 |
| Guido Rey The Letter (after Vermeer) 1908 platinum print Getty |
The Vermeer re-enactment photographed above clearly required elaborate planning and multiple contrivances. Does that mean that the resulting print looked any less comical in 1908 than it does now? Surely the answer is yes, since the photo wasn't originally made – or originally viewed – as a joke. It dates from an epoch when painting and photography were often believed to be much closer relatives than people now believe them to be. Nobody is any longer left alive in the world who could describe the exact contours of the admiration excited by these painterly photographs when they were fresh and new.
 |
| Julien Vallou de Villeneuve Reclining artist's model ca. 1853 salted paper print Metropolitan Museum of Art |
 |
| Robert Macpherson Discobolus, Vatican Museum, Rome 1850s albumen silver print Getty |
 |
| Anonymous photographer Elizabeth Robins before 1902 albumen print National Portrait Gallery (U.K.) |
 |
| Félix Nadar Antoine-Louis Baryé 1855 salted paper print Getty |
 |
| French photographer Two women embracing 1864 daguerrotype Getty |
 |
| Adolphe Braun Flowers ca. 1868 albumen silver print Getty |
 |
| Anonymous photographer Eleanora Duse before 1897 albumen print National Portrait Gallery (U.K.) |
 |
| Felice Beato Japanese Warrior in Armor ca. 1865-67 albumen silver print Getty |
 |
| Adrien Constant de Rebecque Man in chain-mail tunic posing as dying soldier ca. 1863 albumen print from collodion glass negative Metropolitan Museum of Art |
 |
| Roger Fenton Colonel Harding, Crimean War 1855 salted paper print Getty |
 |
| Maxime Du Camp Sphinx, Giza 1850 salted paper print Getty |
"Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images – as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possess the past. Nothing could be more unlike the self-sacrificial travail of an artist like Proust than the effortlessness of picture-taking, which must be the sole activity resulting in accredited works of art in which a single movement, a touch of the finger, produces a complete work. While the Proustian labors presuppose that reality is distant, photography implies instant access to the real. But the results of this practice of instant access are another way of creating distance. To posses the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real." – Susan Sontag, The Image-World
 |
| Elliott & Fry Christina Rossetti 1880s albumen silver print National Portrait Gallery (U.K.) |
 |
| Benjamin Brecknell Turner Humphrey Chamberlain and his sister Agnes Turner 1855 albumen silver print National Portrait Gallery (U.K.) |