‘F rom today painting is dead!’ was how French artist Paul Delaroche greeted, horrified, one of the earliest photographs. It wasn’t, but celebrating photography’s 150th anniversary in 1989, the Observer explored how this ‘miraculous new invention’ changed our ways of seeing. Cartes de visite – among the earliest affordable mass imagery – challenge the cliché of Victorian photography.
Rather than a bewhiskered paterfamilias in his Sunday best, rigid and unsmiling as required by long exposures, they display surprising diversity and a taste for sensation. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, gives her daughter a piggyback; a bare-bottomed boy gets smacked; there are giants, severed heads, bearded children, chimney sweeps and celebrities. Most captivating are candid early shots of ‘ordinary folk’ at work and especially at play Another feature explored the visual trickery of Victorian ‘spirit’ photography – ghosts, ghouls, wraiths and spectral presences.
Apparitions were conjured with simple techniques including multiple exposure, montage and double printing. This ‘paraphernalia of deception’shifted gradually from swindler’s trick to innocent family entertainment before making itself at home in advertising, art and the nascent film industry. Most captivating are candid shots of ‘ordinary folk’ by Paul Martin, a 19th-century Martin Parr who used lighter, less cumbersome equipment to capture people at work and especially at play.
Pictures of men and wo.
