The Origins of Photography

Louis Daguerre (1787 - 1851)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 - 1877)

Attempt at Art as well as portraiture.

Objection of Baudelaire

Tableau Vivant and Soft Porn

Louis Daguerre may be misrepresented as the inventor of photography, and, certainly he achieved a process for fixing an optical image onto a plate in 1839. However, he was a theatre set designer and showman. For twenty years he had worked on his invention of the diorama as a theatrical illusion.

Fox Talbot in Britain is credited with developing what we still today regard as photography. He wanted to be an artist and took photos of nudes from as early as 1842.

Art or Craft?

In the mid-19th century, newly-invented photography was regarded as a craft because its production was a technical and mechanical process. However, early practitioners attempted to create pictures as art forms as well as popular portraits.

The reason for including the poet Charles Baudelaire is that he condemned photography as a debasement of Art; and a lot of people listened to this pillar of French Culture. So, from its early stages, photography had influential critics and attracted hate mail. How times change in these days of Artificial Intelligence. The camera does not lie? Hah! Photo manipulation had been around for a century and a half before Photoshop and Illustrator appeared.

Incidentally, in another parallel to our own times, Charles Baudelaire himself was arrested for his Satanic Verses in 1857 and charged with blasphemy. Sound familiar? Les Fleurs du mal / Les Litanies de Satan. Baudelaire died of drink, drugs, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Oscar-Gustave-RejlanderTwo Ways of Life went on show at a Manchester exhibition in 1857. It is a photo-montage of 32 images. Of course it was shocking - a debasement of Art and morals. A feelthy picture. A depravity etc etc.

Now, is it simply me being arty-farty or can you, too, see a similarity between the photo montage of 1857 and Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, by Jason M. Allen, exhibited at the Colorado State Fair in September 2022. Look at that central, circular element of the composition. Let it be banned. The artist-generator won an award! Let it be banned! Eschew this devalution of Art!

Trouble is, the AI Generation of Graphics is a genie out of the bottle, and it won’t go back again.

To end on a lighter note, after the artistic photos of naked statues, next came the tableau vivant for which live models stripped off to be photographed in the nude. Soft porn was born - and it got a lot harder.