Study Room resource: History of photography
Prints and drawings, including fashion illustrations, architectural drawings, design drawings, watercolours, posters and much more, not on display in the galleries, can be seen in the Print & Drawings Study Room. To make it easier for teachers and lecturers to access the most popular material with groups, we have developed themed resources which contain original prints and drawings.
These resources contain images from some of the first photographers and discusses the development of photography through the 20th century.
The images referenced below appear in the study room resources but are unavailable to be shown on the website due to copyright issues.
'The Pool - Evening' by Edward Steichen, 1899. Museum no. Circ.964-1967
Steichen was using a plate camera to take this image. He states that he focussed on the foreground, which he would be able to view on the ground glass at the back of the camera. The woods in the background would have been too dark for him to see on the ground glass and so he would have had to estimate at what aperture to set the camera (what size the diaphragm should be) in order that the dark background could be seen. The vintage prints of this image were platinum prints. The out-of-focus style of the photograph is typical of Steichen's early work and representative of the suggestive, rather than literal, quality of Photo-Secessionist photography.
'The technical problem was solved by setting the focus on the flat foreground and regulating the resulting diffusion in the woods by opening or closing the diaphragm of the lens.' Edward Steichen, A life in Photography, London, 1963
Edward Steichen's photography received its first critical acclaim in 1899 when two of his photographs were shown in the 2nd Philadelphia Salon.
The following year Steichen went to New York, en route to Paris, to show his paintings and photographs to Alfred Stieglitz, who bought three of his photographs.
Steichen and Stieglitz were to have a strong collaborative friendship for almost fifteen years in which time they were two of the founding members of the Photo-Secessionist group, promoting photography as an artistic medium. They also brought the work of European artists such as Matisse and Picasso to an American audience at the '291' gallery in New York, which Stieglitz set up in 1905.
In 1902 Steichen had set up a portrait studio in New York. It had been very successful but by 1906 he was finding the work unchallenging and he returned to Paris where he lived until the outbreak of war in 1914. He developed new areas of his work in Paris such as fashion photography. On his return to New York in 1914 Steichen's relationship with Stieglitz began to sour. They disagreed strongly on the future of the '291' gallery and also the involvement of America in the war.
Steichen joined the US Army Signal Corps, which was responsible for taking aerial photographs of enemy territory and movements in France. After the war, Steichen abandoned the Symbolist style of his earlier photographs.
'I began to reason that, if it is possible to photograph objects in a way that makes them suggest something entirely different, perhaps it would be possible to give abstract meanings to very literal photographs. I made many photographs exploring the idea.' Edward Steichen A Life in Photography, London, 1963
Steichen was producing photographs with a high level of detail, showing, for example, close ups of plant forms and still life objects with a Modernistic feel. Initially Steichen continued to use natural light in his photographs but gradually he began to use artificial studio lighting for his commercial work. In 1947 the Museum of Modern Art created the position of director of the department of photography, which was then given to Steichen. He remained in the post until 1963.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13a.
'Rayograph' (Abstract Composition) by Man Ray, 1921-8. Museum no. PH.9-1985
Man Ray began to make rayographs when he moved to Paris in 1921. The rayograph appealed to Man Ray because the process was automatic, not needing a lens or camera, and this fitted into Surrealist thought and practice. It was also a technique that represented ordinary objects in an ambiguous way, which was also an important theme in Surrealist images.
Generally speaking Man Ray was more interested in the play of light and shadow than in capturing the structural or tactile qualities of objects. The rayograph not only captures the form of objects but also their shadow, which creates the ambiguity. Almost flat objects (such as the matches in this image) appear as almost flat forms whereas the matchbox is not so easily recognisable as its shadow is shown.
'The photographer, in order to discover the unknown in everyday bjects, chooses the most unexpected, which is also, as so often, the simplest means: separating the object from the world, he considers only the object itself.' - Pierre Bost, Photographies Modernes, Paris, 1930
Man Ray was an artist of enormous international standing, who worked in many media including photography. He had started to use a camera in order to make good reproductions of his paintings and would in later years take photographs of friends' work, including Duchamp, Picasso and Braque.
He was living in New York in the 1910s and had some contact with Stieglitz and the '291' gallery but it was not until he moved to Paris in 1921 that photography became a dominant form for his ideas.
In 1917 Man Ray did do some photographic collaborations with Marcel Duchamp. By the mid 1920s Man Ray was also a popular and well paid fashion photographer for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
Man Ray had had some contact with Dada and Surrealist thinking and art while in New York. After he moved to Paris, he began producing Surrealist portraits and still lifes using 'rayography' - a technique he developed and named after himself - and other techniques such as solarisation and compound printing.
Man Ray had a large studio in Paris and employed young assistants during the 1920s including Bill Brandt, Berenice Abbott and Lee Millar. He left France for America in 1940, returning to Paris in 1951. He took decreasing numbers of photographs in his later years, but his photographs along with other work were frequently on exhibit throughout the world up to his death in 1976.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13a.
'Miss Mary Taylor' by Cecil Beaton, 1935. Museum no. PH.191-1977
This fashion photograph showing the model Mary Taylor was taken in the mid-1930s. The image is highly romantic in both the dress and the setting. The dress, although black, refers to the 19th century rather than to the high modern style that was fashionable at that time. The sleeves of the dress have an Edwardian feel. The long gloves, necklace, hairstyle and the small posy all serve to emphasise the romanticism of the slightly retrospective style of the dress. Beaton has also styled the setting to reflect this using draped lace, sculpture and the shadow of a chandelier (which is presumably positioned behind the plain fabric of the backdrop). Together, the setting, accessories and the sweetness of Mary Taylor's face (which is highlighted by the halo of light which Beaton had positioned round her head) serve to create a strong sense of romanticism which is suggested by the dress.
If you carefully lift the mount, you can see the dark plate marks at the edge of the image. This shows that the print is the same size as the negative and that Beaton was using a plate camera to take this photograph. In the top right corner you can see the inscription 'B9-11', which is the negative number used by Beaton and his staff. 'B9' is the number of the sitting and '11' is the number of this particular photograph. If you look closely at the image you can see a seam running across the centre of the backdrop and also shadows of lighting equipment in the lower right hand corner. When Beaton's fashion photographs were published these kinds of small fault would have been retouched out of the image.
Within a few years of leaving university, Beaton was working full time on his artistic ventures, establishing himself as a designer for the theatre and ballet and a successful 'society' photographer. Beaton had also begun to publish small books on themes that interested him. They incorporated his drawings and photographs and included The Book of Beauty (1931) and Cecil Beaton's New York (1938).
In 1939 he took a series of highly romanticised photographs of Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother. They mark the beginning of Beaton's long career as a royal photographer, which continued until 1979. His photographs were an important part of the promotion of the 'new' Royal Family in the press.
Beaton continued theatre design and magazine commissions during the war and also undertook work for the British government. In 1942 he flew to Cairo to take photographs for the Ministry of Information and then travelled on to China.
After the war Beaton resumed his increasingly successful career as designer and photographer, as well as publishing a series of books of his wartime work. He also designed sets and costumes for Hollywood films such as Gigi (1957) and My Fair Lady (1963), for which he won two Oscars in 1964. He continued to paint and photograph throughout the 1970s even after a severe stroke in 1974. He died in 1980.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13a.
'Seville', by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1933. Museum no. PH.582-1978
This image was taken in Seville at the beginning of his career as a photographer. It has a strong geometric form; we view the gang of boys through a large hole in a wall which frames the scene. If you didn't know the date of the image you might guess that it was taken during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) or afterwards. The fact that it was taken in 1933 gives it a strange sense of premonition. The boys are playing at war in the ruins of a war that has not yet happened.
Henri Cartier-Bresson began to take photographs seriously in 1931 when he bought a Leica (hand held) camera. Within three days he had mastered the camera and did not essentially change his working technique from that point onwards. He does not use flash equipment, tripods or reflectors, neither does he develop or print his own photographs, relying wholly on his comprehension of the image at the point of taking the photograph.
In 1933 he went to Italy and Spain, in 1934 he exhibited with Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Mexico where he spent the whole of that year. In 1936 he returned to France and became an assistant to the film director Jean Renoir.
He was drafted into the army in 1940, was captured and held in German labour camps, successfully escaping on his third attempt. He worked for the Resistance movement in Paris until the end of the war.
In 1947 he founded the Magnum photo agency with Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger. The following year he travelled in Asia, taking photographs in India, Burma, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt and China, returning to Europe in 1950. He continued to take photographs but from the 1970s spent more of his time sketching and drawing.
In 1952 the term 'decisive moment', most often used to describe Cartier-Bresson's photographs, was coined. It does not refer to the capturing of a historic moment, or to storytelling, which is not what Cartier-Bresson is representing in his photographs. The phrase, derived from Zen Buddhism, is applied to his technique to mean the moment (which he photographs) when his internal sense of form is expressed. Form, a strong sense of geometry, is highly visible in Cartier-Bresson's photographs and it is as if the drama of his images takes care of itself.
'Oceano', by Edward Weston, 1936. Museum no. Circ.560-1975
'To clearly express my feeling for life with photographic beauty, present objectively the texture, rhythm, form in nature, without subterfuge or evasion in technique or spirit, to record the quintessence of the object or element before my lens, rather than interpretation, a superficial phase, passing mood - this is my way in photography.' - Edward Weston writing in his journal, spring 1927
Weston's photographs of sand dunes, taken in the late 1930s, are part of his vision of photography, which he described in his journal in 1927. He captures the eerie landscape with the diversity of the patterns in the sand. Weston has made plain both the abstract or formal quality of the dunes and the landscape's monumentality, without obvious image manipulation or 'artistic' interpretation.
Edward Weston became interested in photography as a young man, attending the Illinois College of Photography from 1908-11. He then opened a portrait studio in Tropico, California, adopting the fashionable Pictorialist style and winning honours and awards for his work.
By 1920 Weston's photographs had come under the influence of modern art and he began to make semi-abstract photographs but still in a soft Pictorialist mode. In 1922 he took two photographs of the Armco steel plant in Ohio that clearly show his move towards Modernist photography.
In 1923 Weston moved to Mexico City with his eldest son Chandler and the photographer Tina Modotti. Free from the restrictions of his portrait studio in California, Weston was experimenting with his photographic style and content.
Using an 8x10 plate camera Weston produced sharply focussed still-life studies of Mexican crafts. He would use the less cumbersome Graflex camera for portraits. Weston's photographs of this period show his growing concern to render the substance and particularity of objects.
These preoccupations continued on his return to California in 1926 when he began to produce still lifes of fruits, vegetables and shells. These same concerns are reflected in his nude studies of this period. Weston moved to Carmel in 1929 and began to spend more time taking photographs out of doors. He became particularly fond of the Point Lobos area, producing startling images of the beach forms of driftwood and rocks.
In 1932 Weston stopped printing on platinum paper and began making gelatin-silver prints (which he continued until the end of his life). He came to feel that the gelatin-silver print maintained the vibrancy of the photographed object and the original conception of the image. In 1946 he began to use colour photography but only produced a small number of colour prints. He re-photographed subjects he had recorded in black and white exploring the specificity of colour.
By 1946 Weston was so stricken with Parkinson's disease that he was unable to continue taking photographs. In 1953 he supervised the re-printing of over eight hundred of his photographs, which was carried out by his son Brett. He died in 1958.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13b.
'Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama', by Walker Evans, 1936. Museum no. PH.19-1981
'Photographers born at the turn of the century reached their majority at a time when it was still generally thought that a photograph of the everyday, midday world that was clear and sharp all over was not to be judged as art: it was simply a record. The photographer of that generation who changed that, more than any other, was Walker Evans, who photographed the commonest of things in a style that seemed as transparent and disinterested as that of an insurance photographer.' - John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now,' MoMA, 1989
In 1926 Walker Evans went to Paris in search of European culture, intent on a career as a writer. On his return to New York the following year he began to experiment with photography, adopting the extreme angles and play with technique visible in European contemporary photography.
During the early 1930s Evans broke with formalistic photographic experiments to produce highly observant, naturalistic images of, for example, architecture and street scenes. This coincides with Evans' exposure to photographs of Paris by the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-27).
He produced haunting images of the decaying manors of the plantations in the South in 1935 and also produced documentation photographs for the MoMA exhibition 'African Negro Art'. In the summer of this year Evans began his two years working for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), producing images primarily in the southern states of the farmers, their families and homes.
In 1936 the writer James Agee was commissioned by the magazine Fortune to produce a story about the lives of the sharecroppers in the South. The sharecroppers turned over most of their crops for rent and were particularly hard hit by the Depression. Agee requested that Evans came with him as photographer. Evans and Agee were granted leave from the FSA for the project. In Alabama the men met a sharecropper named Floyd Burroughs who agreed to work with them on the project (as did Burroughs' relations the Fields and Tingle families).
The article was never printed by Fortune magazine, but their experiences were eventually captured in their book entitled Let us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The layout of the book stressed the independence of the photographs from the text. The photographs are printed together in the front of the book with no captions, and Agee's text rarely refers directly to the them.
This image shows the wife of Burroughs and was one of three images which Evans took of her standing against her house. He used an 8x10 view camera, capturing the fine detail of the rough wood and her lined face. The image does not render a strong political or allegorical reading. Instead, Evans moves the viewer to confront her face and look into her dark eyes which are lined up with the shadow on the boards behind her. Evans was making an aesthetic choice to record her in a style that signifies the honesty and the tension of the act of taking her picture. This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13b.
During the late 1930s until the mid 1940s Evans took photographs of people on the New York subway. Evans also undertook photojournalistic commissions for Fortune magazine from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. He received acknowledgement for his seminal role in the history of photography during the 1960s with large retrospective exhibitions and reprinting of his books. He was made Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1965. He died in 1975.
'Bistrot Noir et Blanc', by Robert Doisneau, 1948. Museum no. PH.262-1980
This photograph was taken in 1948, and is part of Doisneau's long-term project representing French suburban life. Some of Doisneau's photographs are posed or staged rather than strictly documentary photographs. If Doisneau was unable to photograph an observed scene that interested him, he would restage the scene at a later date. It is unclear in this photograph whether Doisneau came across the group at bar, or whether, with the use of professional models or friends, he has staged the image.
'This is not to suggest that Doisneau systematically invented "his" world, but it is to note the creative or subjective dimension which his social photography of the banlieue (suburbs) and the classe populaire contains.' - Peter Hamilton, Doisneau, Tauris Parke Books, 1992
Robert Doisneau trained as an engraver and lithographer in his early teens and at 17 was employed as a lettering artist at a Paris graphic studio that specialised in advertising work and had just started to use photography as an advertising medium.
Doisneau took an interest in photography at this time and became the unofficial photographic assistant at the studio before moving on to be the assistant to the photographer André Vigneau.
Doisneau undertook his military service from 1932 to 1934 after which he was able to find work as a photographer at the Renault car plant at Boulogne, producing images of the work-force at leisure as well as at work.
Doisneau's projects in post-war France were diverse. He continued photographing suburban Parisian life and also produced fashion and society photographs as well as book illustrations. His famous 'Kiss' sequence was taken for Life magazine in 1950. From the late 1970s onwards Doisneau's work received growing acclaim due partly to the increasing respectability of photography and the commissioning of his work funded by the French government. He died in April 1994.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13b.
'Untitled', for the portfolio 'Southern Suite', by William Eggleston, 1981. Museum no. PH.235-1983
'Walker Evans said (whispered rather) those four words, "colour photography is vulgar". But he made an exception, of course, which was that colour photography was great to describe anything that was vulgar. You know, anything trashy was great on colour film. And a lot of your pictures - to me some of the most successful ones - contrast something appallingly vulgar with something very fresh and natural.' - Mark Haworth-Booth interviewing William Eggleston, History of Photography, spring 1993
The dye transfer process represented to Eggleston the most intense and saturated colouring of images of real life and things. The quality of the dye transfer print is very successful in this image where it captures the bright paint and rust of the sign and the sun reflecting off the grass and ploughed field, representing both the 'vulgar' and the 'natural'.
William Eggleston became interested in photography as a young man, studying the work of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. He began to experiment with colour photography in the 1960s, working exclusively in colour by the late 1960s.
Eggleston, by this stage, was producing striking images of ordinary objects, the debris of human existence, the sentiment which aligned him with other young photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, whom he met in New York in 1967. Eggleston's work gained international critical attention in 1976 when his photographs were shown at MoMA in New York. The prints were dye transfer colour photographs, a process that he had been experimenting with since the early 1970s. This was only the second exhibition of colour photographs to be held at MoMA.
The exhibition proved to be controversial. The dye transfer process was predominantly a commercial medium and the seeming formlessness and lack of intentional meaning of the images meant that many viewers doubted the intent of the artist and the legitimacy of the work.
Eggleston continues to photograph in colour, producing throughout the late 1970s and 1980s portfolios and publications of his work in America, Europe and Africa.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13b.
'Nude', by Bill Brandt, 1979. Museum no. PH.256-1981
Bill Brandt's exploration of the nude as subject for his work began after the Second World War. The hallmark of this work, very generally speaking, is the abstraction of the female body, usually concentrated in the foreground of the images, and a distortion at times so extreme that the body part is barely recognisable.
Brandt initially used a Kodak wide-angle camera for his nude studies. An object more than four feet from the camera was in focus and the 110o angle covered by the lens meant that the whole scope of a scene would be seen inside the frame.
This image, in the style of his earlier wide-angle nudes, places the nude into the foreground, her body extending away into the background. The camera is placed at the possible position of the model's face, placing the viewer in an unsettling position of both knowing that the (part) nude is the object in the photograph but also having to view the scene through the 'eyes' of the nude. We are both viewer and subject of the picture.
Bill Brandt became interested in a career as a photographer in his early twenties. He worked in Man Ray's studio in Paris for three months in 1929. There was little direct teaching from Man Ray but Brandt was able to absorb the exciting developments in photography and other media of Surrealism in Paris. He was also studying the street photography of Eugène Atget, which was being re-evaluated by artists including Man Ray and Berenice Abbott.
Brandt came to live in London in 1932. During the first few years in London, Brandt's photography was mainly self-motivated. His first book, 'The English at Home', was published in 1936. The book shows the social diversity of urban life, often juxtaposing images to highlight social contrasts. Many of the images were staged by Brandt using family, friends and models to act out the scenes he wished to create.
For the next decade he worked mainly on commissions for the picture press and also from the British government. His major markets were Lilliput, Picture Post and the English and American editions of Harper's Bazaar.
In 1940 Brandt was commissioned by the Home Office to photograph the conditions of London's air-raid shelters. Some of his photographs were published alongside Henry Moore's shelter drawings in Lilliput magazine. He also undertook commissions for Picture Post on the war effort in Britain.
After the war Brandt continued his photojournalist assignments, concentrating on photographs of the British countryside. In 1950 the publishers Cassell & Co. commissioned Brandt to compile his landscape photographs and finish the series for a book, which was published the following year, entitled Literary Britain. During this period (and up to 1960) Brandt was also producing nude studies, shown in interiors and also on seashores. Brandt continued to work up until his death, reprinting many of his photographs as well as working on new commissions.
This photograph can be found in Print Room Box 13b.
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