on 29-Nov-2018 (Thu)

Romantic depictions of colonized lands and peoples offered an appealing alternative to the reality of military occupation and economic exploitation sustaining the rise of capitalism.

Positivism—a philosophy that rejects metaphysical considerations in favor of a strictly empirical approach to understanding all forms of human experience

camera obscura, a dark chamber with a small aperture that projects external scenes onto the opposite wall

Typified by the work of Ingres, Neoclassicism offered view- ers glimpses of an imaginary antique past or an exotic, oth- erworldly present rendered in a crisp, detached linearity.

Romanticism, exemplified by the painting of Delacroix, likewise tended toward subjects drawn from distant cul- tures or literary fantasies, but depicted with an undisguised subjectivity and passionate colorism.

The most immediate and obvious impact of photography on painting can be seen in the work of artists eager to achieve a special kind of optical veracity unknown until then

at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, photographs were absent from the Fine Arts galleries and instead presented in the industrial halls, highlighting their technical rather than aesthetic interest.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) discovered a way of fixing a light-reflected image on the silver-treated surface of paper, producing what its creator called a “calotype.”

Talbot’s technique converted a negative image into a positive one, a procedure that remains core to film-based photography. Because the negative made it pos- sible for the image to be replicated an infinite number of times, unlike the daguerreotype, painting-conscious pho- tographers such as Oscar G. Rejlander (1813–75) could assemble elaborate, multifigure compositions in stage-like settings. They pieced the total image together from a vari- ety of negatives and then orchestrated them, rather in the way history painters prepared their grand narrative scenes

photo- grams: objects are placed directly onto photosensitive paper which is then exposed to light.