Curatorial and planning notes
Manipulated photography includes any steps during the taking of the photograph through to the creation of the final image that alter the "truth" of the visible world. This might include the selection of capture methods (i.e. infrared) that alter the reality of the visual image prior to capture, through the handworking of negatives so common with Pictorial photography, hand-colouring or the post-processing of digital images in Lightroom, Photoshop or other software. It can include scratching negatives, writing on prints, collage, photomontage or the intentional, or unintentional, burning of prints. |
Contents
| This theme includes example sections and will be revised and added to as we proceed. Suggestions for additions, improvements and the correction of factual errors are always appreciated. |
Information requests
681.01 Process and product > Improving content on photographic techniques
We are seeking to expand the themes covering photographic techniques and processes. These sections will include:
- Invention of the process
- Any related patents
- Trade literature
- Contemporary advertisements and announcements of the innovation
- A description of the process and its variants
- Historical examples and details of where examples can be located in public collections
- Contemporary examples by photographers using the exact process.
Conservation will not initially be included but may be in the future if required. |
Introduction
681.02 Process and product > Manipulated photography
Manipulated photography is a large topic which the "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop" exhibition curated by Mia Fineman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11 October 2012 - 27 January 2013) addressed with an accompanying well researched exibition catalogue. The exhibition is refreshing as it clearly demonstrated that photographers who claimed to be "straight photographers" such as Paul Strand, Ansel Adams and many others manipulated their negatives and photographs to obtain their desired goals.
Some of the techniques applied in the pre-digital era were:
- Composite photographs where two or more negatives were used to construct a single photograph.
    
- Composite portraits where two or more negatives to create a portrait designed to show the characteristics of a class of people.
     
- Exaggeration postcards combined multiple images to create surreal images of American rural life. William H. 'Dad' Martin of Ottawa, Kansas became the most popular of these photographers although there were others including Henry M. Beach
          
- Painted photographs where paints were blown onto the photograph or applied with a brush.
          
- Backgrounds that provide an illusion of the location and/or activities of the sitter.
      
- Foregrounds scenes placed in front of the sitter where the head is visible above the scene or through a hole or window.
       
- Multiple exposures that were taken, deliberately or by accident, inside the camera or during the development process.
       
- Appropriation where original photographs have been used by a later photographer for a different purpose. This can be with or without the consent of the original photographer and can be done as a twisting of genres or a commentary on the nature of art and photography.
     
- Solarization is the deliberate or accidental intrusion of light into the darkroom during the development process.
       
- Alteration of the final print this may occur when the photographer deliberately defaces or cuts the print to alter the visual message.
 
- Distorting mirrors and lenses have been used by photographers including André Kertész, Bill Brandt and Weegee to flex their photographic visions.
     
Composite and combination prints
681.03 Process and product > Composite and combination prints: Defined
Creating a Composite photograph (also called a combination print) means having one or more negatives that are then used to create a single print. This requires careful planning and scrupulous attention to detail during the printing to get smooth transitions between the different parts of the image so it becomes a seamless whole. Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) used this technique for his seascapes so that both the sea and sky could be correctly exposed. Perhaps the most famous example of a composite photograph is the Two Ways of Life (1857) by the Swedish born photographer Oscar Rejlander who combined thirty negatives of figures and groups to create a single 16" x 31" image.
Photographers who made combination prints:
George N. Barnard
Gustave Le Gray
Oscar Rejlander
Henry Peach Robinson
The 1869 classic by Henry Peach Robinson Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers. To which is added a chapter on Combination Printing includes a contemporary method for creating combination prints.
681.04 Process and product > C.W. Applegreen creates a composite photograph
  
This rare carte de visite series shows photographer C.W. Applegreen preparing a composite photograph along with the fruit of his labour.
Composite portraits
681.05 Process and product > Composite and combination prints: Portraits
The use of Composite photographs has been employed in portraiture to combine groups of multiple individuals into a single image intended to capture the characteristics of the group as a whole.
Painting on photographs
681.06 Process and product > Introduction to painting on photographs
        
From the earliest days of photography with daguerreotypes and salt prints artists have used them either as the basis for works of art or have painted directly on them using a vast range of techniques and specialized equipment including air brushes and retouching, colouring and painting kits
681.07 Process and product > Nineteenth century Japanese artists and colourists
        
From as early as the eighth century woodblock-printed works were seen in Japan. Although initially the technique was used for texts and religious works by the sixteenth century moveable type was being used. Gaining popularity with artists the technique expanded and individual prints became available. With the popularity for prints there became a need for artists who could paint them or had the skills to use multiple woodblocks for different colours. As photography became available within Japan, predominantly with foreign photographers such as Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried, most of the prints through the second half of the nineteenth century had the brownish tones of the albumen print. Their skills with woodblock prints were perfect for painting photographs and some of the finest photographs of this type came from Japan.
681.08 Process and product > John Thomson: A Chinese portrait artist, Hong Kong
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
    
John Thomson, Illustrations of China and Its People, a Series of Two Hundred Photographs with Letterpress Description of the Places and People Represented, 4 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston Low, and Searle, 1873 [vols. 1 and 2] and 1874 [vols. 3 and 4]), Vol. 1
A Hong-Kong Artist
Lumqua was a Chinese pupil of Chinnery, a noted foreign artist, who died at Macao in 1852. Lumqua produced a number of excellent works in oil, which are still copied by the painters in Hong-Kong and Canton. Had he lived in any other country he would have been the founder of a school of painting. In China his followers have failed to grasp the spirit of his art. They drudge with imitative servile toil, copying Lumqua's or Chinnery's pieces, or anything, no matter what, just because it has been finished and paid for within a given time, and at so much a square foot. There are a number of painters established in Hong-Kong, but they all do the same class of work, and have about the same tariff of prices, regulated according to the dimensions of the canvas. The occupation of these limners consists mainly of making enlarged copies of photographs. Each house employs a touter, who scours the shipping in the harbour with samples of the work, and finds many ready customers among the foreign sailors. These bargain to have Mary or Susan painted on as large a scale and at as small a price as possible, the work to be delivered framed and ready for sea probably within twenty-four hours. The painters divide their labour on the following plan. The apprentice confines himself to bodies and hands, while the master executes the physiognomy, and thus the work is got through with wonderful speed. Attractive colours are freely used; so that Jack's fair ideal appears at times in a sky-blue dress, over which a massive gold chain and other articles of jewellery are liberally hung. These pictures would be fair works of art were the drawing good, and the brilliant colours properly arranged; but all the distortions of the badly taken photographs are faithfully reproduced on an enlarged scale. The best works these painters do are pictures of native and foreign ships, which are wonderfully drawn. To enlarge a picture they draw squares over their canvas corresponding to the smaller squares into which they divide the picture to be copied. The miniature painters in Hong-Kong and Canton do some work on ivory that is as fine as the best ivory painting to be found among the natives of India, and fit to bear comparison with the old miniature painting of our own country, which photography has, now-a-days, in great measure superseded.
Exaggeration photo postcards
681.09 Process and product > Exaggeration postcards
In the USA between 1905 and 1915 there was a popular craze for postcards that used photomontage to highlight the wonders of the American West. William H. 'Dad' Martin of Ottawa, Kansas became the most popular of these photographers because of his wit and the wide variety of the subjects he chose to include. In his fictional world farmers sit astride corn cobs the size of buses, drive cars laden with vast onions and potatoes to market and chase rabbits the size of cars.
681.10 Process and product > William H. Martin: Exaggeration photo postcards
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
William H. 'Dad' Martin of Ottawa, Kansas (USA) was the creator of a number of postcards that showed the most extreme aspects of mid-western life. By the use of photomontage he juxtaposed agricultural products, objects and people to amuse the consumer.
Distortions
681.11 Process and product > Distortions: Defined
 
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
distort
–verb (used with object)
- to twist awry or out of shape; make crooked or deformed.
- to give a false, perverted, or disproportionate meaning to; misrepresent: to distort the facts.
681.12 Process and product > Introduction to distortions
The use of distorting mirrors and lenses creates elongated, squashed, stretched and crushed forms and this characterisic of fairground mirrors has been used by photographers to create unwordly forms and it is particularly suited to the taking of nudes.
Berenice Abbott is best known for her photographs of New York but she was also interested in scientific photography and patented the 'Distortion Easel' that was a device for controlling angles and levels of distortion that could be used for photography.
André Kertész in 1933 produced a remarkable series of photographs called 'Distortions' (published in 1976) in which mirrors were used to distort nudes into bizarre abstractions.
   
Weegee is remembered for his night shots of New York city crime scenes but he also shot distortions including a series in Paris with a twisted out of shape Eiffel Tower.
 
Mordançage
681.13 Process and product > Elizabeth Opalenik: Mordançage
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
  
Solarization
681.14 Process and product > Introduction to solarization
The accidental rediscovery of solarization by Man Ray and his model and lover Lee Miller was a process that the Dadaists and Surrealists loved. They appreciated the fact that a new process could be found by the chance encounter of a foot with a mouse in the darkroom meaning light was urgently required and that the flash of light could convert the commonplace print into a new form of mysterious reality.
Solarization, the term Man Ray proposed, has nothing to do with the sun rather it is the 'Sabattier effect' (named after the French scientist Armand Sabattier who discovered it in 1862) that creates an image that is part negative and part positive and is created by exposing the print to light part way through the darkroom development process. The level of solarization is dependent upon the stage of development, the level of light the partially developed print is exposed to, and the amount of time it is exposed.
681.15 Process and product > Examples of solarization
                       
Man Ray, Josef Ehm, Lloyd Ullberg and Tom Baril. Ilse Bing, Maurice Tabard, and proponents of the very active Czech avant-garde movement of the 1920's including Jaroslav Rössler (1902-1990) experimented with solarization.
681.16 Process and product > Edmund Teske: Duotone solarizations
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
Edmund Teske (1911-1996) was born too late to be involved in the flowering of the avant-garde but through his interests in music and Vedanta, the study of the Hindu Vedas, he developed a philosophical framework that blended into his photography. The constructs of time and space and their malleability could be expressed through alterations in photographic processes. The use of composite prints, where multiple negatives are combined to create a single image, was the photographic equivalent of merging space and time. To this he added what has been referred to as 'duotone solarization' - where the final image has both black and white and brown and white solarized effects. His expertise in this process created images that subvert nature to create unnatural and yet beautiful photographs out of the mundane to empower them with emotional and almost sacred meanings.
Photojournalism and painting on photographs
681.17 Process and product > Press photographs with paint or instructions
               
Polaroids
681.18 Process and product > Ellen Carey: Pulls
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
       
alan@luminous-lint.com |
  
General reading
Fineman, Mia, 2012, Faking it: Manipulated photography before Photoshop, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art) isbn-10: 0300185014 isbn-13: 978-0300185010 [Distributed by Yale University Press] [Δ]
Whiting, Arthur, n.d.‘Handwork on Negatives‘, The Photo-Miniature: A Magazine of Photographic Information, vol.X, no.116, pp.353-387 [Δ]
Woodbury, Walter E., 1905, Photographic Amusements including a Description of a Number of Novel Effects Obtainable with the Camera, (New York: The Photographic Times Publishing Association) [Δ]
Readings on, or by, individual photographers
Bill Brandt
Brandt, Bill, 1961, Perspective of Nudes, (London: The Bodley Head) [Δ]
André Kertész
Kertész, André, 1976, Distortions, (Paris, Editions du Chêne) [Δ]
Weegee
Weegee, 1959, Weegee's Creative Camera, (Hanover House) [Δ]
Weegee, 1964, Weegee's Creative Photography, (Ward, Lock & Co.) [Δ]
If you feel this list is missing a significant book or article please let me know - Alan - alan@luminous-lint.com
Peter Beard (1938-) • Bill Brandt (1904-1983) • Ellen Carey (1952-) • Joan Fontcuberta (1955-) • Benno Friedman (1945-) • Jack Fulton (1939-) • Paolo Gioli (1942-) • Judith Golden (1934-) • Astrid Klein • Jerry McMillan • Arnulf Rainer (1929-) • Lucas Samaras (1936-) • Deborah Turbeville (1937-) • Joel-Peter Witkin (1939-) | Home > Techniques > Process and product > Manipulated photography
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