The problem of the photographic emulsion

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Figure 1 - Albumen print by Frances Frith, "Travelers boat at Ibrim (1856-1859) in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Figure 1 – Albumen print by Frances Frith, “Travelers boat at Ibrim (1856-1859) in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

I wanted to talk about the albumen process from a technical point-of-view.  But first, we need to deal with a sticky issue: what is an emulsion? Back in the day when science was still taught in American schools most people would have answered: mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is an answer to the technical problem in cooking of how do I get two imiscible liquids, oil and water to mix, and the answer is that you add egg yolks. Egg yolk contains a compound called lecithin which acts like an “emulsifying agent.”

OK so far, what about photographic emulsions? Well photographic emulsions are not technically true emulsions, because what they are are silver halide crytals (so a solid) dispersed or suspended in a liquid (typically gelatin nowadays). Well, the distinction between emulsions and colloidal suspensions is really a big snore and quite besides the point.

The important point is that the photographic emulsion was invented to solve a very important problem in the development of photography. You will recall that the Daguerreotype was invented in 1838 and produced truly magnificent images. You could examine them with a magnifier or loupe and they would reveal exquisitely resolved detail. But its image was merely a silver-mercury amalgam film lying precariously atop a silver plate. It was fragile and delicate. And perhaps, more significantly it was a direct positive process that didn’t lend itself well to the creation of multiple copies, ideally on paper.  Public demand is the mother of invention.

Reproduction was, of course, the goal of William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype process, where the vehicle for the negative was paper and the second image was produced from the negative onto a similarly light-sensitized sheet of paper. An artistic, luminous, softness image is the essence of the calotype process. But it could not equal the sharpness and realism of the daguerreotype. In the calotype the light-sensitive salts are suffused into the paper. What was needed was to produce a transparent sharp layer that could be placed on either glass to produce a negative or on shiny paper to produce a positive from the negative. The use of albumen from eggs as an emulsion for glass negatives was invented independently by two Frenchmen in 1848, Niepce de Saint Victor and Louis Desire Blanquart-Evrard. As it turned out the production of glass negatives with albumen “emulsions” proved technically difficult on a large scale. There was just two much variability. But its use as an emulsion on paper became the dominant process for the next half century, with negatives produced first by Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion process and subsequently by dry plates, which used gelatin as the emulsifying agent.  The dry plate was invented in 1871 by Dr. Richard L. Maddox. Maddox’s dry plates were extremely sensitive to touch. A method of hardening the gelatin emulsion was discovered by Charles Bennett in 1873. Significantly, Bennet also discovered that prolonged heating of the emulsion significantly increased its light sensitivity. The era of high ISO films was born. The rest as they say is history…

With all this technical talk I think that we deserved a lovely nineteenth century albumin photograph to look at. Figure 1 is by the great nineteenth century travel photographer Francis Frith (1822-1898 ), taken in Egypt (1856 – 1859) and entitled “Traveler’s Boat in Ibrim.”

 

The sentinel

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Figure 1 - Double crested cormorant on the old fountain head by the Glacken Slope restoration. Frsh Pond, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – Double crested cormorant on the old fountain head by the Glacken Slope restoration. Fresh Pond, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Most of the large water birds that you see, the egrets and the herons, are stealthy hunters always either on the move, however slowly, or ready to lunge. A notable exception to this are the double crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus). You see them out swimming on the water, launching themselves beneath the surface in search of food and you see them standing on the rocks drying their wings. But a lot of times they are just standing there as if in contemplation, as if they were sentinels just watching, just guarding.

I took this image of such a bird last week.  H was standing on the old fountain head by the Glacken Slope restoration on Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA. As is often the case, especially on cloudy days, the water on that part of the pond is gray and almost motionless. Despite my admiration of the yellow or orange throats of these cormorants, I decided in the end to process the shot as a black and white, to emphasize the silhouette. It is very unusual for me to photograph a bird in black and white. Color is typically so defining. Black and white focuses on form. The toning, I think, adds just a dash of brightness to the image.These are one of the more primordial looking of birds. You watch them, observe their vigillance, and you are taken back, reminded of their prehistoric origins. It is humbling, for so they have watched for millions of years.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 200 mm . ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/3200 sec at f/7.1 with +1 exposure compensation.

Dancing by the light of the moon

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According to my calendar Labor Day is rapidly approaching. Indeed, in most years this would be Labor Day weekend, and this coming Tuesday marks the end of meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere. So soon? Boston is a city of colleges and universities and the population is about to expand. With that boom will come a vibrancy of mood, but for now it all remains pretty quiet. We await the September light and the crisp chromatic days of October.

This past week has been grotesque, if you spent much time watching the news. The word sadly is “inured.” We are becoming hardened to images and videos of violence. And that is compounded by political groups that seek to manipulate us in one direction or another with these images – showing them over and over again in an attempt to control us. It just accelerates the hardening.  I am already sick of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We cannot seem to rise above the least common denominator, which is I guess analogous to water’s always seeking the lowest point it can.

So this morning I was determined to find a photograph of the week that was visually appealing and perhaps upbeat. And my search was rewarded with a marvelous image by Jorge Duenes for Reuters to showing hikers in Tijuana, Mexico silhouetted against  super-moon. It is striking how super-moons have come to affect us. It is as if we are looking for some ancient magic mysticism to take away the insane pain of modern times. There is no ultimate solace (or is it “lunlace?”) to be found there. We have to take responsibility.

But in tesrms of art and emotions, this image functions at so many different levels. It is simply delightful but at the same time brings with it something primordial. And, of course, to the waning boomer generation it is a remembrance of things past. The world forever waxes and wanes.

You’re not going to find immortality on the internet

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Figure 1 - The author with his father, Hyman Wolf, on the lower East Side of Manhattan along the East River in 1954. Digitized black and white print. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – The author with his father, Hyman Wolf, on the lower East Side of Manhattan along the East River in 1954. Digitized black and white print. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Today would have been my father’s birthday – his 103rd birthday to be precise. And I always like to remember him on his birthday. So today I am posting another one those faces from the past images. Here I am with my dad in 1954. Don’t do the math. It’s depressing. We are along the East River in New York City, somewhere South of Fourteenth Street as evidenced by the Con Ed steam plant in the distance. I have said this before. My father loved New York City and everything that it stood for in his day.

This is another one of those contact prints (I believe) from a 2 1/4″ x 2 1/4″  twin lens reflex that my dad took. These were commercially printed and that contributed hugely to the mediocrity of the image quality. I found a lot of dead unused greys at the lower end and the image wasn’t too sharp. So I did some histogram equalization, sharpening, gamma manipulation, and just a touch of sepia toning. The result is almost reasonable except for the bleached out sky. This would have really benefited from a K2 filter or some such.And I find that painting in clouds in Photoshop, just a bit extreme.

Still there we are. Are we preserved for posterity? It had been troubling me that my parents had little or no web presence; so I am happy to say that through the agency of Hati and Skoll and this blog, if you do a search of “Hyman Wolf,” my dad now pops up, along with somewhat more famous Hyman Wolfs. But I must warn you not to look for fame or immortality on the internet. It is a fragile and ephemeral thing. When I die, if the subscription fee for this website isn’t paid, then poof! It will all be gone.

Well, maybe not quite. There are internet archives. That is a relief, not so much for the illusion of immortality but more for the ability of researchers in the future to be able to figure us out. We are rapidly foregoing print for fragile bits of information. There is the value of search ability – I mean amazing and extreme search ability.  You have to wonder what the researchers and librarians of the future will think of all the silly selfies that seem to define our age.

Librarians? Will there be librarians a hundred years from now. I have to think so. In my lifetime, I have seen them adapt. Many have stopped cataloging books but are ever ready to help you with the Boolean complexity of information searching. I have heard many times how all you need to do today is type a plain English question and the search engine answers it. Don’t believe that! There is still an art to searching and hence a need for librarians both to help you find it and on a higher level to keep order to the information.

In any event, I have no delusions of immortality for either me or my father. It is not to be found on the internet or elsewhere. Still there we are, or rather were.  Happy Birthday, dad!

Putting a name on it

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Figure 1 -Portrait of a young bride by Otto Sarony Studios, c 1906. In the public domain by virtue of its age.

Figure 1 -Portrait of a young bride by Otto Sarony Studios, c 1906. In the public domain by virtue of its age.

I wanted to share today a photograph from the Otto Sarony Studios of a young woman in a summer dress from around 1906. As we discussed, c1906 means that it’s going to be impossible to say who took the photograph and also we cannot say who the young woman in the photograph is. Does this diminish the image? But the photograph is truly spectacular, the young woman is beautiful, the dress amazing, and the hat goes beyond amazing.  We do not know who she is; so we begin to form stories in our minds.  The woman looks about twenty, around my grandmother’s age at the time. She looks just a bit terrified or at least uncertain, and there our mind stories take off.  You can imagine this photograph, once cherished, wound up in a drawer in someones home and then was disposed of by people who did not know who she was, or worse who did not care. I have gotten in the habit of writing on the back of such photographs from my family, who the person is with dates. But nonetheless, there was a time when this young woman dazzled the world with her beauty. And now over a century later, she dazzles the world, or the little part of it that is the Hati and Skoll readership, again.

Figure 2 - Close-up of the brooch in Figure 1.

Figure 2 – Close-up of the brooch in Figure 1.

Recognize that this photograph was a symbol of love, it tells a story of love. That’s the very point isn’t it. She was adored loved and quite probably had her own children, whom she adored and loved. The picture tells an intensely intimate family story. That, at least, I can prove. I became interested in the brooch that she is wearing and I began to wonder about the resolution of cameras in 1906 and assumed that it was a cameo. So I took my loupe to it, which I have done electronically in Figure 2. It’s pretty clear what it is. It is a photograph of three people, of a family, perhaps the young woman and her parents. We cannot tell for sure.  But it starts the mind wandering again. New York City was filled with immigrants, then and now. Is this perhaps a memento of the “old country.”

Of course, we cannot say for sure. There are so many questions that we want to ask this beautiful woman. But she is mute on all subjects. She is mute because she is only a shadow on an emulsion, perhaps two tenths of a millimeter thick. And I hold the thickness of the emulsion to be the key to understanding the relationship of lives and photographs.  Suppose that the photograph was taken at 1/5th second, then it is merely a slice of her life on a slice of emulsion 0.2 mm thick. If the photographer had just kept taking photographs one second would translate to a mm, and a minute to six cm.  Say the woman lived to be eighty and the photographer had just kept taking pictures, her lifetime would translate to an emulsion mountain ~ 2500 km or ~1600miles. Roughly, the length of road trip from New York to Chicago and back.

I do that calculation to point out what a minuscule instance a photograph captures. Still it is magic. But if it were not for the need of our minds to weave a story, we would really have no connection between us and these denizens of a century ago. Think of your own life, what fraction did your high school yearbook picture comprise? And more significantly what does it say about you today? Do all the selfies in the world ultimately amount to nothing? Are they no more than chimeras or ghosts to be hopelessly chased and pursued in a meaningless narcissistic world?

Again our brains take what information they get and create a stories.  The stories stem from what little information we have and then combine it with our own experiences, our own stories. We wish that we could give this young lady a name, wish we could put a name on her. Then we could, if so inclined, search for her in the internet archives.  Perhaps we could and if we could, I venture that we would have very little additional information when we were through. And in the end we would ultimately still be left to our imaginations. We imagine; indeed we hope, that this photograph, just like the gold heart charm on her bracelet, was a token of love, an instant in a lifelong love story. Then the very best that we can offer is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

And that, dear reader, is the meaning of an antique photograph.

Before the triple altars of mammon, clear skin, and the sacred pretzel

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Figure 1 - The triple altars of mmaon, clear skin, and the sacred pretzel. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – The triple altars of mmaon, clear skin, and the sacred pretzel. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

It is late August now, and I went this past Sunday for a walk at the Mall. It is both a melancholy and an expectant time. I feel for school children, now doomed to succumb to the demands of “back to school,” and soon my easy commute to work will be slowed by a convoy of school buses. It not only seems, but is, inevitable. However, right now it is very quiet and, when I got to the mall, it was largely silent. My favorite coffee stop wasn’t even open yet, and I watched as the Godiva chocolatier, the woman who stands in the window and dips fruits in luscious dark and creamy chocolate, sleepily unlocked the door to the shop, closed yet to the public as she performed her magic.

I have in the past advocated that photographers document the ephemera of our times, the trends, and the soon-to-be obsolete. On this particular Sunday morning I happened upon one of those giant vending machines. This one sold acne creams – indeed, America’s #1 Acne Brand.  That struck me as strange and worthy of a photograph before someone realizes how stupid an idea it is.  Is it perhaps catering to the embarrassment of teens who want to buy these treatments in private? What could be more private than the middle of a shopping mall? Hello there, people!

So I took the photograph of Figure 1 before these machines disappear completely. I have seen them before selling IPhones and tablets. That really perplexes me. Have you ever had a vending machine fail to deliver a Coke, when you were parched and dying of thirst, seen your favorite chip dangle tantalizingly close to release but never quite making it? In both cases your money is gone. I mean, like I’m really going to risk eight hundred dollars making a purchase at a machine. This is not the singularity it is singularly stupid!

There I was Sunday morning. I was struck by the juxtaposition. America’s #1 Acne Brand stood right next to the Bank of America ATM. And if you think this was coincidental then puzzle me this. There is a second America’s #1 Acne Brand on the other side of the mall, right next to the Bank of America. So there I was standing before the triple altars of mammon, clear skin and the sacred pretzel. You will note that the pretzel even has its own halo.  I am spiritually exhausted. I resign myself to this misappropriation of the sacred. But I do stop to photograph it in the hope that it will soon disappear.

Otto Sarony

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Cecilia Loftus as Ophelia, 1903. From the University of South Carolina Shields Collection and in the public domain by virtue of its age.

Cecilia Loftus as Ophelia, 1903. From the University of South Carolina Shields Collection and in the public domain by virtue of its age.

A major complication when looking at photographs from photography studios, such as Sarony’s, is that most of the time you cannot be sure of attribution. Did the proprietor take the photograph or was it taken by someone else in his employ. With Napoleon Sarony ‘s son Otto Sarony,(1850 – 1903) things get, well, complicated .

Otto was trained by his father to take over the family business. Indeed, he presided over almost every photo-session between 1893 and his father’s death in 1896 and he continued as sole proprietor from 1896 to October of 1898, when he sold the business and   “all the fixtures, implements, cameras, lenses, specimens and materials used in about the photographic establishment . . . together with the trade-mark “Sarony'” to Jonathan Burrow. Such was the power and worth of the Sarony name. But then, as I said, things got complicated in 1902, when Otto sold the right to his name to photographic entrepreneur Theodore C. Marceau. Otto Sarony managed Marceau’s endeavor from Dec. 22, 1902, until his untimely death at age 53 in September 1903.

But it did not stop there. From 1903 onward photographs continued to be issued in under Sarony’s name or, perhaps better said, his label.  In 1906  the Marceau Studio merged with the Otto Sarony Studio. The Otto Sarony label continued into World War I. The merger was thirteen year’s after Otto’s death, which means that the huge volume of images produced under his name were not taken by him at all, but by nameless and in many cases skilled portraitists.

This all makes the choice of a characteristic Sarony image a bit tricky. I have chosen as Figure 1 a spectacular photograph of Scottish actress Cissie (Ceclia) Loftus (1876-1943) in the role of Ophelia in Hamlet.  There are hints of provenance however, since there is a chronology of Loftus’ major performances and Ms. Loftus is listed as performing Hamlet from from December 1902 to January 1903 and then again in March 1903. If we assume that the photograph was taken at the time of these performances it was done in 1902 or 1903. It dates therefore to the brief time of Otto’s management of Marceau’s Studio. This I guess puts it in the “possibly taken by Otto Sarony category” and if you add the significance of Ms. Loftus as a subject of the photograph it probably rises to “probably taken by” Otto Sarony.

This raises, perhaps, the question of why attribution is so important to us. Is it not the case that a photograph, if beautiful, remains beautiful even when it cannot be accurately attributed to a particular photographer? Certainly so, but I do think that there is added value when you have a body of a photographers work (literally a photographic habeas corpus, if you will), which enables you to get closer to his/her vision and progression as an artist. With so many artists of photography’s first century we must be content of single images.

Aqua

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Figure 1 - Aqua, Boston, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – Aqua, Boston, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Today I’m offering up Figure 1 as another IPhone experiment. I call this photograph “Aqua” for obvious reasons. But in this case aqua has the double meaning of both water and color. It is summer soothing. And I have to say that I remain  impressed by the IPhone,s ability to handle pretty extreme close-ups, just tap on the screen where you want the sharpest focus and voila!  As I’m looking at it on my computer screen the image is about two inches wide and the glass is pretty much actual size.  I had to darken out some distracting elements across the table, which I did with a combination of the burn, magic wand, and clone tools. I thought that the napkin in the upper right was going to annoy me.  But in actuality I find it balancing both in terms of color and shape. I think that the composition would be just too monotonous without it, I like all the rings of reflection and refraction, but I particularly like the distorted lensing of surrounding elements like the napkin in the glass.

Adelaide Ristori – an antiquarian mystery

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Figure 1 - Adelaide Ristori as Marie Anteoinette photographed by Napoleon Sarony. In the public domain by virtue of its age.

Figure 1 – Adelaide Ristori as Marie Antoinette photographed by Napoleon Sarony. In the public domain by virtue of its age.

Yesterday I spoke about Richard Grant White’s 1870 article in Galaxy: “A Morning at Sarony’s.  He was much taken by a particular portrait that he saw at the gallery.

“Sarony’s portrait of Ristori as Marie Antoinette is a work of which Delaroche need not have been ashamed. True, it is the product of three factors. The skilful use of the chemical qualities of light, and the marvellous power of the actress herself in summoning into her face and attitude an expression of the emotions of the scene, are two; the third is the ability, the artistic ability, of the operator. He has succeeded in selecting, and then in fixing by a process almost instantaneous, the position and expression that will transmit Ristori’s grandest moment to posterity. The product is noble as a mere work of art. The portraiture aside, it is valuable for itself. There is mental anguish in every line of that face; there is tragedy in the very sweep of that drapery.”

On reading this I became intrigued by the question of which of the many pictures that Napoleon Sarony took of Mme. Ristori White was talking about. It is one of those antiquarian questions which I love to try to solve and which have become infinitely more addressable in this age of the internet and the worldwide web.

But first things first – who was Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906)? She was one of the great actresses of her day and famous at a tragedienne. Indeed, we are told that Paolo Giacometti wrote the play Marie Antoinette for her. The theater critic for the New York Times was less than thrilled by the play:

“Mme. Ristori appeared at the Star Theatre last evening as Marie Antoinette in Paolo Giacometti’s wordy and tedious play, the only merit of which is that it presents–or enables Mme. Ristori to present–a striking and clearly defined portrayal of the much misunderstood daughter of Maria Theresa.”

Hmm! Returning to the question of which of Sarony’s photographs White is speaking, he does not give us a lot to go on.  I focused on the phrase “… there is tragedy in the very sweep of that drapery.”  I went in search of a portrait with drapes in the background. But there are none. But it is a misnomer of sorts. If you look up with a GOOGLE search the definition of the word “drapery” on the web you will find the third definition: 

the artistic arrangement of clothing in sculpture or painting.
“the effigy is notable for its flowing drapery”
For a classically astute art critic like White, this would have been his meaning. And given also White’s description of Sarony fussing with the folds of a lady’s dress, the photograph described is almost certainly that of Figure 1 with its dramatic sweep of the skirt that gives a most dynamic sense to the image. And, of course, in the end, it really doesn’t matter.
But, as one final note there is a beautiful colorized daguerreotype in the Il Museo Bibloteca dell’Autore in Genova of Adelaide Ristori in her youth,  This is reproduced as Figure 2 below.
Figure 2 - Daguerreotype of Adelaide Ristori in Il Museo Biblioteca Dell'Autore and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Figure 2 – Daguerreotype of Adelaide Ristori in Il Museo Biblioteca Dell’Autore and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.