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Showing posts from February, 2021

'Sun Drawings' and Sweet Artifice

Image
  By the mid-nineteenth century, the marvellous invention of photography was transforming image making. Modern photography can be traced to the 1820s and the development of the darkroom chemical process. The first glass negative was produced in late 1839 by Englishman, John Herschel. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates. How miraculous to gaze at a photographic image held in one’s hand, for this was ‘real’; a slice of actual life caught forever, unmediated by the painter’s brush mark. It was as close to reality as one could get and if the early sitters for this wonderment were compelled to remain stock still for up to two minutes in order not to cause a blurred image, it must have seemed a small price to pay. From the beginning, early photographers exploited the medium’s truth-to-life. It became the perfect vehicle for creating fictional narratives, which convinced by simply being more ‘real’ than the most exact painting could ever