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Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Having acquired a share in L. J. M. Daguerre's invention, he was one of the first to practice daguerreotype portraiture in England, and he improved the sensitizing process by using chlorine (instead of bromine) in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action. He also invented the red (safe) dark-room light, and it was he who suggested the idea of using a series of photographs to create the illusion of movement. The idea of using painted backdrops is also attributed to him.It looks like the photograph of the Duke of Wellington was taken at the studio behind St Martin's in the Fields. There were several subsequent paintings and etchings of the Duke made from Claudet's photograph but none of them are quite as good as the original. As it says on Iconic Photos:
From 1841 to 1851 he operated a studio on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery (now the Nuffield Centre), behind St. Martin's in the Fields church, London. He opened subsequent studios at the Colosseum in Regent's Park (1847–1851) and at 107 Regent Street (1851–1867).
The photo itself taken in 1844 was a remarkable bridge across centuries. Memories of Elizabeth the First or the English Civil War were as fresh and recent to Wellington (born 1769) as Wellington or Lincoln is to us. The photo was different from latter paintings and engravings based upon it — unlike the kindly old man which smiled down from the paintings, the photo showed a crankier, more determined Wellington — a face you truly expect from the Victor of Waterloo.
... than a collection of photographs from the early twentieth century. An article in the Daily Mail with some very fine examples of early colour photographs from the collection of the millionaire Albert Kahn (who died in 1940) led Tory Historian to the actual website, which gives an account of M. Kahn's biography, interest in photography and the subsequent fate of the photographs. The BBC is doing something very useful by publishing a selection of them and doing a programme on the subject. One can only hope that the intrepid BBC researchers will be able to come up with some better accounts of where and when the pictures were taken than the Daily Mail has. It is to be assumed, for instance, that the picture above is from 1918 but that is not entirely clear from the description.
A delightful collection of colour photographs taken in Russia in the early twentieth century by the chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who had made numerous innovations in photography and started a systematic photographic documentary of the Russian Empire. About half of the photographs and plates were confiscated by the authorities when Prokudin-Gorsky left the Russia in 1918 to settle eventually in France where he continued his work. The remaining half is now in the Library of Congress. Here are some more of the images. There are so many and they are so fascinating that choosing one seems impossible.
