Figure 1 – The first photograph, “View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826”, in the public domain in the United States.

The first photograph, certainly the first photograph currently in existence, is usually credited to French amateur scientist, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833).  This image, “View from the Window at Le Gras”, produced on pewter is currently in the collection of the Henry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Niépce first experimented successfully with copying engravings onto lithographer’s’ stones, using a process he referred to as heliography as early as 1824.  (The term, photograph, was first used by astronomer, John Herschel, in 1839.)  Eventually he settled upon using pewter plates as a support medium.  In the summer of 1826, in the window of his upper-story workroom at Le Gras, Niépce set up a camera obscura using a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum) and exposed the plate for at least eight hours. The exposed regions of the plate became hardened by the light, much like dentist currently cure cements with UV light.  Niépce removed the plate and used a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum to dissolved away the the unhardened bitumen.  This produced a direct positive image on the pewter, which has now lasted close to two hundred years.

Niépce formed a partnership with the French artist Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), in 1829 and he died of a stroke in 1833. Daguerre, of course, went on to invent the daguerreotype in 1838.  The two are generally attributed, along with Englishman Henry Fox Talbot, with the invention of photography.  Readers are also referred, however, to the important work of Hércules Florence, who after Niépce but before Daguerre made important contributions to the invention.  Florence worked obscurely in Brazil and as a result was not recognized by his contemporaries.

In response to my blog on Alf Kumalo, who photo-chronicled apartheid, reader Rajan shared with us the remarkable work of fine art photographer Lisa Kristine who has made it her work to chronicle modern slavery.  This is in the finest tradition of photojournalism and photoessay.  Like Kumalo, Kristine is compelled do do this work at great personal risk.  There is a video of her lecturing on this human tragedy, which is illustrated by her beautiful photographs that documents both the horror of what she has witnessed and the fundamental dignity of human hope in the midst of total dispair.  I really should not say any more, but let her work speak for itself.  Watch this video and visit her website.

Like a large part of the nation, I have been watching Ken Burns’ latest documentary, “The Dust Bowl.”  Burns is a master of the art form.  He has an effective formula: still photos augmented with video clips, if they exist; a silver tongued narrator, here Peter Coyote; interviews with eyewitnesses; and underscoring with folksy tunes, here strummed and sung by Woody Guthrie.  I have been admiring and amazed at the quality, the sharpness and tonality, of the photographs.  They look as if they were not eighty to ninety years old but very modern and taken yesterday.

Well, there’s something curious going on here.  I’m not sure to what degree the images have been restored and enhanced – I need to explore that a bit.  But what is interesting is that Burns has turned the tables on us.  Usually black and white pictures convey, and are used to convey, a sense of age. And you can throw in a dash of sepia toning to emphasize the effect.  Here we think, and are meant to think, that these look so modern like they were taken yesterday.  He shows you a vibrant image of a baby or a young child and you say “what a beautiful little girl.”  And then he tells you, or better still, has a family member tell you how she died a terrible death due to “black dust pneumonia.”  It is absolutely heart-wrenching.

We have been talking about how when you see a person in an antique photograph you naturally wonder, what happened to the person.  Here we see the effect of making the image appear modern so that you can directly relate to the person and the catastrophe they experienced.  These events are not in the remote past, but could happen to you or someone you know tomorrow.

We see in these pictures the continued relevancy of black and white imagery.  They remain profoundly able to elicit psychological effect.  Even in the absence of color photography can provide a truly subtle pallet for the manipulation of human emotion.

We have talked a lot about photojournalism and the creation of iconic images that not only define the instant, but can also effect great change.  In our modern electronic world, images bombard us continuously and can to use, the latest vernacular term – go viral.  Watching an image evolve in this way is like the experience an astronomer has witnessing the birth of a star in the cauldrons of the universe.

So I offer you, as example, the magnificent photograph taken by Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan of New York City in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy.  This is the cover photograph of the latest issue of New York Magazine showing the city split in two by power outages.  Baan explains this photograph in Poynter Magazine: “It was the only way to show that New York was two cities, almost.  One was almost like a third world country where everything was becoming scarce. Everything was complicated. And then another was a completely vibrant, alive New York.”

Other Baan images of the hurricanes aftermath may be found at De Magazine Zeen. Baan took to the air to obtain the cover photo.  I think that we will be seeing this picture for a long time to come – an icon in the making.

I decided that it would be interesting to assemble a set of “My Favorite Photographs.” Perhaps I will share some of these with you.  When you test your memory with the question: which photographs of all the thousands that you have seen rise to, say, the top twelve favorites,   your mind organizes itself and first asks: who are your favorite photographers.  That seems an easy question.  In my youth two photographers inhabited the Cathedral of the Most Holy.  These were Ansel Adam and Edward Weston.

These two sainted figures set the standard for what could be done with black and white photography.  That is, if you were willing to, like a novice or initiate, learn the black and white arts of the fine print.  It is a standard to which I, and my generation of amateur phoyographers, continue to strive.  So then the problem becomes simple.  For Ansel Adams, it’s “Moonrise Hernandez, NM, 1941” and for Weston it’s “Pepper No. 30., 1930”

Please take a moments and follow the link to have a look at “Pepper No. 30.”  It is a very sensual pepper.  The two halves seem to be caressing one another as two lovers.  It’s a wonderful picture.  So I clipped it out electronically and pasted it into my little collection of favorites.  This is when it struck me.  I still like it, and Edward Weston is certainly still one of my top favorites.  But Pepper No. 30 no longer holds special favorite status magic for me.  It was a revelation for me.

I found myself rushing to my bookshelf and dusting off the little 1971 Aperture monograph “Edward Weston.”  Relieved, I found that I still love Weston.  His “Nude in the Dunes, 1930,” his curled up “Nude, 1936,” and his “Two Shells, 1927,” still ring true and wonderful.  But “Pepper No. 30,” not so much!  It made me wonder what had happened, why had this image lost its spell on me?

I looked up in the Aperture monograph what Weston himself wrote about “Pepper No. 30.”

“It is classic, completely satisfying, – a pepper – but more than a pepper: an abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter.  It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes me beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.”

Really?  It was then that I understood.  It is not that the pepper was any less sensuous or abstract.  Like any original, its impact had become lost when copying became overwrought.  “Pepper No. 30,” and equally wonderful, “Cabbage Leaf, 1931,” have been copied so much that we have become immune to their impact.  Indeed, I’ve probably seen “Pepper No. 30” reproduced over a thousand times. The entire kitchen: carrots, turnips, cabbages, and pasta have been imaged so many times that we no longer care.  Even in film we have the famous gastronomical seduction in Tony Richardson’s screen adaptation of Henry Fielding’s, “Tom Jones,” and Ken Russel’s rendering of D. H. Lawrence’s essay on “The Proper Way to Eat a Fig in Society,” in his “Women in Love.”  This marvelous little photograph that I once revered and held in sainted status had been murdered in the cathedral.

Figure 1 – Murder in the Cathedral, Copyright D. E. Wolf, 2012

Weston describes how the pepper was beginning to lose its freshness, that this was the last day that it would be worth photographing.  So I suppose we must assume that it was ultimately eaten.  For me, I am pleased that I opened the monograph.  Sometimes there is a special intimacy to looking at photographs on paper, and I find that Edward Weston still occupies the pantheon of my personal greats.  Looking at his images, I realize how much there is to learn and how much he has to teach us.

I’d like to recommend a new exhibit “Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation,” at the Worcester Art Museum, in Worcester, MA.  For those of you who have never been there, this museum with its top-notch cafe’, as well as the nearby American Antiquarian Society, are jewels in central Massachusetts.  The exhibit is an extensive set of photojournalistic images collected by Howard G. Davis, III to chronicle the period from 1958 to 1985.Thus, we have the civil rights movement, the space race, the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam, Kent State, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.

To those of us, who are of that generation, the images are not only iconic but haunting.  Revisiting pictures such a Eddie Adams’ “Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing the Viet Cong Guerilla, Bay Lop, 1968;” Bernie Boston’s “Flower Power,1967;” and Nick Ut’s “Children Fleeing South Vietnamese Air Force Napalm Attack on the Village of Trang Bang, 1972,” is absolutely viseral. These images changed America, and you are taken back to the first time that you saw them.  They are burned into your mind forever.  Ut’s image was originally censored, not because of the horror it depicted, but because it showed full frontal nudity.  Entering one of the little video booths to see the newsclips is terrifying.  You feel like you are about to be transported back to that formative time.

Honestly, it is powerful stuff!