Reading Response: Disclosure and Uncertainty in Early Photography

The "Disclosure and Uncertainty in Early Photography" reading was very interesting to me because I had very little knowledge about the early history of photography. It was cool to learn that while photography may have started from a simple goal of reproducing nature quickly and accurately, it didn't take long for artists to develop their own styles and themes for their work. In some of the pictures shown in the reading, its clear that artists like Talbot and Le Gray were not simply trying to reproduce nature onto a sheet of paper. They were expressing themselves by showing the parts of the world that felt interesting to them, and creating some really stunning images (especially considering that their work was done in the mid 1800s). I found the story about Le Gray's Mediterranean Sea, Sète extremely interesting. The fact that he spliced two different negatives together because the sky and the sea needed different exposure times is very impressive, because it is such an early example of an artist editing an image to get the best final product. This story shows how quickly photography moved away from the limiting philosophy that photos were meant to be a simple reproduction of nature, and not an artists work. As early as 1857 Le Gray decided that he was not going to simply take what nature gave him, he was going to work to create the best image he could, and the result was beautiful!

I also thought Anna Atkins' work was very cool. While the images were fairly simple, the choice to use the "rich blue cyanotype" really makes them nice to look at, despite the fact that the subject matter (algae and seaweed) was fairly uninteresting.