A blog about photography & transformative art
Viewing entries tagged
History of Photography
The sky is the most ephemeral of things. A masterpiece of abstraction that is ever changing, each iteration is achingly short-lived. We are drawn to behold a particular moment of sky precisely because we know it won't last. We so want to grasp at it and to keep it, but, alas, it cannot and will not stay for us.
Photography is magic. I suppose we all know that but it's become so common and easy that we have become desensitized to the miracle of it. I do love the way most everyone plays with photography now. I see people making images everywhere I go, with phones, automated cameras, and gadgets of all kinds. Yet, digital imaging is so immediate and so very automated that I wonder if some of the magic and wonder have been bred out of photography.
Timothy O'Sullivan, Eadward Muybridge, Carlton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson are our great artistic ancestors in this regard. Carrying massive cameras and using the wet collodion process (wet plate) these photographers burned the grandness of the West into the American consciousness. Photography was a different kind of dedication back then. Glass plates had to be exposed still wet, after being coated by hand in makeshift darkrooms.
