SIX IDEAS IN PHOTOGRAPHY:
A CELEBRATION OF PHOTOGRAPHY’S SESQUICENTENNIAL

Gretchen Garner, Guest Curator
Grand Rapids (MI) Art Museum, 1989

[catalog now out-of-print]

This exhibition, drawn from the collection of Frederick P. Currier, The Grand Rapids Art Museum, and other sources, celebrated the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography.

Pictures by the following 95 photographers were included in the exhibition:

What follows is the introduction to the show, by Gretchen Garner:

Nineteen-eighty-nine marks the 150th year since photography was successfully practiced by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot and the Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre.  Both men announced their systems in 1839:  Daguerre’s for the jewel-like polished metal Daguerreotypes that became an immediate sensation all over the world, and Talbot’s for the less-popular then, but overwhelmingly-used now, system of printing on paper.  Talbot’s method allowed for multiple images to be made from one original negative.  Both systems were built on the discoveries of others.

Since ancient times, for example, the principle of the camera had been understood, and the camera obscura was often used as an artistic aid.  By placing tracing paper over the faint image reproduced by the lens, a picture could be drawn in true perspective.  In 1725 Johann Heinrich Schulze had discovered the sensitivity of silver salts to light and around 1800 Thomas Wedgewood’s experiments confirmed that material coated with silver nitrate would darken on exposure to the light.  Still, there was no way to fix these images until 1839 when Sir John Herschel discovered that thiosulfite of soda will dissolve unexposed silver and fix the exposed image.  The brilliant Talbot brought all these threads together.

In France both Joseph Nicephore Nièpce and Hippolyte Bayard had made photographic images about the same time as Daguerre’s first experiments, but they were overshadowed by that public relations genius.  In exchange for an annuity, Daguerre gave his invention to France, making it free to anyone to adopt; and from that point on into the 1850s Daguerreotypes were the rage.  A mercury compound on silver-coated copper plates was made sensitive to light by the vapors of iodine, and the mirror-bright, one-of-a-kind images became popular for portraits, views, and still-lifes.  Frederick Scott Archer’s 1851 invention of wet collodion emulsion on glass plates brought the negative/positive system into favor, where it has remained.

Since then many discoveries—we must count them inventions as well, of course—have added to the perfection of photographic practice: the ambrotype, tintype, albumen prints, platinotype, dry-plate, photogravure, half-tone printing, autochrome, photographic film, the hand-camera, the miniature (35 mm) camera, tri-pack color film, the light meter, electronic flash, instant-developing film, and electronically controlled cameras.  A list of names could of course be attached…but that would lead us in a direction we do not intent to pursue in Six Ideas.  Instead we will showcase some subject themes in photography that have been important since the beginning in 1839 and continue to be important today.

Deciding how to celebrate the photographic sesquicentennial has been a difficult process.  In its many uses, photography is so widespread in our culture that no scheme is adequate to acknowledge them all.  Beyond the few chosen to hang on museum walls, newspapers, magazines, books, posters, billboards, and our walls at home are full of photographic pictures—and in other less visible ways, photography is also present.  Visits to the dentist involve photography when x-ray pictures are taken, manufacture of many goods involves photographic printing, and indeed the very words you are reading were put onto the printing press by way of photographic film.

Nevertheless, pictures are the heart of photography, and we had a pictorial springboard to start from in the collection of Frederick P. Currier.  Currier’s generous gifts and loans to the Grand Rapids Art Museum have formed the basis of its rather recent venture into photography.  By examining Currier’s collection, the idea of themes emerged.  Certain interests of Currier’s were evident in the type of work he had collected.  Six of them—the ones in this show—were felt to be truly perennial and truly important to the history of photography.  We decided to use the Currier collection as a grounding in the nineteenth century and borrow work that brings the theme up-to-date. It must be emphasized that Frederick Currier has not collected photographs with a list of themes in his hand.  Like all true collectors, he follows his passions and as he changes so do the photographs that make their way into his heart and hands.

These are our themes:

TIME SUSPENDED—photography is time’s witness, stopping it forever

A WIDER WORLD—photography shows us distant, hidden, and exotic worlds

FAMOUS FACES—through photographs, the famous are familiar

MINUTE DETAIL—optical clarity reveals a richly textured universe

PRIVATE THEATER—the camera is an intimate audience for the photographer’s dreams

PICTORIAL EFFECT—form, color and texture are created through photography

These are our themes because for each of them the photographic process has a special affinity.  They are found in all types of photography: fine-art, journalistic, commercial, scientific, and amateur—and our exhibition means to honor their presence at all levels of photographic practice.  We might say they are the ideas most compatible to the medium.  When they are pursued in painting (minute detail, for example) it is often in imitation, or drawn from a photograph as a primary source.

Certainly the relation of photographs to time is inherent, taken as they are from the flow of real time, and their value as a true witness has made them the preferred tool of geographers and portraitists alike.  The marvels of the sharp lens and continuous-tone film have created a purely photographic aesthetic; yet, photography earlier showed a chameleon’s ability when imitation of painting was the goal.  The turn-of-the-century Pictorialism was a heyday of the imitative aesthetic.  Many other purely photographic aesthetic options have been explored since then.  We can credit the privacy of the photographic act for the enormous amount of personal fantasy that has issued from the camera, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s tableaux to the burst of this kind of activity in the last decade.

While it would be a mistake to limit photographic practice to these themes (it has proven always to be a mistake to limit photography!) nevertheless they are an essential core to its pictorial applications.

Gretchen Garner

© 1989