Between 1897-1908, 356 individual large format, hand-pulled photogravures and 318 tipped autotypes (halftones) were issued as part of 66 individual art folios in the German photographic art journal: Die Kunst in der Photographie.” (translated to The Art in Photography)

Franz Goerke (1856-1931), the editor and publisher  of this publication, was an important exponent of German art photography.  Dr. Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, who taught the young Alfred Stieglitz photographic chemistry in Germany in his formative years, commented in a photographic review during its’ first year of publication (1897): Die Kunst in der Photographie is a  …”totally new and original undertaking.  Many waffle about art in photography, but what nonsense.  Here (speaking of Goerke)  we are dealing with the work of a sensitive expert.” 1.

And a modern view,  in the publication History of Photography:

“This publication may well be the most important and valuable documentation of art photography in the German language but, because of its rarity, has remained virtually unknown.” 2.

Please visit here to continue with our overview of Die Kunst in der Photographie.

1. ROLF H. KRAUSS: DIE KUNST IN DER PHOTOGRAPHIE, THE GERMAN CAMERA WORK: PART 1: THE PUBLICATION AND ITS IMAGES: HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, VOLUME 10, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1986: P. 267
2. IBID: P. 265

Limited-edition subscription portfolios of large-plate photogravures were issued by the Photo-Club de Paris commemorating their annual photographic salons held between 1894-1897.

The Photo-Club de Paris was created by members who seceded from the Société de Francaise de Photographie.  Contemporary author Janet Buerger writes of the organization:

“The Photo Club de Paris was formed as an idea at the International Congress of Photography in 1889. In 1891 it published its first Bulletin. Its initial salon album, published in 1894, was the first of at least four that set the standards for fine gravure folios in the period.” 1.

Continuing, Buerger states:

“These gravures are valued as original prints, because of their superior quality and because they are often all we have left of the extremely rare images of this period.” 2.

1894 was the first year the club hosted one of the most lavish and international of the artistic photographic salons of the late nineteenth century. Precedents to this had been set by the first 1888 Vienna salon, followed by their salons of 1891 and 1892 and the first London (Linked Ring) salon of 1893. These secessionist clubs broke away from the older established photographic societies inclusive but frequently interested in technical rather than artistic achievement.

“The series constitutes a highpoint of pictorialism in print, the permanent visual record of an influential event that brought together work by most of the international masters in the medium”… 3.

Please visit here to continue with our overview of The Photo-Club de Paris and the first year portfolio.

1. FRANCE: JANET E. BUERGER, THE LAST DECADE: THE EMERGENCE OF ART PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE 1890’S: ROCHESTER: INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE: 1984: P. 24
2. IBID
3. EXPOSITION D’ART PHOTOGRAPHIQUE: SHELIA J. FOSTER:IMAGINING PARADISE-THE RICHARD AND RONAY MENSCHEL LIBRARY AT GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE, ROCHESTER: STEIDL: GÖTTINGEN: P. 201

Beginning in 1894 and continuing through 1898, the Vienna Camera Club in Austria published a monthly journal known as the Wiener Photographische Blätter (Viennese Photographic Sheets). Edited by Professor Franz Schiffner of Vienna, the publication was a showcase for the club’s views on artistic photography, (it also featured technical articles) publishing beautiful hand-pulled photogravure plates by talented Austrian photographers as well as others from around the world. Contemporary author Manon Hübscher writes:

“The Wiener Camera-Klub was also intent upon establishing itself as the leader of a growing movement in Eastern Europe.  To this end, it provided a showcase for its work by issuing a magazine entitled the Wiener Photographische Blätter.” 1.

Ten years after it was first published, photographic historian Josef Maria Eder wrote this  journal:

 “devoted itself especially to the artistic side of photography and was notable for its beautiful illustrations.” 2.

1. MANON HÜBSCHER: THE VIENNA CAMERA CLUB-CATALYST AND CRUCIBLE: IN: IMPRESSIONIST CAMERA: PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN EUROPE, 1888-1918 : MERRELL PUBLISHERS : 2006 : P.126 2. JOSEF MARIA EDER: HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TRANSLATED BY EDWARD EPSTEAN: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS: NEW YORK: 1945: P. 685

In the early 1890’s, the idea behind the formation of The Photographic Salon in England was a simple one: difference of opinion. Organized by The Linked Ring Brotherhood, a group of like-minded photographers with an international roster, the Salon’s aims were in advancing and promoting artistic photography. The first exhibit of the Salon was held in 1893 at the Dudley Gallery in Picccadilly and would continue there annually through 1904.  From 1905 until ending in 1909, the annual exhibit was held in London at the Galleries of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours at 5a Pall Mall East. 

“From 1893-1909 it was unique as an annual exhibition in solely promoting pictorial photography on an international scale and in setting a very high standard of selection of photographs to be shown under the best possible conditions at the time.” 1.

Please visit here to continue with our overview of The Photographic Salon.

1. THE ANNUAL EXHIBITIONS: IN: THE LINKED RING – THE SECESSION IN PHOTOGRAPHY IN BRITAIN, 1892-1910 : MARGARET F. HARKER: A ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY PUBLICATION: 1979: P. 95

Welcome to PhotoSeed!  When I was a child, my reading of English archeologist Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt inspired me enough to start digging around in my own backyard. Later, as a young aspiring photographer, I came across a quote by American photographer Harry Callahan which really stuck with me: “I love art because it doesn’t have rules like baseball. The only rule is to be good. That’s the toughest thing to do.”

Along with my parents, who instilled a love of art in me at an early age, the progression of my professional life as a newspaper photojournalist combined with an innate love for art and history has lead me to the present undertaking.

What is PhotoSeed? It is a destination based on derivation. It will evolve as an online photographic compendium focusing on the historical record of “artistic photography” roughly produced from the 1880’s to about World War I.  With apologies to Alfred Stieglitz and others, there will be plenty of flim-flam, and the major “isms” of this era: aestheticism, naturalism, and pictorialism, will be here in abundance.

I’m not going to consciously ignore something because I don’t care for it. Mundane and repetitive work of the period is very instructive for the time in which it was created. Taken collectively, all of the work on this site added to the general conversation of ideas that pushed photography forward. I promise to make plenty of exceptions to keep things interesting, however.

The material presented here will continue to validate my own respect for Callahan’s observation “to be good” in guiding the site’s purpose, relevance and spirit. Carter’s influence will be illuminated by the site’s ongoing “photographic archeology” which will unearth delights not known by casual photographic historians.  

That’s why I’m taking the time to share with you the fruit and results of photography’s early artistic efforts. In my estimation, their gleanings still matter. These photographs can and should inspire today’s practitioners–be they armed with ubiquitous cameras built into smart phones or those keeping alive the medium’s noble processes including daguerreotype, wet plate, and film.

As for its name, PhotoSeed’s derivation stands for growth and renewal in the photographic arts at a time when taking chances with a camera was seen by many as subversive. It is my hope PhotoSeed will evoke and conjure the time and place of when this photographic record was created.

For once planted, seeds, as represented by the ideas sown by photography’s pioneers and toilers alike, required only the sun overhead to realize their potential:  

“Like the sunflower, the sun was a popular symbol with art photography clubs. It represented photography’s necessary light as well as the inspiration, power and renewal associated with otherworldly presence.” 1.

And about that “mesmerization” thing? The history of photography includes a delightful account of photographic hypnotism decades before George Eastman’s Kodak mania took hold and put people around the world in a different kind of trance.

English journalist Henry Mayhew, whose series of profile vignettes first published in 1851 as London Labour and the London Poor, included one dispatch published in the third volume of the series (1861). In his “A Photographic Man” (2), Mayhew writes about a former banjo busker turned photographer who teams up with another like-minded chap and enters the exploding yet dubious shilling and sixpenny portrait (ambrotypes & ferrotypes) trade. Sometimes, the duo are able to make a little bit extra at the conclusion of a portrait session. In this respect, the mysterious and telegenic power of the camera recounted in Mayhew’s profile reveals the gullibility (and empties the pockets) of the largely working poor clientele these photographic “entrepreneurs” cater too:  

“People seem to think the camera will do anything. We actually persuade them that it will mesmerise them.  After their portrait is taken, we ask them, if they would like to be mesmerised by the camera, and the charge is only 2d. (2 pennies) We then focus the camera, and tell them to look firm at the tube; and they stop there for two or three minutes staring, till their eyes begin to water, and then they complain of a dizziness in the head, and give it up, saying they “can’t stand it”.  I always tell them the operation was beginning, and they were just going off, only they didn’t stay long enough. They always remark, “Well, it certainly is a wonderful machine, and a most curious invention.”

Here at PhotoSeed, mesmerization is absolutely free. So sit back, relax, and try not to get too dizzy. This operation is just beginning. We hope you do stay long enough to agree the artistic results of this most curious invention are most wonderful indeed.

–David Spencer  (2010)

1. Janet E. Buerger, The Last Decade: The Emergence of Art Photography in the 1890’s  (Rochester: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1984) 4.

2. Henry Mayhew, “A Photographic Man,” London Characters & Crooks: ed. Christopher Hibbert, (London: The Folio Society, 1996) 12: 295-303.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel is someone to pay attention to when thinking about photography. And for no other reason?  He is credited with coining the very word “photography” in the English language.  (with apologies to French-Brazilian painter and inventor Hércules Florence)

Herschel–famed English astronomer and, for our purposes here, photographic pioneer–is one of the unsung heroes of what we know as modern photography.  For those lucky enough to have worked in a wet darkroom, it was Herschel the scientist and chemist who discovered and corresponded with William Henry Fox Talbot that sodium thiosulphite, commonly known as “hypo”, could “fix” silver halides, and therefore was a reliable means of making a photograph permanent.

Buried next to Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, Herschel’s genius was an ability to make science understandable to both the curious and the more educated through his writings and presentations to the established scientific bodies of the mid 19th century.

As a collector, I’ve always been drawn to the art of photography. However, I have an appreciation of the science that has always been the important backdrop for making modern photography possible in the first place, and Herschel’s role in that science. This wonderful photographic likeness of Herschel, taken by his dear friend Julia Margaret Cameron, has always been of interest to me as a collector because it combines both art and science.

A Cameron portrait of Herschel appeals on many photographic collecting levels.  It is considered one of the great “head” portraits that Cameron was famous for-perhaps more so because of its brooding and mysterious nature; a symbolic likeness of a man whose life was spent on a quest for discovery and explanation of the unknown.

But It has never been my intention as a collector to purchase a photograph because it is considered one of the “greatest hits” in the history of the medium. On the contrary, I am continually surprised how much wonderful material is available of the unknown and unsung photographer, often for the price of a song. The beauty of collecting photography in our modern age is that its’ story has not been fully chronicled nor even discovered, and one of the aims of PhotoSeed will be to fill in some of these blanks for the record.

The four known portraits of Herschel were taken late in his life in 1867 by Cameron. Through much luck I was able to purchase this one, a mounted (with wood veneer overlay) albumen example at auction in 2004 from a gentleman who originally purchased it at auction in Dublin, Ireland in 2003.

Twice personally signed by Cameron, the bottom right hand corner of the mount provides the following inscription by her: “Given to Mr. Charles Hegan by Mrs. Cameron with her kindest regards.”

Naturally, I was intrigued as to the mysterious Mr. Hegan was and how he might have known Cameron. Through research, I tracked down the family who originally consigned the Herschel portrait as well as other items to the Irish auction. And this is why photographic sleuthing pays off.  It turns out that in 1899 this photograph was a wedding present from Hegan to one Joseph Alfred Hardcastle. (born 1868) Never heard of him?  It turns out he was Herschel’s grandson, and the photograph had stayed in Hardcastle’s family until 2003.  A very nice provenance indeed.

A friend of a member of the present-day Hardcastle family in Ireland did research on my behalf, trying to figure out who Hegan was and his possible connection to Cameron, but came up empty.  Later, my own research determined Hegan (Charles John Hegan) was a fellow of London’s Royal Geographical Society (elected 1873) who likely knew Hardcastle through scientific and perhaps family connections (they both attended Harrow but over 20 years apart). Ownership of the Herschel portrait makes complete sense as both Hegan and Hardcastle were devoted to scientific endeavors. On this front, Hegan travelled to South America to conduct fluvial research on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society and Hardcastle, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society who lectured and conducted research relating to astronomy, was appointed director of  the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, but died suddenly in 1917 while in route there.

So talk about the perfect wedding gift. Hardcastle’s love was astronomy. Although only three years old when his grandfather was buried next to Newton, Herschel would have been proud of a grandson following in his own esteemed footsteps.