THE ART OF VICTORIAN Dr. Laurence Shafe
[email protected] PHOTOGRAPHY www.shafe.uk The Art of Victorian Photography The invention and blossoming of photography coincided with the Victorian era and photography had an enormous influence on how Victorians saw the world. We will see how photography developed and how it raised issues concerning its role and purpose and questions about whether it was an art. The photographic revolution put portrait painters out of business and created a new form of portraiture. Many photographers tried various methods and techniques to show it was an art in its own right. It changed the way we see the world and brought the inaccessible, exotic and erotic into the home. It enabled historic events, famous people and exotic places to be seen for the first time and the century ended with the first moving images which ushered in a whole new form of entertainment. • My aim is to take you on a journey from the beginning of photography to the end of the nineteenth century with a focus on the impact it had on the visual arts. • I focus on England and English photographers and I take this title narrowly in the sense of photographs displayed as works of fine art and broadly as the skill of taking photographs using this new medium. • In particular, • Pre-photographic reproduction (including drawing and painting) • The discovery of photography, the first person captured, Fox Talbot and The Pencil of Light • But was it an art, how photographers created ‘artistic’ photographs, ‘artistic’ scenes, blurring, the Pastoral • The Victorian