Cruel Radiance Of What Is: Charting Reality

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce‘s Court Yard, 1826, Bitumen Of Judea On Pewter, 8×10″

  The first permanent photographic subject was Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s court yard in 1826. His Heliograph was made on a sheet of pewter covered with bitumen of Judea, a light sensitive resin that hardened when exposed to light. Niépce’s exposure was so long (eight to ten hours) that the sun moving across the sky created shadows on both sides of the courtyard and the vertical line on the left is actually a tree.

  The view was made from an upper, rear window of the Niépce family home in Burgundy, in the village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes near Chalon-sur-Saône. Representationally the subject matter includes [from left to right]: the upper loft (or, so-called “pigeon-house”) of the family home; a pear tree with a patch of sky showing through an opening in the branches; the slanting roof of the barn, with the long roof and low chimney of the bake house behind it; and, on the right, another wing of the family house. Details in the original image are very faint, due not to fading—the heliographic process is a relatively permanent one—but rather to Niepce’s underexposure of the original plate.

  Niépce’s courtyard image is not a photograph. It was not until 1840, after the announcement of the Daguerreotype (the first commercially successful imaging process), that Henry Fox Talbot, an English entrepreneur invented the positive/negative process (photograph) called the Calotype. The Calotype (Talbotype) being a positive/negative process allowed the photographer to express himself by manipulating the image during printing, controlling local areas of the print to be lighter or darker. It also allowed multiple images to be composited on the same photographic paper. This was not possible with the Daguerreotype process because it did not make a negative and was an in-camera image which flipped the image horizontally.

Nicéphore Niépce’s, Original Court Yard Photograph Made In 1826

  Helmut Gernsheim brought Niépce’s image to prominence again in 1952 and the Eastman Kodak Company was able to make a reproduction. In 1973, the University of Texas acquired the plate from Helmut Gernsheim. The first permanent photochemical image in the history of the world by Nicéphore Niépce’s, is on display at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

©Copyright Craig Carlson All Rights Reserved

Near Judith Landing, Missouri River, Montana

 Days Photographing in Montana are the most interesting of times in the field. I met weather, people, and a land which has become more intriguing to me as a still photographer with each exposed frame.
 A rancher (farms west of the Missouri River are called ranches), told me in no uncertain terms, that the reason ”God man eastern Montana flat, so that balage (rolled hay), would not roll and fall into the Missouri River.”
  I work the Montana landscape along farm roads, those dotted lines on a map without a route number, which greatly exaggerates which part of Montana you are actually in. I was trapped by a violent hail storm, which put chips in my windshield, and left the sky a dramatic scene.
  Most spaces in the Western landscape, are perfect for the looking part of photography. It can take days of looking to find all the surprises the next hill might oblige. As best nature tries, the Montana landscape is human built. Its design is squarish, sometimes round, with long lines pretending to be roads, broken up only by the occasional cattle guard.
 Photography always starts in the morning. Often, where two roads cross, like the town of Winnett, Montana. Winnett has four occupants, a convenience store wanting to be a super market, a motel with no T.V., a cafe with transparent coffee, and a cowboy bar.
All are fossils.

Cowboy Bar, Winnett, Montana

 You move out early, real early, when the light has barely touched the dirt, and when the wind has not yet woken, and even the locals have not lifted their shades. The day moves you along the edges of fields, ready to be cut, and cut. Some parts of the landscape have wrangled back their wildness, while nesting against broken tractors, and abandoned farm implements.
 You hope your eyes tire from looking, or, was that afternoon nap, late. Now, don’t take too long a nap, just enough for you to judge the arc of sun, making new shapes on the horizon.
 A Montana horizon.

Golden Valley, East of Roundup, Montana

 More Montana

©Copyright Craig Carlson All Rights Reserved 2012