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Pioneers of photography: An album of pictures and words
A SUPERBLY ILLUSTRATED, lively, intimate history of one of the great aesthetic adventures of the modern world-the making of the first photographs.
Here arc the fascinating early experiments with processing, the first primitive attempts at colour photography, the ingenious equipment invented for special effects-and here are the prints that resulted, now precious beyond measure. First-hand accounts by the pioneer photographers vividly recall the pursuit of a historic event, a spectacular landscape, a fleeting facial expression.
There are chapters on the work of the inventors=-Niepce, Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and Bayard-and on the professionals, like N adar, who photographed everything from the Paris sewers (by electric light) to Sarah Bernhardt. Bourne made a record of the landscape of India and the Himalayas that was, and perhaps still is, unequalled. The beginnings of documentary photography-fohn Thomson's London types for instance, and the very undocumentary work of Julia Margaret Cameron-showed two paths photography could follow. Yet another, the development of photography as an analytic technique, can be seen in the work of Marey and Muybridge. The development uf colour photography brings the text to a close, and a selected bibliography rounds out the volume.
Aaron Scharf, well known for his earlier books, Creative Photography and Art and Photography, was an adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation on the programmes out of which this book grew.
Here arc the fascinating early experiments with processing, the first primitive attempts at colour photography, the ingenious equipment invented for special effects-and here are the prints that resulted, now precious beyond measure. First-hand accounts by the pioneer photographers vividly recall the pursuit of a historic event, a spectacular landscape, a fleeting facial expression.
There are chapters on the work of the inventors=-Niepce, Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and Bayard-and on the professionals, like N adar, who photographed everything from the Paris sewers (by electric light) to Sarah Bernhardt. Bourne made a record of the landscape of India and the Himalayas that was, and perhaps still is, unequalled. The beginnings of documentary photography-fohn Thomson's London types for instance, and the very undocumentary work of Julia Margaret Cameron-showed two paths photography could follow. Yet another, the development of photography as an analytic technique, can be seen in the work of Marey and Muybridge. The development uf colour photography brings the text to a close, and a selected bibliography rounds out the volume.
Aaron Scharf, well known for his earlier books, Creative Photography and Art and Photography, was an adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation on the programmes out of which this book grew.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1975
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