I have always found the world of photography a mysterious place where the darkest corner of the mind can reveal the barest truths behind an image. The power of black and white photography is the force to make a lucid statement that would otherwise become lost in a world of color. A burst of color makes a noise but the silence of light and shadow is almost deafening. As a student my first insights into this world of shadow and silence came from charcoal sketches and lead pencil compositions. The sketches of Giacometti were one of my first fascinations as the Swiss artist sought to dehumanize a subject by stripping down it's personality void of all color and then recreate its simple essence in the barest form with light and shadow. Thereafter, I became attracted to the world of monochrome Photography with it's power to penetrate subjects in now way that color could illumine the darkest truth. Photography is an art form in it's own right and it's compositions are just as creative as their canvas counter-parts.
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| Crowd at Intersection - Giacometti 1965 Charcoal Sketch. |
Photography was discovered in the early 19th century by the early attempts of Thomas Wedgwood with his camera obscura that captured images on paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. In 1802 he successfully managed to capture the shadows of objects made by sunlight but he died in 1805 at the age of 34 and unable to take the technology any further. Nicéphore Niépce then went on to capture images with substances exposed to light. However it wasn’t until 1827 when the world’s first camera image was captured by Nicéphore Niépce and titled: View from the Window at Le Gras. This image was made on a polished sheet of pewter which was light-sensitive substance and layered with a thin coat of bitumen, which is a kind of thick gunky tar from crude oil. The bitumen was dissolved in lavender oil, to make it more liquid and applied with brush to the surface of the pewter sheet and allowed to dry for a day. The technique for capturing the image occurred when the bitumen hardened under exposure to sun light. Any unhardened part could be removed with a liquid solvent and the result left a print dark image with the lighter regions represented by the hardened. The whole purpose of making the plate was to show an image where the bare metal appeared to be dark and the bitumen parts light.
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| View from the Window at Le Gras - Joseph Nicéphore Niépce 1827 |
The world’s first commercial camera was made available in 1839 with the invention of silver chloride paper-based calotype negatives and salt print processes introduced by Henry Fox Talbot and which replaced the metal plate based daguerreotype process and cut down the exposure time form minutes to seconds. One of the biggest problems of early photography was the long time of exposure in sunlight needed to capture an image. This of course rendered moving objects utterly useless as subjects of early photography.
"Boulevard du Temple", as seen below, was a daguerreo type image made by Louis Daguerre in 1838 and is the earliest photograph to include people. The image portrays a busy street. However as the exposure time was about 10 minutes, the photograph fails to capture the moving traffic and only the 2 standing men were captured due to their prolonged position thus enabling the image capture.
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| Boulevard du Temple - Daguerre 1838. |
In the 1830's early photographic experiment showed more success with still life subjects that were able to hold position for at least 10 minutes for the time of image exposure and development. The Daguerreotype became extensively used at this time and became so popular that the canvas portrait painters now found stiff competition for clients as society marveled at the sensation of a real image captured on paper.
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| Daguerreotype portrait of an unknown man. |
The portrait of Dorothy Catherine Draper below taken in New York in the year 1840, is one of the earliest surviving portrait images in the history of photography. The images become more clear now as Talbot's silver chloride paper become replaced by a new calotype process which involved a paper coated with silver iodide to be exposed in camera into a negative image which then can be turned into a positive image and reproduced in numbers unlike the Daguerre process and becomes the basic format of photograph development today.
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| Dorothy Catherine Draper - Joseph Draper 1840. |
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process of using emulsions on paper. The famous English author Lewis Caroll uses this process in his story "A Photographer's Day Out". Thus the key to the speed of development in this history of the image was the story of the correct combination of chemical on surface. Photography had become so popular as well as cheap it was soon taken to the masses in next to no time to capture images of every kind. However, with the startling power of real life imagery, very quickly photographers drifted from person portraits to capturing the very essence of human life including all of it's harsher aspects of a society divided by the new found wealth in the Industrial Age.
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| unknown locksmith c.1850. |
The Industrial Revolution in the United States of America eventually paved the path for serious conflict between the North and the South. The American Civil War 1861 - 1865 became the opportunity for an astonishing capture of the reality of war and all it's cruelty and suffering far removed from the romanticism of arms and conflict. Thee best place to experience this astonishing portrayal of he grueling slugging match between two opposing ideas can be taken at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Devastation, cruelty, starvation and despair and the worst attributes of humanity were immortally captured for the very first time as men laid down their lives for determined leaders on both sides of the conflict.
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| Harper's Ferry 1861 B & O track torn up by Confederates. |
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| Battle of Gettysburg 1863. |
In 1884 George Eastman from New York state invented the true photographic process of a camera with paper film thus doing away with plates forever. George Eastmen developed the dry gel on paper film which replaced the plate. The world's first Kodak camera was introduced for the commercial market with the advertising phrase "You press the button, we do the rest". Color photography was first crudely developed by the application of green, red and blue filters originally by Thomas Sutton in 1861 but could not capture the entire range of the color spectrum. It wasn't until 1873 when Herman Vogel discovered how to make the emulsions on film sensitive to the entire range of color in the light spectrum. Thus color photography was born and became commercially available with this discovery and evolved towards the modern digital age of photography.
Today with digital photography the world of black and white has expanded to capture every possible known experience of man in his interaction with society and nature. Whether a portrait is of a natural landscape, man-made object or even of man himself, the power of black and white to convey an image is concise to the viewer that doesn't need to filter out the noise of color to arrive at the heart of the subject matter.
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| Author: Harvey Sapir, Source: Wikimedia Commons. |
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| Author Gwen and James Anderson, Source: Wikimedia Commons. |
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| Author Public Domain Archive, Source: publicdomainarchive. |
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| Author Nimbus's Fotothing, Source:.fotothing. |
If the world of color becomes the animation of the human spirit then the world of light and shadow become an insight into the human soul.
