Welcome to today's lecture in which we will talk about portrait mania. Today I will try to explain why after invention of photography in 1839, the first type of photography that people were really obsessed with was portrait photography. Now before we do that, I think it's an important thing to understand that all of the photographs have to be seen or analyzed from the perspective of the time in which they were made.
So we cannot really judge them from today's perspective. And I'll give you a little example, so it's gonna be a little bit more clear to what I mean by that. Now, if we look at the photograph here, we see a couple, supposedly married, who went on a hike, and now they pose for a photographer. Some of the students in my class said that maybe she's not that much into him as much he's into her. They can tell that they have connection.
So most of them said they look like a married couple. However, there is a little bit of strange dynamics going on there, which some of the students saw. If we go back in time and we go to 1985, we have the photograph here of a couple with a child sitting between them.
Now, what my students were kind of shocked with was this couple were smoking in front of their child. They looked rebellious a little bit. They looked like Bonnie and Clyde, some of my students said. And then the child is just sitting between them looking at the camera, looking kind of oblivious to what's happening around him.
So some of the students thought that the photograph here was kind of cool, but not something that you would necessarily do today. And then if you go back in time even more, in 1971, we see a photograph of a couple again. She is sitting in a guy's lap.
They're obviously having a great time. They're in the party somewhere, probably early a.m. So what do we see here in these three separate images?
We see images of three couples shot in different periods of time. And to reveal something to you, these are the photographs of my mom and dad. And this is actually me right here in the middle.
Now I did a little experiment with my mom and dad. And I asked them to choose three images from different periods of their lives which represented them the best. or the images they would really be proud at that time to show to their friends.
So when they were in college, this is the photograph they chose as the most representative photograph of them. They thought they were a really cool young couple who had a lot of fun, and this is the photograph they chose at that time as the best representative of who they were. Now in the 80s, they had their first child, so this is the photograph they thought presented them the best. So this is the photograph they chose.
as the one they would proudly show to their friends as well this is who we are in the 80s. And this is a photograph, a contemporary one, that they chose as the most representative photograph of who they are today. However, an important thing is that today they would never choose this photograph as a photograph that would represent them. So their view of themselves changed through time.
In the span of decades, the way they perceived who they were as a couple really changed. So if we look back in time even more, at the beginning, at the invention of photography in 1840s, we will see that the people there looked in a very particular way, and we cannot judge them from today's perspective. We have to learn to put ourselves in their shoes, to learn more about the time in which the images were made, and then make judgment according to the norms that existed at that particular time. That doesn't really go only for the images at the beginning of photography. That also goes with the images made in the 60s, 70s, 80s and so forth.
So if we look at a little daguerreotype here, done in 1840s, we cannot just tell that this girl looks very confused or very stiff. She does, but we have to know the reasons why. Now we know that the daguerreotype process was extremely slow.
We know that she probably had a little metal clamp behind her back to keep her head still. She was also a kid, maybe a two-year-old kid, and we all know how hard it is to keep a kid still for minutes until the photograph is taken. So the poor girl was probably mortified when she was put in that metal clamp and asked to pose and look at the camera for two or three minutes.
So we have to understand that about the process. We have to understand that about the time before we judge her as a representation in the image. No. In the first years after invention of photography, almost 95% of all of the images were made were images of people. Now the question is, why was a photographic portrait such a sensation?
Now, I will take you back in time again. I will take you to 20,000 years BC, and I'm showing you this cave painting here, in which we see representation of people. So the desire of showing people in an image, representing oneself in an image, existed from the early age.
If we go a little forward in time, we go to Egypt, maybe a thousand years BC, we can see a sculpture. that represents a person again. It seems pretty realistic and it's a sculpture of a female looking very stoic just looking back at the viewer. So again this idea of representing people existed from the early age. And then we come to medieval times, we talked about idealism, we have a representation of Christ.
So again it's another kind of portrait that was made in medieval times. Then we go to the Renaissance, when finally we have this desire to present people and spaces in a realistic way. And I will show to you a couple of artists that worked in what we called the grand era of portraits. Now this is not the time in which we no longer have images of celebrities, images of kings and queens, images of Christ and religious icons.
What we have now is portraits of everyday people. who can actually afford to commission painter to paint them. So we have artist Janman Eich and we have his realistic representation of people to the left and right and also realistic representation of space.
We can see how this depth of space goes way back and we can feel that they're standing in front and then the mirror is behind. We have that sense of space and sense of 3D space. Then we have Rembrandt and he's again realistic representation of people.
And we have Jacques-Louis David and again his realistic representation of people. Now what do these portraits have in common? Even though we were talking about realistic representation here, right, especially towards the end in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance times, however, no matter how realistic paintings and sculptures were, they were still not extreme. realistic representation.
They were artist rendition of whoever sit in front of them. Now, just to give you a little explanation, what do I mean by artist rendition? For example, if a guy here hired a painter to make a painting of him, so he paid thousands of bucks to have that done. And he obviously was sitting for him for weeks until the painting was made.
So there was a commitment there. Maybe one day he woke up. and there was a zit on his forehead.
So the guy said to the painter, can you please just not paint that zit? Can you just disregard it? And the painter, because he was paid to do that anyway, because he had the option not to include parts of his body into the final piece, he probably said, yes, no, I'm not gonna paint that, that's totally fine. What I'm trying to explain to you here is that the artist had a choice to include or exclude parts.
that maybe would exist if we were to take photograph. So even though this painting seems to be really realistic, it was not a perfect reality, right? Some things were probably changed a little bit.
Now, after photography was invented as a process in 1839, people became absolutely crazy about having their image taken. For thousands of years before, we had that desire to represent people in images. That desire existed for the longest time.
So 95% of the garyotypes ever made were portraits. Now for the first time, people can examine themselves in an image. They can also have a photograph of their loved ones instead of relying on memory. Now again, to take you back in time, before photography, the only representation of people that we had were paintings and drawings.
So only people who can afford having their paintings or drawings done could have had a likeness of themselves or of someone they love. So if someone they love dies or they would go on a very long trip and those trips were not as easy as they are today, they couldn't just hop on a plane and go to Beijing. Those trips would probably take months or years. So if somebody would leave they would be gone for a long time. So if people at that time couldn't afford paintings to be made.
If somebody would pass away, the memory of them would slowly fade. They had nothing to remember them by, which is kind of inconceivable to us today because we have thousands of images of all of our family and friends. We have them.
We have them on our cameras, we have them on our computers, we have them on our phones. Images of people we love are everywhere around us. So we have something to rely on instead of just memory back in the days that did not exist.
So now for the first time, we have a process in which we can have an image such as the garyotype that is so realistic, that is so beautiful and sharp, almost as if that someone sits in front of us. So even when they're gone, people can still look at a photograph, they can still look at that the garyotype and they can remember what they looked like. So it didn't really matter if the process was slow and it was slow in comparison to what we know today photography to be.
However, it was faster than painting. So even if it was a 10 minute exposure, it was still much faster and cheaper than having a painting made. So the other thing is that the Garotype was an exact replica, not a painter's rendition of whoever sit in front of the camera.
However, no matter how exciting this new technology was, it was also nerve-wracking because there was no hiding from a bald spot or big belly. what I explained before. So there was not a painter here who can add a little bit of hair.
It's a straightforward shot that presents everything that was happening in front of the lens. So there was no hiding behind it. Now I just want to compare first portrait photography with painting that again was the only visual material that people had before invention of photography. So we can see that in terms of the pose, in terms of the framing, those two images almost look the same, right? So it's only from the waist up, it's a half profile, people looking at the camera.
So that was the norm in first portrait photography. And I also wanted to compare the contemporary portrait of my mom and dad with a daguerreotype made in 1840s. And just to remind you that the ambition behind it was the same, which is to show themselves in the best light possible. So these guys here, they wanted to look good for the camera because they knew that that photograph may be shown to somebody else, right?
So they wanted to look good. They posed, they smiled, and they just wanted to look good. She had the same idea behind it. She dressed up, she may look a little overdressed today, she may look a touch stiff, whatever it is, but it's the best that she could do. So the motivation behind these two images is the same.
So I wanted... you to keep that in mind as we'll look at some of the daguerreotypes. Now these are really beautiful images and if you were to look at them as the object in front of you, you would see how beautifully crisp they are.
You would also see how detailed they are and also there is a sense of depth in daguerreotypes that doesn't really exist in contemporary photography. So I will read a quote to you that will explain why that obsession with portrait photography was, how widespread it was, and also how much that image, that first photographic image meant to people at that time. I received your letter Saturday evening, and that relieved a good deal. Although I had read it over three times, then cried for an hour as hard as I could, but my dear, it was nothing in the letter that I cried about. But because I knew, then you were really gone.
I slept with it under my head for a week. and I read it every night before I went to sleep. You may say it was very foolish of me to cry and feel so bad. Perhaps it was. But remember that your letters, your daguerreotype, and my tears are the only consolation that I have.
So this is an example that I told you about of somebody going on a trip, and they're going to be gone for months, years even. And the only representation that people have of the loved one who is gone is the gara type. Now this is the end of the first part and make sure to listen to other parts of the lecture posted on Blackboard.