How Does Photography Affect The Impressionist Movement?
Photography had so much more of an influence on the Impressionist movement than just photography in its own right. Photography influenced artists in their paintings, in their pastel works, in their sculpture and in seeing the world around them in a different way. Modern artists were influenced by the invention of the camera because it gave them a cropped composition and showed the tonal effects of light and dark in much finer detail than they could interpret with the naked eye. This technology made it easier for artists to capture the tone in their compositions in other mediums beyond photography as well.
Among modern artists influenced by photography were the Impressionists. To begin, several distinguishing elements and stylistic features …show more content…
not only make their work characteristically Impressionist but also inherently demonstrate modernity in their rejection of traditional and accepted styles, their exploration and integration of new technology and ideas, and their portrayal of modern life. Technology, such as the camera, supported Impressionists in capturing modernity through subjective vision, by encapsulating fleeting and conditional moments into their paintings, drawings and sculpture, like a snapshot of the subject in action. Artists were able to analyze cropped compositions in new way. The camera also showed the tonal effects of light and dark in much finer detail; making it easier for artists to capture tone in their compositions.
Through the use of stereoscopic photos- stereoscopy creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth from given two-dimensional images- like this pictured remind the audience of how modern cities function as a working whole, unlike in the past where people were divided into neighborhoods. Photography allowed for the fast paced city to be captured beautifully just a countryscapes could be captured by painters.
Charles Nègre was a photographer, born in Grasse, France. He studied under various painters including Paul Delaroche before establishing his own studio. Delaroche encouraged the use of photography as research for painting. The photograph Chimney-Sweeps Walking (1851) is an albumen print- a technique that used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to paper. This photograph may have been a staged study for a painting, but regardless is considered important to photographic history for its being an early example of an interest in capturing movement and freezing it forever in one moment.
Not everyone in this time period “approved” of photography as an art at this time.
Baudelaire in fact, was one key opponent of it. He had strong sentiments about the medium in relationship to art as he reflected “If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.” He believed that photography was a “refuge of all failed painters with too little talent” and dismissed it as an art form, but rather accepted is a simple tool in the creation of art. Of course, to combat these fields of thought there were many who advocated for the art such as French scientist and writer Louis Figuier. He argued that photography, if anything, helped artists to make their works even more individualized and created because it allowed them to focus on subjectivity in their works since photographs took care of the accuracy of part. He also argued that photography now forces great artists to go beyond their talents and push the limits of their work beyond replicating what they saw in
nature.
One of the key artists of not only the impressionist era, but of using photography to help capture moments and motion was Edgar Degas. The work and life of Edgar Degas truly perpetuated the essential and fundamental values and styles of the modern and the Impressionists. His studies and experiments provided the art world with thorough, almost obsessive, examination of life, movement and light through his works in oil, pastel, bronze, mixed mediums and more. He first became interested in photography through portraiture, he loved depicting people in his works. At the time, cartes de visite, or calling cards, were very popular and Degas would collect those of his friends and even have his own taken. Two of Degas’s most repeated themes in his work were people, especially his dancers and female nudes, and racing. Degas became fascinated by movement and used photography to help understand the movement of animals. Photography allowed him to be confident in his representation of horses and their motions by breaking down the movements that happen too quickly for the eye to see. While Degas’s sketches are a snapshot of horses in action, they imply a continuation of time and space. He became one of the first artists to demonstrate the real movement of animals, horses most specifically, as revealed in the stop action photography experiments of Eadweard Muybridge. Degas created an exhaustive series of studies in the movement of horses through drawings, painting and sculpture.
In his painting, Viscount Lepic and his Daughters (1873) we can see how Degas uses photographic effects to crop the family and place them within the composition in such a way that it juxtaposes the foreground and background of the painting. The background of the painting is not executed in detail, the details are reserved for the figures making it more of a portrait but the cropping allows the eye to travel around the entire composition in a way that is much different from the centric compositions of the past. Additionally, this cropping also is extremely similar in composition and feel to Japanese prints. We see a similar approach to composition by Caillebotte as seen in Degas’s work in Caillebotte’s Boulevard Seen From Above (1880). This photographic effect of viewfinding and cropping to create an abstracted view of the urban depiction from above can also be compared to abstraction and composition of Japanese prints.
Modern artists of the 20th-century avant-garde movement Surrealism utilized photography in their search to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind and probing of the imagination. The movement was essentially launched through the publication of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 in which he described surrealism saying “Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.”
Surrealists were able to use the technology to create compositions of “bizarre juxtapositions that occur naturally in daily experience.” For example, in a photograph of a baby armadillo encased in formaldehyde, Dora Maar seems to trick the imagination into making a slightly repulsive subject strangely mesmerizing and captivating. Photography came to play an integral part in the works of surrealists like Man Ray and Maurice Tabard who used photographic techniques to further the bizarre juxtapositions such as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization that “dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality.”
Man Ray’s experiments in photography lead him to rediscovering a technique described as “cameraless” pictures or photograms. In this process he would place objects on a light sensitive paper which he then exposed and developed. He called his technique rayographs. Man Ray was one of the first artists to experiment with the process of solarization in his works which involves rendering a photographic image in part negative part positive through its exposure to a flash of light during development. It is said that fellow surrealist photographer and artist, Lee Miller, aided in the discovery of solarization with Man Ray. The two accidently interrupted the development of a picture and were so intrigued with the dreamlike results they continued their experiments.
In Eugene Atget's photographs of the desolate streets of Paris and mannequins in shop windows, Surrealists realized their own understanding of the city as a "dream capital," or their own complex revenue of dreams and memory. Man Ray helped Atget realize that he was not only interested in documenting the city, but that he also had an underlying need to capture the inherent fantasy the city exuded. Atget began taking photographs dedicatedly capturing pictures of Paris for use by artists that went “beyond the merely descriptive to evoke a dreamlike world that is also profoundly real, though infused with a mesmerized nostalgia for a lost and decaying classical past.” These photographs in included imagery of streets, shop fronts, vehicles, trees, apartments, monuments, dummies grinning in windows and more. Man Ray was so captivated by one of Atget’s photographs entitled Magasin, avenue des Govelins (1925) that he utilized the image in the Surrealist publication La Révolution surréaliste in 1926.
Photography truly aided in the Surrealists investigations of art as a source of meaning and understanding. While seemingly quite different from the Impressionists use of the medium to seek truths about the modern world, Surrealists were able to use photography to capture the inherent juxtapositions of those truths to relay the fantasy and dreamlike states they wished to understand more deeply. Their deliberate use of a very technical and informative medium to see the unreasonable and uncalculated in a subject set the stage for investigations in photography as an art and medium for contemporary artists to come.
Among modern artists influenced by photography were the Impressionists. To begin, several distinguishing elements and stylistic features …show more content…
not only make their work characteristically Impressionist but also inherently demonstrate modernity in their rejection of traditional and accepted styles, their exploration and integration of new technology and ideas, and their portrayal of modern life. Technology, such as the camera, supported Impressionists in capturing modernity through subjective vision, by encapsulating fleeting and conditional moments into their paintings, drawings and sculpture, like a snapshot of the subject in action. Artists were able to analyze cropped compositions in new way. The camera also showed the tonal effects of light and dark in much finer detail; making it easier for artists to capture tone in their compositions.
Through the use of stereoscopic photos- stereoscopy creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth from given two-dimensional images- like this pictured remind the audience of how modern cities function as a working whole, unlike in the past where people were divided into neighborhoods. Photography allowed for the fast paced city to be captured beautifully just a countryscapes could be captured by painters.
Charles Nègre was a photographer, born in Grasse, France. He studied under various painters including Paul Delaroche before establishing his own studio. Delaroche encouraged the use of photography as research for painting. The photograph Chimney-Sweeps Walking (1851) is an albumen print- a technique that used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to paper. This photograph may have been a staged study for a painting, but regardless is considered important to photographic history for its being an early example of an interest in capturing movement and freezing it forever in one moment.
Not everyone in this time period “approved” of photography as an art at this time.
Baudelaire in fact, was one key opponent of it. He had strong sentiments about the medium in relationship to art as he reflected “If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.” He believed that photography was a “refuge of all failed painters with too little talent” and dismissed it as an art form, but rather accepted is a simple tool in the creation of art. Of course, to combat these fields of thought there were many who advocated for the art such as French scientist and writer Louis Figuier. He argued that photography, if anything, helped artists to make their works even more individualized and created because it allowed them to focus on subjectivity in their works since photographs took care of the accuracy of part. He also argued that photography now forces great artists to go beyond their talents and push the limits of their work beyond replicating what they saw in
nature.
One of the key artists of not only the impressionist era, but of using photography to help capture moments and motion was Edgar Degas. The work and life of Edgar Degas truly perpetuated the essential and fundamental values and styles of the modern and the Impressionists. His studies and experiments provided the art world with thorough, almost obsessive, examination of life, movement and light through his works in oil, pastel, bronze, mixed mediums and more. He first became interested in photography through portraiture, he loved depicting people in his works. At the time, cartes de visite, or calling cards, were very popular and Degas would collect those of his friends and even have his own taken. Two of Degas’s most repeated themes in his work were people, especially his dancers and female nudes, and racing. Degas became fascinated by movement and used photography to help understand the movement of animals. Photography allowed him to be confident in his representation of horses and their motions by breaking down the movements that happen too quickly for the eye to see. While Degas’s sketches are a snapshot of horses in action, they imply a continuation of time and space. He became one of the first artists to demonstrate the real movement of animals, horses most specifically, as revealed in the stop action photography experiments of Eadweard Muybridge. Degas created an exhaustive series of studies in the movement of horses through drawings, painting and sculpture.
In his painting, Viscount Lepic and his Daughters (1873) we can see how Degas uses photographic effects to crop the family and place them within the composition in such a way that it juxtaposes the foreground and background of the painting. The background of the painting is not executed in detail, the details are reserved for the figures making it more of a portrait but the cropping allows the eye to travel around the entire composition in a way that is much different from the centric compositions of the past. Additionally, this cropping also is extremely similar in composition and feel to Japanese prints. We see a similar approach to composition by Caillebotte as seen in Degas’s work in Caillebotte’s Boulevard Seen From Above (1880). This photographic effect of viewfinding and cropping to create an abstracted view of the urban depiction from above can also be compared to abstraction and composition of Japanese prints.
Modern artists of the 20th-century avant-garde movement Surrealism utilized photography in their search to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind and probing of the imagination. The movement was essentially launched through the publication of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 in which he described surrealism saying “Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.”
Surrealists were able to use the technology to create compositions of “bizarre juxtapositions that occur naturally in daily experience.” For example, in a photograph of a baby armadillo encased in formaldehyde, Dora Maar seems to trick the imagination into making a slightly repulsive subject strangely mesmerizing and captivating. Photography came to play an integral part in the works of surrealists like Man Ray and Maurice Tabard who used photographic techniques to further the bizarre juxtapositions such as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization that “dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality.”
Man Ray’s experiments in photography lead him to rediscovering a technique described as “cameraless” pictures or photograms. In this process he would place objects on a light sensitive paper which he then exposed and developed. He called his technique rayographs. Man Ray was one of the first artists to experiment with the process of solarization in his works which involves rendering a photographic image in part negative part positive through its exposure to a flash of light during development. It is said that fellow surrealist photographer and artist, Lee Miller, aided in the discovery of solarization with Man Ray. The two accidently interrupted the development of a picture and were so intrigued with the dreamlike results they continued their experiments.
In Eugene Atget's photographs of the desolate streets of Paris and mannequins in shop windows, Surrealists realized their own understanding of the city as a "dream capital," or their own complex revenue of dreams and memory. Man Ray helped Atget realize that he was not only interested in documenting the city, but that he also had an underlying need to capture the inherent fantasy the city exuded. Atget began taking photographs dedicatedly capturing pictures of Paris for use by artists that went “beyond the merely descriptive to evoke a dreamlike world that is also profoundly real, though infused with a mesmerized nostalgia for a lost and decaying classical past.” These photographs in included imagery of streets, shop fronts, vehicles, trees, apartments, monuments, dummies grinning in windows and more. Man Ray was so captivated by one of Atget’s photographs entitled Magasin, avenue des Govelins (1925) that he utilized the image in the Surrealist publication La Révolution surréaliste in 1926.
Photography truly aided in the Surrealists investigations of art as a source of meaning and understanding. While seemingly quite different from the Impressionists use of the medium to seek truths about the modern world, Surrealists were able to use photography to capture the inherent juxtapositions of those truths to relay the fantasy and dreamlike states they wished to understand more deeply. Their deliberate use of a very technical and informative medium to see the unreasonable and uncalculated in a subject set the stage for investigations in photography as an art and medium for contemporary artists to come.