[Reader-list] From Daguerreotype to Photo Shop

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear all,

A causal look at the photographs of friends and acquaintances posted on
social networking sites suggests that we are all 'page-3' now. It seems that
not much has changed when it comes to posing for a photograph, an excerpt
from the essay pasted below- "It illustrates how people posing for portraits
in the nineteenth century tried to convey their status, character, and
modernity in pictures'.

On a slightly different but related note though, the Multiple Purpose
National Identity Card seek to capture the photographs of one billion
Indians. These photographs will be shot in a formatted pose. Conveying just
the facial characteristics of Indian Citizens. I think it would be
interesting to read the essay below keeping in mind how would the composite
image of -The Indian- would look like or can there be ever such an image?

Regards

Taha

PS: Since the reader list does not allow images, I recommend that you may
want to follow the link and see the visual while reading the text.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/01/daguerreotype-photoshop

 From Daguerreotype to Photoshop
Robin Kelsey dissects the "hybrid medium" of photography

In the photograph, Henry James Jr., the future eminent novelist, is only 11
years old. He stands beside his seated father, Henry Sr., a somewhat portly,
bearded man resting his hands atop a cane, an appurtenance necessitated by
the wooden leg that replaced the one he lost in a fire as a boy. It is 1854,
and the two Jameses are posed for a daguerreotype in the New York City
studio of Mathew Brady, who several years later would make his place in
history with powerful photographs of the Civil War.

In Brady's placid father-son portrait, the younger James wears a
military-looking jacket, its nine buttons fastened right up to the collar,
and holds a wide-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon encircling the crown. The
most telling detail, however, is the way the boy, who stood on a box for the
picture, casually rests a forearm on his father's shoulder. "It illustrates
how people posing for portraits in the nineteenth century tried to convey
their status, character, and modernity in pictures," says Robin Kelsey, Loeb
associate professor of the humanities. "The pose conveys the extent to which
the elder James was a progressive and permissive parent—he grants his son an
autonomy and authority that was quite unusual at the time. Most portraits of
that era establish the father as the patriarch in no uncertain terms."

Webb Chappell

Robin Kelsey

In his course Literature and Arts B-24, "Constructing Reality: Photography
as Fact and Fiction," Kelsey teases apart scores of photographic images to
reveal what they imply. The course not only treats historic and artistic
photographs, but also ranges through medical and forensic photography,
"spirit photographs," the photography of social reform, advertising,
politics, war, law, and criminality, plus family albums, calendars, and
coffee-table books. Kelsey views photography as a "hybrid medium" that is
both a simple, automatic trace of reality and an intentional composition
that fits the Western pictorial tradition: rectangularity, a single
viewpoint, perspective, a vanishing point. "You can sit and spend time with
a single photograph in a way that I find very gratifying," he says. "For me,
the images reveal themselves only through long and repeated viewings."

With few exceptions, scholars of art history were slow to investigate
photography; instead, those in disciplines like American studies and English
did the pioneering research. Recently, trained art historians like Kelsey
have become deeply engaged, but it remains a small field: "We all know one
another and each other's work," he says. (He and Blake Stimson, professor of
art history at the University of California, Davis, edited The Meaning of
Photography, which appeared this past year.) The study of photography is
growing—part of a larger trend toward the study of visual material in
general—though it must compete for resources at a time when many art-history
departments are working to become less Eurocentric and to strengthen their
African, Asian, and Latin American sub-fields, for example.

The similarities between what Kelsey does with photographs and what art
historians do with paintings are greatest with consciously artistic
photographs, such as those of Alfred Steiglitz. Yet there are differences.
"In the study of painting, one can assume, generally speaking, a high degree
of intentionality behind the particulars of the work. Van Gogh used his
brush just so, because he wanted the painting to look just like that,"
Kelsey says. "With photography, especially the instantaneous photographs
using fast shutter speeds that became the norm in the twentieth century,
chance plays a much larger role in creating the image." (Indeed, Kelsey's
next book, due this year, is titled Photography and Chance.) "Chance
undercuts your authority over the image," Kelsey notes. "One of the
struggles for photographers in the twentieth century was how to rationalize
chance out of the image."

For example, Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose astonishing street photography
revolutionized the art, argued that he could compose a picture in a fraction
of a second. His 1952 book, Images à la Sauvette ("images on the run," or
"stolen images"), whose English title is The Decisive Moment, epitomized
this style and coined an entry for the photographic lexicon. At the other
extreme, contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall
create elaborately staged and painstakingly produced photographs that have
been called "one-frame cinematic productions"—ratcheting up the authorial
element by controlling every facet of the composition.

 Though Cartier-Bresson's instantaneous slices of life might seem to argue
otherwise, Kelsey cautions that one of the dangers of interpreting
photography is that "Images are taken as unproblematic reflections of
reality. The object of my course is to prepare students to think more
critically about the images they encounter, to be more sophisticated in
their understanding of how images work, and to ask why one image, and not
another, gets used."

Take, for example, those melancholy Civil War photographs that depict a
battlefield with a soldier's corpse in the foreground, his rifle on the
ground beside him. "Any viewer in the late 1860s would have realized that no
one would have left a rifle on a battlefield," says Kelsey. "Those corpses
were looted for their boots, for money—and rifles were very scarce. Yet
viewers weren't upset; in the nineteenth century, people seemed much less
concerned with the ways in which photographs were at times staged. By the
1930s, when allegations arose that a New Deal photographer had inserted the
skull of a steer into photographs of parched agricultural land to accentuate
the sense of suffering, people were very disturbed. It had to do, in part,
with the rise of journalism as a modern institution and a new ethical code
that accompanied this."

Repeatedly, Kelsey returns to the status of photographs as evidence—in
convicting criminals, selling products, diagnosing diseases, or documenting
atrocities. "Evidence was one of my favorite courses in law school," says
the scholar, who interrupted his Harvard doctoral program in art history to
attend Yale Law School and practice for two years in San Francisco. (He
completed his Ph.D. in 2000, and joined the faculty in 2001.) "I very much
like photography because its aesthetic values are always mingling with its
evidentiary values. After more than 150 years, we are still confused by
that. Our understanding of photographs as evidence cloaks their function as
pictures—we tend to forget all the conventions and choices that go into the
production of a photograph because it still seems a simple, direct trace of
the world."



In the early years of photography, amid the Industrial Revolution, "People
were very concerned about the fallibility of human vision," Kelsey explains.
"In a conflict between a photograph and the human eye, the machine was
thought to be superior." In the 1880s, "fast" (more light-sensitive)
emulsions and high-speed shutters appeared. "Suddenly, people could see
images of bodies frozen in motion, and it was startling," he says. "Artists
had represented people running or horses galloping in accord with certain
conventions of grace and beauty. Now photographs were showing bodies in
motion in a very different way, and many people found these images shocking
and awkward-looking. The frozen image is not available to everyday
experience. The authority of photography was such that people believed the
photographs had gotten to a deeper reality." (Today, in a world in which the
"snapshot aesthetic" has long since become the norm, a Sports Illustrated
shot of a base runner splayed across home plate has become visually
pleasing.)

By the late nineteenth century, photographs were also displacing and
supplementing medical illustration. "Doctors might seek out and emphasize
symptoms that showed up well in photographs," Kelsey says. "In France,
[neurologist Jean-Martin] Charcot used photographs extensively in his
studies of hysteria. It seems clear that he interpreted hysteria in a way
that made the photographs as significant as possible, emphasizing these
theatrical gestures the patients made. You could analyze hysteria in terms
of the utterances and sounds patients made, but Charcot stressed the visual
cues."

The advent of the Kodak camera in the late nineteenth century put
photography in the hands of many more (and less serious) amateurs and vastly
increased the number of images captured on film. (In 1888, George Eastman
made up and trademarked the name "Kodak" and soon coined the slogan, "You
press the button, we do the rest." At first, customers returned the entire
camera, with 100 exposed film images, to Kodak for processing.)

 In earlier decades, nearly all portraits were formal studio shots, but
"snapshots" enabled "candid" pictures. "The idea that people reveal more of
themselves to the camera when they are unaware of it is more than a century
old," Kelsey says. "But what we call the 'candid' photograph in our photo
album is hardly a typical picture of the subject. What we put in our photo
albums are idealizations. The obligation to smile for the camera is a way of
ensuring that we always look like we are enjoying ourselves at birthday
parties or on holidays and vacations. Even if we are miserable, the photo
album will insist that we are having a great time."

Idealized self-images are buried deep in the psyche. Kelsey points to a
recent study showing that when a digitally idealized image of ourselves
appears in an array of images, we pick ourselves out faster than we do with
an unimproved image—yet we locate friends and acquaintances more quickly
from unimproved images.

The practice of improving, enhancing, distorting, and otherwise manipulating
photographic images with computer software—as with previous techniques to
doctor photographs—has led some to predict that viewers will no longer take
photographs seriously as evidence. So far, that has not happened. The
torture pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for example, were
widely credited as evidence of wrongdoing. "The Abu Ghraib pictures were not
produced by photojournalists," Kelsey explains. "Their credibility had to do
with the fact that they are self-incriminating. It's hard to believe that
someone on the inside of the prison would have doctored those photographs.
The whistle-blower story was very compelling.

"Historically, what has sustained photographs as evidence is not simply the
automatic nature of the medium, but journalistic codes of integrity," he
continues. "After all, when writing a verbal report of an event, one can
make up everything, but we do still take what we read in newspapers
seriously, due to our faith in the integrity of the institution. Now
photography will have to rely on those forms of trust, rather than on simple
faith in the technology itself."

Even so, in our media environment, the image often trumps the word—or even
the deed. The "photo op" was "an invention of the Reagan presidency," says
Kelsey. "Ronald Reagan, who was an old movie actor, understood the
importance of the camera in a way that no previous president did." On the
eve of the 1984 election, for example, CBS aired a hard-hitting piece by
correspondent Lesley Stahl that criticized Reagan for cutting funding for
the disabled and elderly, even while appearing in photo ops at the
Handicapped Olympics and at the opening of an old-age home. To her surprise,
as Stahl recounted in her memoir, Reporting Live, she received a call from
Reagan aide Richard Darman '64, M.B.A. '67, complimenting her on the piece
and praising its strong visuals. "They didn't hear you," Darman said. "They
only saw the pictures."

Today, of course, cell phones and the Internet have made nearly everyone a
potential photojournalist. For Kelsey, the ability to disseminate images
globally via the Web is a far more significant historical shift than the
change from film to digital photography (though they are, of course,
technologically related). "If we were just making digital pictures and
printing them out, that would have a much less profound impact than what we
have with the Internet," he says. As an example, he cites images of 2007
street conflicts in Cameroon, transmitted daily by ordinary citizens with
cell-phone cameras, who "could operate in a sense as photojournalists for
people around the world."

Furthermore, even as digital photography has made it easier to manipulate
images, "the spread of photographic technology has made it easier to catch
such manipulations," Kelsey states. "In this moment of security videos and
ubiquitous cell-phone cameras, anyone who fakes an image of a public event
risks being exposed by what was recorded by another camera." Consider an
image released in July 2008 by the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
It shows four Iranian missiles successfully launching skyward, and was
disseminated worldwide through major newspaper, television, and online
outlets. Yet Agence France-Presse, which first distributed the picture, soon
retracted it, explaining that it had apparently been digitally altered. (The
Associated Press received a very similar image from the same source that
showed only three missiles taking off.) The Iranian agency seemed to have
added a fictional, fourth sky-bound missile to disguise the failure of an
actual fourth missile. "Now that we have these conflicting images," says
Kelsey, "the question becomes: what is the most persuasive explanation for
the incompatible pictures, what is the most compelling story we can tell?"

Telling stories with images has become central to modern life—economic,
social, political, cultural. "The terrorists have certainly fought with
images," says Kelsey. "Though we must never diminish the value of the
thousands who lost their lives in the World Trade Center attacks, it is also
true that the effect of those attacks on this country as an image—the planes
hitting and the towers going down—was psychologically devastating. The
invisibility of the terrorists makes it difficult to respond with an equally
powerful picture. The primary lesson: never underestimate the power of
images."

Craig A. Lambert '69, Ph.D. '78, is deputy editor of this magazine.