Displaying Photography in Art and in Cultural & Creative Industries, Appunti di fotografia

Scarica Displaying Photography in Art and in Cultural & Creative Industries e più Appunti in PDF di fotografia solo su Docsity! LEZIONE 1 - Chapter 1 – The Darkroom (Reiner Gemma Frisius, 1545) pp. 5-7 [...] Oh! Let’s make a vow so the Sun, stopping itself in the middle of the starry sky, would take by himself its portrait with the daguerreotype in the darkroom; with all the strains and the holes found in it by the astronomers, from Galileo to Capocci. EMANUELE ROCCO, 1839 The word camera, that in English and in Italian refers to this day to a cinematic-photographic shooting device, maintains a steady memory of its connection with the ancient optical apparatus, called in Latin camera obscura, from whose evolutions and improvements, both technological and scientific, as well as optical and chemical, the photography arose.  in ancient time, before the invention of photography there was a device, the camera obscura.  on the slide there’s the first visualised record of a darkroom and we’re seeing a drawing, related to another solar eclipse, such as those ones observed by Aristotle in Lovanio in 1554, skept by a dutch mathematician Reiner Gemma Frisius  this phenomenon is at the base of the functioning of the photography Photography handbooks mention that already in the IV Century the philosopher Aristotle observed the eclipse phenomenon thanks to a darkroom that enabled him not to be blinded by the light emitted from the powerful rays of sunlight. The Arab astronomer Al-Hazen (lived between X and XI Century b.C.) gave a written account of this natural event, while away the first visualized record of a darkroom was in a drawing, related to a solar eclipse observed in Leuven in 1544, sketched by the Dutch mathematic and physic Rainer Gemma Frisius. The phenomenon at the basis of the working principle of the darkroom can be observed by producing a hole in the wall of a room left completely in the dark; in this manner, on the opposite wall, an overturned image (from the top to the bottom and with the right side – left side inverted) of the section of the outdoor illuminated reality will be mirrored in it. Thanks to this trick, some particular phenomena (i.e. the eclipses) can be studied and followed avoiding the risks for the sight, due to the extreme luminosity of the sun. Also Leonardo da Vinci in his manuscript Codice Atlantico recounts of the darkroom phenomenon and in the same work we read about an original similarity between the darkroom and the functioning of the human eye. Therefore, the darkroom arouse as a means for the human’s desire to know and understand the world and its visible displays, and for this reason it obtains primarily application in the field of the scientific studies, even though in the course of time its use will be prevalent even in the artistic field, as a device able to create an exact, reliable and reproducible image of reality. However, in the meantime, the darkroom, which was initially a room or an inhabitable space (at present day it’s still possible to visit such rooms designed for the guests’ curiosity and amusement, mostly located in castles like the Fontanellato Fortress in Parma, Italy), began to increasingly resemble the features of a box, that is to say a portable device that man can move outdoor through which man can take landscape views. Therefore, stretchers and carriages, tents and boxes of any sort were constructed to house the darkroom and to carry it out. Thanks to the evolutions and developments of the darkroom, the road towards the birth of the photography will be even more pressing over the centuries, in particular «two factors will increase and make more complex the need of pictures all the way to create a system able to satisfy it: the rise of bourgeoisie, the middle classes who became more central and important and the scientific progress of the second half of the 19th century, where the photography was invented» . From XVI to XVII centuries the names of the users of the darkroom were many and well-known, in particular among the “vedutisti” painters like Canaletto, Vermeer, Bellotto and Guardi. However, it was during the Renaissance that the appeal and the studies on the darkroom increased of importance: in the half of XVI Century, in order to increase the clarity and so the degree of precision of the reflected image, Gerolamo Cardano inserted a convex lens in correspondence to the hole of the portable device; at the same time, the patriarch of Aquileia Daniele Barbaro, in his essay Della Prospettiva, added a lens to the diaphragm. Other descriptions of the darkroom, like the ones of Giambattista Della Porta in Magiae Naturalis Libri Quator, remarked the will to increase the degree of precision and perfection of the image of reality, declaring at the same time its role of support toward painting: «Thus, anyone who ignores the art of the painter will be able to draw, with the help of a pencil or a pen, the image of any object» . In the illustration of the portable darkroom designed by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646), we can see also a two-darkroom prototype: one of these was inserted in the bigger one, so that the draftsman could stand inside the little one and trace on its walls of transparent paper what was projected in it through the hole that had been drilled in the external big one. Still in the XVII Century, exactly in 1685, the scientist Johann Zahn developed a reflex darkroom prototype (principle at the basis of present-day reflex cameras) that added to the back wall, on which it was projected the image of the reality, a 45° inclined mirror that overturned and projected aloft the image (restoring the natural left-right vision), so that the portion of reality could be easily traced on an horizontal wall of the room in which a purposely placed glass laid flat. SLIDE 4: photography is an invention btw two worlds which are opposite  science and art Over the centuries, many were the improvements reached by this well-acquainted device, and its use and the curiosities it aroused increasingly oscillated between the scientific studies and the artistic application, gradually becoming, on its path towards photography, «the symptom and the cause of a new arrangement of the visible world, of a new approach considered as the substantial element of all the attempts of artistic expression» . It seems evident that the researches towards the capture of an image from nature took giant steps from an optical point of view but, even in XVIII Century, the knowledge in the chemical field couldn’t allow the preservation of the image formed in the darkroom (that is to make it stable and in this manner to transform it into a photograph). Scholars hadn’t discovered yet which of the photosensitive substances was able to capture the image projected on the back wall of the optical device and, once exposed by light, they hadn’t found how to stabilise the image without any further alteration. Even in this field many inventors and researchers did some important experiments and went close to the solution to the photosensitive and stability issues of the employed substances. Among them, Johann Heinrich Schulze and THOMAS WEDGWOOD are worth mentioning (see Chapt. IV, pp. 31-36). Even if they were close to the discovery of the method through which they could automatically capture an image of the world, in the end they remained a step back from the definitive birth of the photographic technique and only others will achieve it. LEZIONE 2 - Chapter 2 – View from the Window at Le Gras (Nicephore Niepce, 1826-27) pp. 13-16 In the beginning of the history of photography there is a landscape or, to be more precise, an architecture, a little housing estate lost in the French countryside. It’s not ‘an image of’, as from habit and for convenience people use to say, but it’s an authentic condition learned by experience the one that saw Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, in a sunny summer day of 1826, being really present in that place. CLAUDIO MARRA, 2013 For centuries, the darkroom allowed painters and vedutisti (i.e. landscape painters) to capture the reality with great precision and attention to detail. Certainly, this was what many scholars and inventors, from different countries and knowing nothing of each other, were trying to obtain: an automatic and accurate, long-lasting stable trace not produced by the hand of an artist or draftsman, of what, with the magic help of the sun (which was the author actually), was reflected inside that perforated box. The invention of the so-called photography aroused only in the XIX Century, after experimentations, failures, mistakes and incredible eureka moments. This happened only when the improved system of chemical knowledge could finally identify, among the many photosensitive substances, the ones that were able to capture those fleeting images and the other ones able to keep them fixed forever in the flow of time. The first big-name that led to the true discovery of photography is the French Nicephore Niepce, a brilliant inventor from Saint-Loup-de-Varenne (in Burgundy, in the neighbourhood of Chalon-sur-Saône). Since 1822 he had been experimenting a special resin, the bitumen of Judea, a substance that allowed him to obtain images with an engraving-like technique while, simultaneously, he was continuously searching for new ways to improve the darkroom. Since 1816 Niepce was looking for a way to obtain images from the darkroom, and by reading the letters exchanged with his brother Claude (he, too, was an inventor who then moved to London), it’s possible to follow the development of his researches . Niepce wrote a letter to his brother in which he described that he had been able to obtain negative images (using the photosensitivity of the silver chloride) but these didn’t satisfy him because his real aim was to obtain a positive and direct image of reality. (inside the darkroom, thanks to the optical process the image of reality is always a negative, because the photosensitive substances used in order to catch a fixed image use the potentiality of the sunrise to let the light surface become darker or within, it depends on the technique) So, he looked for a substance that, when struck by the light, instead of becoming darker could rather whiten. Finally, betwee 1826 and 1827 and after about ten years of attempts, Niepce obtained the View from the Window at Le Gras, that is the positive image of the outside surroundings of his family home viewed by the garret (in some of his letters Niepce wrote about shots done from his brother’s room). The view, at present-day considered the first photographic image of the history of photography, is a landscape with buildings (roofs, branches and sky) of poor clearness, impressed on a pewter plate smeared with bitumen of Judea, that was left in the darkroom for about ten hours . During this long period the sun, whose rays filtered through the hole of the “We announce an important discovery of our famous painter of the Diorama, Mr. Daguerre. The discovery it’s really phenomenal. It upsets all the scientific theories of light and optics, and it will revolutionise the art of drawing: Mr. Daguerre has found the method to fix the images that paint themselves inside the darkroom”. At first, photography is announced in a scientific institution, after few months, in august 1839 there was a meeting btw the academy of science and the academy of fine arts  In another memorable meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts on the 19th August 1839, it’s given demonstration of the working principles of the daguerreotype: this caused great curiosity and admiration in the present public. In the meantime, a fire destroyed Daguerre’s Diorama, and some rumours reported that the Russian Tsar was really interested in the purchase of the patent: this all was enough for Arago to push the French State to come into the officially possession of it (only in the United Kingdom the inventor will patent the method independently), decorating Daguerre with the legion of merit and entrusting him and also Isidore Niepce a life annuity that guaranteed him a quiet life. Soon some daguerreotypes were sent to the European courts and Daguerre itself, in addition to the editing of the handbook entitled Historique et description des procedes du daguerreotype et du diorama which had a widespread diffusion, officiated some public presentations and began to train a skilled staff with the assignment to explain the method everywhere it was required. Daguerre signed an agreement with Giroux for the commercialization of wood devices certified by him that, even if they were not cheap for that period, lead to the spread of the invention, even overseas, that became soon a real mania, called in a famous caricature ‘daguerreotypemania’: «All the optical stores were besieged, [...] a few days after in all Parisian squares man could see camerae obscurae placed on tripods in front of churches and buildings. All the physicists, chemists and men of learning of the capital city, all they were polishing silver-plated plates» . The new invention called daguerreotype is made up by images shot from reality and impressed on little metallic plates (maximum dimensions 20x15 cm) that, in order to avoid the danger of damages and the possible break, are treasured in leather, velvet or cardboard cases. Thanks to the method developed by Daguerre, the formed image inside the darkroom can be read as a direct positive, due to a specific tilt angle of the plate and the consequent light effect on the surface of the mirrored plate (so, the negative is also readable on the same surface too): the pale parts are due to the reaction of a whitish mixture of mercury and silver, and the dark areas are due to the not exposed parts that leave parts of the mirrored plate uncovered. As a mirrored image, the right side and the left side are inverted and, because of the type of the support in use, the image is a unique and not reproducible exemplar. After the big success of the first years, obtained thanks to the above-mentioned preciousness and the precision of details, the daguerreotype fell into disuse and then definitely disappeared. This happened because, almost at the same time, another photographic discovery, then disclosed to the public, became widespread. Unlike the daguerreotype, that new discovery had something that would become of capital importance in the future of the mass-media: the technical reproducibility. LEZIONE 3 - Chapter 4 – Latticed Window (William Henry Fox Talbot, 1835), pp. 33-36 and the birth of portrait (credo) “One of the first days of October 1833 I was entertaining myself on the beautiful shores of Como Lake, in Italy, making sketches with Wollaston’s camera lucida or, to say it better, I was trying to do them; but with a little chance of success. […] Thinking about this, it came to my mind how wonderful could be if the natural images could impress themselves and in a long-lasting manner fixed on paper”. WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT, 1844-46  again we are speaking about a scientific, (not a painter, not an artist), who wanted to create something for the humankind While in Paris Daguerre was going to introduce to the world the discovery of photography, simultaneously in London another inventor, the mathematician and botanist William Henry Fox Talbot, was deciding that it was time to officially communicate the arrival point of his chemical and optical experimentation. He was in a hurry because of the publication of the announcement, published on the 12th January 1839 on the «Literary Gazette», of the birth of photography in the daguerreotype version. Talbot didn’t waste time and got in touch with the Royal Institute in London where, on the 25th January 1839, some of his prototypes were analyzed thanks to the intervention of the physicist Michael Faraday. A few days later, on the 31st January 1839, in the Royal Society (once again, it all happened within the framework of a scientific institution, as it had been in Paris for the introduction of daguerreotype) Talbot read an explanatory text of the method that he had discovered, entitled Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing or the Process by Which Natural Objects May be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil. But what did Talbot find in the years in which Daguerre, refining the intuitions of the deceased Niepce, was developing the direct and unique copy of the real? He himself described that he had an eureka moment around 1833, during a journey in Italy, in Bellagio, on the shores of Como Lake. Not being a good draftsman, Talbot used, as many did at that time, Wollaston’s camera lucida, a device that allowed him to draw sketches of the Italian landscape with pretty accuracy . Eager to go one step forward on the way to the discovery of the direct and automatic copy of nature, taking advantage of his optical and chemical knowledge, Talbot was successful in the creation of contact images that he named photogenic drawings. Basically, he placed some natural elements (such as leaves and flowers) but also textiles and semi- transparent laces on light-sensitized sheets of paper (dried after immersion in a solution of table salt and then of silver nitrate). Left exposed to light for a certain period of time, the objects would then be removed from the sheet of paper: on that sheet of paper these objects would have impressed their white negative mark, while all around the photosensitive substances hit by the light would have dyed dark the rest of the sheet of paper. These images, fixed with different substances and then with table salt (suggested by John Herschel), are called off-camera images (because they had been obtained without the darkroom) and they will be a key passage for Talbot’s following experimentation. As Nicephore Niepce came to take advantage of what he achieved by adapting the photogravure technique to the use of the darkroom, so did Henry Fox Talbot applying his discoveries achieved with the papers of the photogenic drawings to the darkrooms, nicknamed by his wife «rattraps». Returned back in England and restarting his experiments, in 1835 Talbot finally obtained what it’s actually considered the first photographic negative of history, entitled Latticed Window, that is the subject he framed in his house at Lacock Abbey, near Bath. Once again, after Leon Batista Alberti’s metaphor and Niepce’s first heliography, a window was used both as subject and as metaphor for the photography itself. This is how Beaumont Newhall described the image: «It’s a negative of 6,5 cm² portraying a lead-sealed-glass window in Lacock Abbey. He assembled it with great accuracy on a postcard and wrote next to it ‘Latticed Window (with the darkroom)’, August 1835. When fresh-made, man could count, with the aid of a magnifying glass, all the little fragments in which the glass is subdivided that are around 200» . Even after having had obtained something incredible, unexplainably Talbot abandoned its improvements and dedicated himself to other things. However, he was ready to claim his discovery when in 1839 from France came the news of the birth of photography. So, even the English inventor realized a photography, that is a semiotic index, an automatic trace of reality, as Daguerre did with the daguerreotype, but the two methods differ for some important particulars that caused the death of the first one, the daguerreotype, and the success of the second. The daguerreotype was an unique copy, readable as a direct positive but, because of its uniqueness, it was not reproducible. Nonetheless, the fact of being realized on a plate, and the procedures through which it was made, permitted a great precision in details and a brilliant definition of the particulars that was very pleasant to see. On the contrary, Talbot realized a photographic negative from which man could obtain (that is, man could ‘stamp’ through a contact process) a number theoretically unlimited of positive copies: so, he discovered the process of the technical reproducibility that will be so important for the theoretical and aesthetical reflections on the contemporary. Unfortunately, his images on paper were much lower in quality than the daguerreotypes: they appeared grainy and little defined. Due to this, at the very beginning it was Daguerre’s invention that obtained major consensus and more success sale, even to the detriment of its non-reproducibility. Only later, but inexorably and definitively, the daguerreotype would fall into disuse and the process of the reproducible and sequenced negative will prevail in the diffusion of photography. After going under some changes that improved its performance (as the use of wax or of glycerol, in order to give transparency to the sheets of sensitized paper used as printing plate, or the use of silver gallic nitrate in order to develop the latent image, and the reduction of the time exposure to a few minutes), Talbot’s negative-positive method imposed itself in history: from the official registration of the patent in 1841, the English procedure would be universally known as calotype (from the Greek kalós, that means ‘beautiful’). Thanks to the fact that he invented a method through which man could automatically reproduce the reality in serial copies, William Henry Fox Talbot had also another merit: from 1844 he began the publication of the first photographic book of history, entitled The Pencil of Nature, followed in 1845 by Sun Picture in Scotland. Due to the lengthy publication of the fascicles in which his scripts were partitioned (months separated the publication of one fascicle to the following one), only few copies were sold and, to this day, very little are the surviving ones. Inside the fascicles, the calotypes were glued directly on the pages and those images, by using Talbot’s own words published in one Reader’s Notice inserted in the publications, «are impressed only by the action of the light, without the help of the artist’s pencil. These are images created by the sun and not, as some have guessed, imitative engravings». As Niepce did with his Notes on heliography, also the brilliant English inventor glorified the truly automatic identity and the impassiveness of the medium. For Talbot, the pencil of nature showed that a dream had come true: the possibility to double the world as a perfect mold with no more debts with the artist’s hand. Unlike what would have happened in the first centuries of the using of photography (when it had to move its first steps inside the art world and earn in it its space), the historical fathers of photography were proud to underline that, thanks to them, man had finally made way for the machine. The main subjects of Talbot’s photographic books were landscapes, granaries, posed people, little objects and the famous broom leaning against the jamb of an open door. Even if we’re mostly dealing with anonymous and banal views, they were the first taste of a phenomenon that would have, and has even now, a fundamental importance in the relationship between man and world: the possibility to virtually travel, thanks to the pictures and the illustrations inside the books. Chapter 5 – Self-portrait as a Drowned Man (Hyppolyte Bayard, 1840) pp. 43-45 (sempre lezione 3) If Bayard would have put his bitterness and his anger into a painting, surely his rivals would have felt less embarrassed, as in fact it is when we see a nude in painting: if we feel embarrassed, we can always think that that body doesn’t exist because it’s only a figment of the artist’s a bit twisted imagination. Claudio Marra, 2004 A half-naked man is leaning against a wall, his eyes are closed and his arms folded. His name is Hyppolite Bayard and with this image his suicidal death, by voluntary drowning in the Seine, is publicly declared. The body lays in the Morgue in Paris, and we can think that it had been photographed by someone in charge of the public security, appointed to document the violent death, or at least by a doctor with the assignment to ascertain the death causes. The name Hyppolite Bayard was well-known among the people who were working, in the mid-Nineteenth Century, around the invention of the photographic process. Bayard, an employee of the Treasury keen on photography, had been convinced to carry on with his studies on the photosensitive substances due to Arago and Daguerre’s announcement of the 7th January 1839. As had happened to Talbot, who restarted both his photogenic drawings and his observations developed after his Italian travel because of their announcement, so Hyppolite Bayard too, got again to work and the 5th February of the same year he presented to a member of the French Institute some direct positive images on sensitized paper with silver iodide. He called them images photogenees. Bayard was obviously conscious that he had obtained something of extreme importance and, because François Arago had a feeling for Daguerre’s proposals and was able to walk the road that led to the patent, he decided to contact Arago to show him his achievements. On the 20th May 1839 Arago in the flesh verified Bayard’s achievements, but then the months passed and it came clear to Bayard that the French mathematician would have sponsored only Daguerre’s invention, avoiding new discoveries to divert the attention of the scientific world from the daguerreotype patent that he himself supported with firm belief. In the meantime, Hyppolite Bayard organized a personal exhibition in the Salle of Commissaires Priseurs, with thirty photographs of still lives and architectures that, from that moment on, would have been remembered into the annals of history as the first public photographic exhibition. Bayard himself began to investigate, following the example of Talbot’s patent, the hypothesis of the negative mark, and at the same time he presented some evidence and sent letters thanks to which we can follow the progresses of his studies. This is what he wrote addressing the wise men of the Academy of Sciences in Paris: «Man should prepare a sheet of paper with potassium bromide, then with silver nitrate. The moist sheet should be left exposed for a few minutes in the darkroom. Once taken-out and examined by candle light, the paper will not show the image of the subject impressed on it; to let it be visible, we should expose the sheet of paper to mercury vapours, as people use to do with the plates following Mr. Daguerre’s process. The paper will then colour itself in black in the parts in which the light has modified the preparation. It’s useless to say that we have to avoid the effects of sunrays on the paper outside the space of the darkroom. This description and one or two proofs obtained following this procedure were sent to the Academy that in the session of the 11th November 1839 accepted to store them up. I plead You, Mister, to open this package, in the case you consider it worthwhile»1. 1 H. BAYARD, Lettre de M. Bayard, reported in ZANNIER 1982, p. 63. elitist artistic ambitions and try the more direct and easy way of the camera obscura. In order to understand the meaning of this first photomontage of history (even though there had been various claims on this) , first of all we must know that it was created by the combination of thirty different negatives, stamped on two sheets of drawn close sensitized paper. Also the dimensions of the final image are important (like in painting), measuring about 40 x 78 cm, is in effect decisively anomalous for the photographic standards of that time and rather close to the ones of the high painting, in particular the one of the historical paintings suitable for the Salon exhibitions. In order to play the roles of the complicated scenic setting designed in his project, Rejlander wasn’t satisfied with anonymous amateurs, so he hired an acting company, Madame’s Wharton’s «Pose Plastique Troupe», which was specialized in refined tableaux vivants and could guarantee professionalism and self- awareness in the interpretation of the gestures and poses planned by Rejlander. The final construction of the scene of Rejlander’s photomontage had been clearly inspired by some historical paintings such as Raphael’s The School of Athens and Thomas Couture’s Romans during the Decadence. Finally, the subject itself, representing the eternal battle between good and evil and between vice and virtue, was absolutely aligned with the taste for rhetoric and for mythological themes in an educational and admonishment context that was in fashion at that time. The combination of all these information describes exactly which were the requirements for a photographer, ex painter, that surely was aspiring to be considered an artist and, more in general, it describes the Nineteenth century art approach (in particular, the one of the painting) towards photography. Starting from the famous phrase «From this day on, painting is dead!» that the painter Paul Delaroche pronounced at the sight of a daguerreotype, in the following years photography had been welcomed by the painters with suspicion for its pretense of being considered an artistic object. From one side photographers tried to imitate follow, on the other painters were scared by this new device, this new competitor. Accepted as an auxiliary tool in the creation of the work of art – because it shortened the posing time for the portraits and it allowed the substitution of sketches and landscape outlines with plates that were cheaper and ready to use -, the photographic image couldn’t compete with the painting because, even if it has the same square format and the same possibility of being framed and hung on a wall, in the end it didn’t own the same statute of originality, complexity, virtuosity and rarity that were typical features of painting. Many painters made a broad and instrumental use of photography as «a maidservant of painting», among them Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and Claude Monet, but many were the ones that hated it and publicly declared its ignominy. Among the more combative ones there was Jean-August Dominique Ingres who, with many others, signed a declaration in which the French State was accused of having irremediably damaged the art, due to the fact that it had supported the patent of the new photographic technique. If we consider this glowing atmosphere and the revolution generated by the photography in the common people’s use and in the potential customers of the artistic studios, the reading of Oscar Gustav Rejlander’s photomontage becomes a manifesto of what the critics will later name as the Nineteenth century historical Pictorialism. Apart from the photomontage, what kind of reply could photography give to that «psychological complex» nourished by the painting, that was since then the only holder of the art jurisdiction in its higher sense? Since then, art was a synonym of painting. The photomontage seemed to be the more immediate reaction (and the precocity of its birth it points out well the urgency of the question), and the more perfected, to the eagerness of being considered as artists that the photographers felt from the very beginning of the introduction of the new technique. All this anxiety is present in a very clear way in The Two Ways of Life: the themes and the measures are the ones of the historical paintings exhibited with pride in the Salons and still in fashion in the mid-Nineteenth century painting. The men and women photographed were true actors and actresses, able to give both to the image and composition (yet borrowed by the great painting classics) an excess of rhetoric and artifice that distanced it from an ordinary tranche de vie. But what is more important and at the same time highlights what this technique wanted to be, is the impression of effort, work and difficulty that Rejlander wanted to obtain: the (even frustrating) will to heighten the level of photography to the one of the painting by reintroducing the role and the skills of an author, in opposition to the cold-heartedness of the machine. By personally charging himself with the task of putting together, one by one, all the single parts of the imagine, Rejlander thought that he could compete against a pictorial work of art, with its visual organization, staging, content and artifice: all qualities that in the Nineteenth century were crucial in the determination of the artistic identity. So, the photographers finally had at their disposal a new device, able to capture reality in its spontaneity and in its «dull» and impassive truth and which, with some operations, they could obtain an image that was a frozen mirror of the world and… what did they do? They tried all the ways to force, to cancel, to conceal and to mystify its characteristics. They did it firstly by working hard on drawings and sketches in order to study the composition of a complex image, and secondly they created it through the juxtaposition of a wide range of shots skillfully combined during the printing process. The result was a complicated mosaic, an allegorical fresco halfway «the academy painting, the Cinemascope frame and an enormous theatrical tableau vivant» . The aim was to show that the photomontage, called photographic composition by Rejlander, could help photography to achieve the dignity traditionally reserved to art thanks to its possibility to parade industriousness, inspiration, creative interpretation and originality, taking out those mechanical aspects, like automaticity and impersonality, that were inherent to its indexical nature, a work taken out from semiotic. That’s the reason why the photomontage is the emblem of the Nineteenth-century Pictorialism, of that spread behavior that led the photographers to live a sort of inferiority complex towards the painters and led them to the imitation of the their styles and formal features, but above all, led them follow the only medium which awarded the image its artistic statute: the painting. It’s clear that people could have been pictorialist in various manners, such as the case of Robert Demachy who used a substance called gum bichromate that, mixed to the photosensitive emulsion, gave to the images the effect of a charcoal or sanguine drawing  you can realize pictures thanks to a machine and you use a substance able to give to your final picture the aspect of a charcoal. Or the case of Peter Henry Emerson, which created images very close in their aspect to an Impressionist painting , and called them «naturalistic photographs», because he blurred the outlines just to be close to the faulty perception of the human eye. If all of this is true, it’s also sure that the photomontage remained during the Nineteenth century the most explicit case of the «fighting for an image» between photography and painting. It’s worth mentioning that, during its exhibition, The Two Ways of Life had been critically welcomed (at the point that Rejlander was forced to cover some nudes with a drape) but had also received enthusiastic welcomes (it was purchased by Queen Victoria for King Albert’s studio). What was blamed about that image were the vulgarity of the pose of the models and the superficiality showed in the approach of important and delicate themes. The obscenity perceived by the public was decisive in the debate that grew around painting and photography: in that period, the painting exhibited in the Salon were crowded by nudes, mostly female nudes, in mythological and allegorical dresses, acting as goddesses or nymphs. Despite the rhetoric, in front of Rejlanders’s photomontage the studied construction, the displayed difficulties and the attempt to follow the modes of painting, there was nothing to do. The image could be easily understood as a manipulated, fantastic reality but a credible one because it had been photographed: constructed with «pieces» of reality, in it the artifice gave way to the indexical nature of the sign. So, those bodies were offending because they were real bodies, that nakedness was embarrassing because it was truly offered to the photographer’s eye. While a painting is always a personal interpretation of an artist, a photography is an automatic writing made with light, it’s the reality itself. The same things can be said of the second photomontage of history, Fading Away (1858) of the English Henry Peach Robinson , in which a scene of private grief can be perceived as something disturbing and shocking. And yet there’s no blood, neither a desperate drama nor violent, bloody details like the ones that painting could display. There we see only a few silent relatives at the sickbed of a dying young girl. Actually, at that time the public was shaken by the reality of this scene, by its being a possible, real and coming true pain. After some other photomontages, like Hard Times of 1869, Oscar Gustav Rejlander definitely abandoned that practice and the debates that followed it, and made it available to the science and then collaborated to the photographic illustration of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animal.