BLUR IN ENGLISH PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE 19TH C.

BLUR IN ENGLISH PHOTOGRAPHY
OF THE 19^TH C.

Mémoire rédigé en anglais
Sous la direction du Professeur François Brunet
Master « Arts et Culture Visuelle dans les pays anglophones »
Session de Juin 2006

Thanks to: François Brunet, Michel Frizot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton, Charles Nègre, Sally Mann, Johannes Vermeer, Steven Soderbergh, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Diane Reeves, Roland Barthes, André Rouillé, Beaumont Newhall, Sarah Hodgson, Carole Turzanski, the Puech Club, Vincent Pasquier, Mum, my goldfishes Zigotto and Zigomard, my Polaroid, computer, dictionaries and scanner.

CONTENTS

« Pour moi, j’émets le vœu que la photographie, au lieu de tomber dans le domaine de l’industrie, du commerce, rentre dans celui de l’art. C’est là sa seule, sa véritable place, et c’est dans cette voie que je chercherai toujours à la faire progresser. C’est aux hommes qui s’attachent à son progrès de se pénétrer de cette idée. »

Gustave Le Gray, 1850[1]

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[1] Gustave Le Gray, Traité pratique de photographie, 1850-1852, quoted in Sylvie Aubenas (dir.) Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallimard, 2002, p.44

INTRODUCTION

. 5 

I. THE APPEARANCE. 8

A. A Context 8

1. Photography: a document?. 9
2. A crisis of representation. 12

B. Two Forerunners. 18

1. Sir William Newton. 19
2. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake

II. THE DEVELOPMENT. 25

A. The Empirical Blur 25

  1. A portraitist 26
2. Two landscape photographers. 34

B. The Theoretical Blur 42

1. A selective focus. 42
2. A blur ideology

. 48

III.THE EVOLUTION  56

A. A Reactionary Blur 56

1. The end of Pictorialism 57

B. A New Approach of the Blur 62

1. A new perspective. 62
2. Blurred photographs: documents. 70

 75CONCLUSION

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BIBLIOGRAPHY. 79

INTRODUCTION

 In 1827, in France, Nicéphore Niépce’s experiments led him to produce the very first image in the world called View from the Window at Le Gras. In 1839, François Arago, secretary of the Academy of Sciences and a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the French government announced the discovery of a means to produce images with a camera. The newspaper La Gazette de France reported, “M. Daguerre has found the way to fix the images which paint themselves within a camera obscura”.[2] Meanwhile, in England, William Henry Fox Talbot, a scientist and mathematician, claimed to record the effects of light on pieces of paper. He showed samples of his work to the Royal Institution in London. The creation of an image consisted in placing a susceptible paper in a camera, let light come in, and finally stop the action of the light on the paper by using chemicals. The photographic process which eventually led to the physical creation of a print was both discovered in France and in England. That’s the way history of photography started, in a competition.

 As a mechanical way to produce images, the invention of photography in 1839 introduced 19^TH century society to a new age, namely the age of the machine. Not only was it the age of the machine but it was also the age of reproduction. As a consequence of the invention of this new medium, people rushed to make their portraits and collected photographs. Newspapers were now illustrated. Publicity developed. A market for photography emerged. Painting and drawing were no more the only means to produce images. Industrialized society, democratisation and scientific progress initiated both a feeling of fear and confidence in the future. British society of the 19^TH century found itself divided on the question of progress. However, in the 1830s, the introduction of railways and the steam locomotive revolutionized public transport. Yet, while France experienced hard times through the advent of various political systems from 1830 with Louis-Philippe to 1870 and the third Republic, not to mention a war against Germany from 1870 to 1871; England, on the contrary, as Victoria became Queen of England in 1837, settled into prosperity.

 Within sixty years, English photography gained recognition and international respect. From Victor Hugo’s admiration for Julia Margaret Cameron’s prints to American photographers’ desire to become members of the British society called the Linked Ring Brotherhood, English photography aroused curiosity, enthusiasm, envy and sometimes disappointment.

 In the period I propose to study, which basically starts from 1840, with the invention of the calotype process by William H. Fox Talbot, to approximately 1918, which corresponds to the end of Pictorialism and the First World War, I will try to analyse the use of blur in English photography. Besides, in order to contrast this analysis and reveal the photographic enjoyment, I will frequently compare photographs to paintings and study their similarities, differences and specific features.

 As a matter of fact, we still nowadays use the words “blur”, “fuzzy”, “out of focus” or “soft focus” (in French, “le flou artistique”) to describe the artistic quality of blurred images. Moreover, we instinctively associate blurred images with art or quite the opposite, with poor photography. Where does that come from?

To better understand the use of blur in English photography, I will first study the general context of its appearance. In other words, how and why did the blur occur in the English practices of photography? To answer this question I will take the examples of English and French photography, as they were major opponents in the discovery and improvements of photographic processes. In this section, I will also present the crisis of representation that photography initiated. Then, I will introduce two supporters of the practice of photography according to the artistic genre.

In a second part, I will distinguish two aspects in the interpretation of the use of blur. First and foremost, I will describe an empirical blur, that is to say, photographers that took blurred pictures to communicate a general aesthetic, express a vision or pleasure in creating an image. Then, I will focus my attention on a more theoretical blur. Indeed, the use of blur also allowed photographers to draw up theories and principles around its properties.

 In a third part, I will finally study the evolution of the blur. I will try to demonstrate how blur became an obsession for some photographers and prevented them to evolve. Then, I will show that blurred photographs can also derive from a documentary practice of photography. This last argument actually goes against all the endeavour of the amateur photographers of the 19^TH century but the parallel has to be drawn so as to demonstrate that, on the whole, blur cannot be categorized or be the property of one particular practice.

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[1] Gustave Le Gray, Traité pratique de photographie, 1850-1852, quoted in Sylvie Aubenas (dir.) Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallimard, 2002, p. 44

[2] “The First News Accounts of the Daguerreotype, January 6, 1839”, 1839, quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1980, p. 17