During my recent winter of photographic discontent, I roamed around the internet looking at pictures of naked women. Which is pretty much all I saw, pictures. There wasn’t much art being committed. Which led me to the question of what exactly do I mean when I say “art” and how does it apply to photography of landscapes and nudes.
George Orwell laid out the first, and maybe only, test. He said, “For any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival.”
Orwell didn’t prescribe a survival time frame, but a century seems about right to me. If people are still looking at a photograph 100 years after it was made, we can safely call it art, even if it is something we personally don’t like.
For most photography then, it is too early to tell what is art and what isn’t. Photography was invented about 1822 and the first surviving print is from 1826. Here it is.
And although photography’s inventors were artists, the technology to produce fine art prints took time to develop. There is a still life by Daguerre dated 1837 and Henry Fox Talbot made some photographs in the 1840’s that qualify, but it isn’t until the 1860’s that we began to see photographs that manifestly qualify as art under the test of survival. (Although we should note here the photographs that the Frenchman Nadar made of Sarah Bernhardt, especially this one from 1859.
There you have the beginning of modern glamour photography. Note the romantic pose, the wistful expression, the lighting and the drapery.
And, of course, documentary photography can be art and many photographs of the Civil War are, but they are beyond the scope of this modest blog which limits itself to landscapes and nudes.)
Although she didn’t do either landscapes or nudes we must pause to note Julia Margaret Cameron who may be the first true artist who worked in the photographic medium. She spent the last eleven years, from 1868 to 1879 of her life making photographic portraits which are undoubtedly art. Here are a couple of examples. The first is of a 16 year old girl photographed in 1864.
This one is a photograph Cameron made in 1867 of her niece, Julia Jackson, who was the mother of Virginia Wolfe. Jackson was Cameron’s favorite photographic subject.
The first landscape artist to use photography was Timothy O’Sullivan. (1841-1882) About 160 years have passed since his photograph of Canyon de Chelly was made and no one can mistake it for anything other than art. It has survived. No wonder. Look at it. Note the composition. The tones. No modern photograph of the scene has ever come close to its aesthetic perfection.
He made many other photographs which are art. We’ll say more about him in a later post but we’ll leave you today with one more, taken in Vermillion Canyon in 1870.
In our next post in this series we’ll make some educated guesses about the work of Stiechen, Stieglitz, Weston, Adams, Bernhardt, Cunningham and a few others from the early 20th Century and how it fares under Orwell’s test.
