Winslow Homer, Charles S. Homer, Sr., and Sam at Prout’s Neck,"
ca. 1884, albumen silver print, by Simon Towle. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

I had always assumed that Homer was camera shy and there are few photos of him, but recent scholarship has turned up new discoveries, many of which are included in the exhibition.

Homer’s interest in photographs gained momentum during his time as a sketch artist covering the Civil War. He collected photographs that were taken by others, which helped him visualize the scenes he portrayed for the popular magazines.

By the 1880s, he sought fresh inspiration for his artwork, so he traveled to Europe, and he bought the first of three cameras.

Though he never wrote about his use of photographs as reference, the authors explore the various ways his art was shaped by the camera, a tool that could simultaneously capture accurate information and deceive the viewer.

His painting of a fish in mid-leap was his painterly response to the ability of the camera to freeze action. Though probably not based directly on a photo, the very idea of painting a moment from fast action was unusual in the nineteenth century, when most other artists would have painted a fish as a still life object.

The exhibition and book contain other insights into Homer's process, including doll-size mannikins with simple costumes, which he used for reference when drawing and painting working-class women.



The exhibit ‘Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting’ is the product of years of study by Bowdoin art historian Dana E. Byrd and museum co-director Frank H. Goodyear III. Bowdoin College hosts the first showing of the exhibition, which travels in November 2018 to the Brandywine River Museum.

The catalog is 208 pages with 138 color illustrations, hardbound, and published by the Yale University Press. The exhibition will be up from June 23 - October 28, 2018.
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Other books that explore the relationship between painting and photography:

Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf, 1968. Covers the influence of photography on portraiture, landscape, realism, and impressionism.

Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph, Edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes, 2011. Chapters on Eakins, Remington, Steiglitz, O'Keeffe, and Bechtle. In this book the main emphasis is on modern painters.

Painting and Photography, 1839-1914. by Dominique de Font-Réaulx, 2012. Textbook-style coverage of the intersection between realist painters and the photographic image, with chapters on genre photography, photographing the nude, portraiture, and painters who were also photographers.

The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso. Oversize book with features on key artists who used photography.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Shows Rockwell's reference photos compared to his finished illustrations, as well as information about how he took photos and how he changed them to suit his purposes.

Previously on GurneyJourney
Using Photo Reference

Chronophotography

Edweard Muybridge perfected the technique of capturing motion in a series of separate photographs.

Chronophotograph by Étienne-Jules Marey

But around the same time, Étienne-Jules Marey pursued a slightly different photographic technique  for representing movement called chronophotography. We might call it stroboscopic photography today.



Instead of breaking down the action into a series of separate images, he superimposed all the phases of the action into a single image. That makes it harder to study each pose, but it's easier to see the overall path of action and the arcs of movement of the smaller forms.

Marey also created sculptures that show the pattern of movement in three dimensions.

Chronophotography was a big inspiration for Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" and it also inspired the emerging field of animation.
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Wikipedia on Étienne-Jules Marey
New Scientist: Art and science in motion
Marey's Movement Sculptures

William Eggleston Quotes

William Eggleston's color photographs are featured in an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum.

The photos are dye-transfer prints from his Los Alamos series, taken mostly in the American south in the early 1970s. 

The curators wisely avoided writing their own interpretations of the images, and instead accompanied the photos with occasional quotes by Eggleston. 

Eggleston's thinking about his images has inspired all sorts of visual artists and filmmakers who are captivated by the quotidian. 

“I am at war with the obvious.”

“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.”



"Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other.”



“I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I’ve never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.”

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More quotes by Eggleston
The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum will be on show through May 28.

Books

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest: Selected Works

William Eggleston Portraits  

William Eggleston, 2 1/4

Photos of Academic Artists

Here are some photos of prominent academic artists.

Books about Academic painting and painters:
The Art of the Salon: The Triumph of 19th-Century Painting
The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers
Jean-Leon Gerome
William Adolphe Bouguereau
Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective
Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty
Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity
Against the Modern: Dagnan-Bouveret and the Transformation of the Academic Tradition
Edouard Detaille, Un Siecle de Gloire Militaire
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Previous posts about Academic Painting