History Of Photography

Man Ray

Was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal.

Man Ray began making photograms ("rayographs") in 1921 by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb.

Rayographs: were artistic photograms using three dimensional opaque and translucent objects.

Man Ray eventually came to see painting as an obsolete form of expression, which photography would replace once the public was visually educated. One of his admirers, Jean Cocteau, called him the "poet of the darkroom."

1920 Photography.

• 1920's: photographs start to replace drawings in advertising as people thought the camera would not lie - but photographers took photos to convey a desire and not just the reality of the product.

Dada• Dada is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.

Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anarchist in nature.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art". Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon”

Surrealism• Surrealism is a cultural

movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

• Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important centre of the movement was Paris.

From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.

CONTRAST - Dada was nihilist anti-art movement, while Surrealism was positive in spirit

Étienne-Jules MareyHe adopted and further developed animated photography into a separate field of chronophotography in the 1880s. His revolutionary idea was to record several phases of movement on one photographic surface

was a French scientist and chronophotographer. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema.

• He adopted and further developed animated photography into a separate field of chronophotography in the 1880s. His revolutionary idea was to record several phases of movement on one photographic surface

Marey hoped to merge anatomy and physiology. To better understand his chronophotographic images, he compared them with images of the anatomy, skeleton, joints and muscles of the same species. Marey produced a series of drawings showing a horse trotting and galloping, first in the flesh and then as a skeleton.

• Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, and the most interesting fact is that all the frames were recorded on the same picture, using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Some call it Marey’s "animated zoo"

Marey also made movies. They were at a high speed (60 images per second) and of excellent image quality: in slow-motion cinematography, he had come close to perfection. His research on how to capture and display moving images helped the emerging field of cinematography.