Ch #8 Flashcards
William Henry Fox Talbot
Attached a page of newspaper to a moving reel in a dark room & used an electric spark to “stop” the action
this experiment is the basis for using electric flash to stop action
did this experiment in 1851 and quickly published his findings
made an exposure at 1/100,000 of a second!!
Ernst Mach - Australian Scientist
Used an electric spark as a lighting source to make postage-sized, stop action images of projectiles.
Objects were moving at roughly 765 miles per hour! This image shows a bullet and the shock waves it creates through space and it was published in 1887
Eadweard Muybridge
Placed a bet with a wealthy horse owner: When a horse runs, do all four hooves ever leave the ground at the same time? TRUE!
Eadweard Muybridge
Muybridge began experimenting with a bank of 12 cameras with trip wires, like a horse moving down the racetrack; had many personal and legal issues that got in the way of his research but after his successful documentation of racehorse movement studies he would go on to be known as the grandfather of the moving image; used photographic images and the phenomenon of the persistence of vision - the sensation that still images viewed in rapid succession can depict motion, to show an audience moving pictures.
Persistence of Vision
The sensation that still images viewed rapidly candepict motion
Eadweard Muybridge
used the camera to convince viewers that what they were seeing was accurate - even when it didn’t conform to anything they had ever seen before; This new reality disturbed the thinking of artists who relied on “being true to nature” as their guiding force; What was true could not always be seen and what could be seen was not always true.; Muybridge demonstrated that truth was just another word for convention
Muybridge’s 12 lens camera
The far left lens was used to focus, the remaining 12 were fired one at a time as each wire was tripped. The object above shows the film holders
Man Walking, 1880s, silver gelatin print
Thomas Eakins
Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904)
Scientist who wanted to make the unseen world visible in an objective manner; grounded in the Positivism beliefs unlike Muybridge, his interest in locomotion of animals and humans was about discovering how it worked, rather than how it looked
Etienne-Jules Marey made the fusil photographique (photographic gun)
A camera with a rotating plate capable of taking a rapid sequence of images
Etienne Jules Marey, Chronophotograph, 1894 7x8 in., Gelatin Silver Print from Glass Negative
Artists studied Marey’s and Muybridge’s images to accurately depict animals and humans in motion; Marey’s work was used to undermine positivism and help to launch new methods of seeing and thinking about time and space
the earth is not a static environment counting down a biblical clock, but a continuum of time
Substituting Gelatin for Collodion
photographer and physician Richard Maddox substituted gelatin for collodion in 1871
Simplified the picture making process, permitting plates to be sensitized in advance and developed at a later time; 1878-the first practical dry plates were manufactured; Dry plates freed photographers from having to make their own plates, travel with heavy equipment, and develop their plates on site
Eastman Kodak Company
The first nationwide photo finishing business
The rise of “snapshot” photographs
The term was adopted from the hunting term meaning: to shoot instinctively without taking aim; The “snapshot” attitude influenced other modern art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism; This occurred because working methods of photography were disrupted and allowed for “looser” compositions and embraced “mistakes”
The Downsides of the Snapshot
The snapshot altered how we see and changed what we are allowed to picture. We can still see these effects & some of these downsides on social media today
