Early Photographs
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The Getty Museum's exhibition entitled Voyages and Visions: Early Photographs from the Wilson Family Collection (October 24, 2000-February 18, 2001) features works from the earliest days of photography. The show includes portraits, scenes from war, cityscapes, landscapes, and pictures of famous sights from around the world. The selection of photographs emphasizes the early photographers' interest in recording "notable constructions or natural monuments such as places of worship, ancient buildings, and earthworks" (Naef & Lyden, n.p.). Their artistry was applied to producing a record of the world with all the accuracy and clarity that the new medium could provide. They saw photography as a means of capturing the sights of the world and bringing them back to those who would never have a chance to see them any other way. This mission runs directly counter to the aims of much academic painting of the time in which history painting, mythological subjects, and idealized, flattering portraiture were among the principal types. Photography, it seemed, was bound to depict merely what was there. There were photographers who reveled in making the most of the limitations and opportunities of the new medium, but there were many who looked to painting for their models. The exhibition of the Wilson collection offers examples of both types of work. There was always a tension between the medium and any aspects of painterly style that were imposed on it. This is clear in Roger Fento
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foreground with his back to the viewer.
Naef and Lyden comment that the 1844 "Fisher Lassie and Child" by the partnership of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson "was daring" in directing its attention to "a barefoot young girl" in an age when "rich merchants and landed aristocrats were the subjects of most paintings and photographs" (n.p.). But this fails to distinguish between a portrait, in which the sitter's individuality and accomplishments were the focus of interest (if not always to the artist, then at least to the client), and the anonymous depiction of a "type" from the lower classes, whose childish appeal and quaint appearance exerted a sentimental charm for bourgeois viewers. The picture is as perfectly posed, lit, and centered as any example of sentimentalized genre painting. Although, as Naef and Lyden note, the movement of the children during the pose does add a certain air of spontaneity to the photograph.
Other photographers seemed more intent on exploiting the medium's possibilities without reference to painting. William Henry Fox Talbot's striking "Street Scene in Paris" (1843) is a picture that would never have been composed in this fashion by a painter--at least in 1843. Naef and Lyden note that Talb
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