It rains and pulls wind ... OPEN AGAIN

Elegant family 19th century cabinet card photograph.

 Washing an extremely yellowed and acid artwork on paper yields this pleasing sequence of yellow wash  waters!

All that discolouration removed from the paper makes  the image appear brighter and the paper
 is stabilized aganist further deterioration.
 We'll show you the difference in the artwork once the tratment is complete ...

Idylls of the King, en plein air

One of the early pioneers of photographic portraiture, Julia Margaret Cameron began her career at the age of 48.

 “From the first moment, I handled my lens with a tender ardor," she wrote, "and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigor." Cameron trained herself to master the laborious steps of producing negatives with wet collodion on glass plates, favoring slight blurs in her images and looser compositions than the polished portraits of her colleagues. She moved in the high intellectual circles of Victorian England, capturing leading academics and artists such as Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin. Many critics praised her originality, though others derided her for slovenly technique. Drawing inspiration from historical and contemporary writers and painters,

 Cameron also staged scenes from history or literature, such as her photographic illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and regularly enlisted family members, friends, and domestic servants as models for Madonnas, 

Christ figures, and angels.

Julia Margaret Cameron
DIMBOLA MUSEUM & GALLERIES
Terrace Lane (off Gate Lane)
Freshwater Bay
Isle of Wight PO40 9QE

Summer Days, 1866
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative
13 ^7/8 × 11 ^1/8 in
35.2 × 28.3 cm

The Sunflower, 1866-1870

Albumen print

13 ^7/8 × 9 ^9/16 in

35.2 × 24.3 cm

Consuming Nonsense: Freshwater Circle Society Study Day

SATURDAY 4TH JUNE, 10.30AM - 3.00PM

a room all for me! prisoner of Victorian conventions.

Albumen print from wet collodion negative
1864
24 X 29.7 cm
Musée d'Orsay
... admired by Lewis Carroll that he collected the work.

Albumen prin from wet collodion negative.
1862
11.0 X 6.8 cm
sepia photograph, mounted green card, of a young woman leaning against a door.
V&A Museum

Lady Clementina Hawarden, one of Britain's first female photographers

Albumen print from wet collodion negative
1862-1863
10.5 X 8.8 cm
sepia photograph,mounted on green card, of a young woman seated, hands crossed on chest.
V&A Museum

Albumen silver print from glass negative
20.1 X 14.4 cm
early 1860s
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

front cover of one of my very favourite books of my favourite photographer.

the book was published in 1974

Clementina was born 1 June 1822 at Cumberland House near Glasgow

her mother was Spanish

She turned to photography in late 1857 oe early 1858, whilst living on the estate of her husband's family in Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, Ireland.

A move to London in 1859 allowed her to set up a studio in her elegant home in South Kensington.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs for ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

Four grey wall, and grey towers,

Overlook a space of  flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

^ from Tennyson's Lady of Shalott ^

A since 1856, Lady Hawarden began to practice photography as simple amateur but, in a short time, he learned all the tricks and techniques. Lady Hawarden chose to immortalize themes and subjects that belonged to his world: his estate of Dundrum, Ireland, where she was photographing landscapes and especially his family.

In particular, the three elder daughters were the protagonists of "living pictures" made around 1862-1863; observing their transition from childhood to adolescence, she depicts the masked and preferably while reciting romantic scenes.

In the course of his work, Lady Hawarden tried always to enhance the female beauty in all its sensuality and expressiveness. However, rather singular fact, the artist never gave a precise title to his photographs. 

Despite the indications suggested by the costumes and gestures made by models, photographed scenes remain open to all interpretations.

 From modern photographer was like, Lady Hawarden was interested more in the treatment of light and its effects on transparency that no content properly narrative of his shots.

La Tapada Limena

the Tapada phenomenon symbolised women's freedom and indipendence
for three centuries

1560-1850

the cyclope eye allowed women to get in contact with the outside world,
taunt, flirt, basically do whatever without staining their reputation.
Peru

The charm of mystery ...

una Tapada Limena by BENIAH BRAWN


Women,full of grace and beauty, were known universally by of name of "TAPADA LIMENA",
because of their celebrated attire,
" la saya y el manto "
This attire consisted on a black skirt and a cloak that women would hold  gracefully over their face,
coquettishly leaving one eye uncovered.
Such original attire allowed " LAS LIMENAS "to go out alone and to start a conversation with whomever they
pleased, without damaging their dignity.
specific to Lima.

I gift my CdV to you, you CdV your gifts to me

The phenomenon of "Cardomania" that raged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth  decreed the success of the format Carte de Visite as a means of identification and social recognition of the bourgeoisie and the affluent middle class in Victorian times. 

Del mechanism exchange that allowed to collect in the album collection of portraits of relatives, friends and acquaintances, I wrote in the previous article on the carte de visite 

Photographs format carte de visite

( carte-de-visite abbreviated as CdV or CDV )

 are a kind of calling card photo that enjoyed enormous popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century...

carte-de-visite or carte de ville

The success of this portrait genre founded on the novelty and convenience of a product photo again, able to perform the function of a means of identification and social recognition. 

The rising middle class, he found an effective solution to the desire for self-celebration and affirmation of the attributes of the class and the individual personality. 

The normal size of a carte de visite is about 54.0 mm (2.125 in) × 89 mm (3.5 in) for the 'photographic image printed on paper compact and thin. This primary support was mounted, usually hot, on a card rather consisting of 64 mm (2.5 in) × 100 mm (4 in). The positive is usually printed on albumen paper.

The oldest examples may have been made ​​on salted paper.

The CdV later are made ​​with collodion processes, aristotipia or other processes, sometimes technically refined and rare.

Not infrequently the CdV was hand-dyed. The Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (Paris, March 28, 1819 - OCTOBER 4 1889) patented in 1854 the method to get eight different negatives on a single plate. This determined size which characterizes the Cdv and that made ​​possible the successful thanks to the reduction of production costs. The negative could be printed by contact and the production of copies was therefore particularly convenient. The format was soon to establish itself in the first few years, until the day when the Emperor Napoleon III made ​​him stop the troops leaving for the Italian campaign (II Italian War of Independence) 8 of the Boulevard des Italiens to be portrayed by Disdéri. 

The episode is riposrtato in memories of the photographer Nadar, pseudonym under which he is known Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (Paris, April 6, 1820 - March 21 1910). The intention was probably to promote and celebrate the image of the emperor, spreading the knowledge of the physical appearance of the whole people, the troops and the Allies. 

Disdéri was selling copies of the most famous people of his time and he gladly welcomed in his studio. 

His picture taken by this photographer meant the consecration of its financial success, artistic or political. 

So all those who could afford it wanted to be photographed in Cdv, then giving it to friends, acquaintances and admirers, a copy of his portrait. The success of the format carte de visite swept triggering the mechanism of chain reaction that was at its base: I gift my CdV to you, you CdV your gifts to me . 

In this way we were with a decent speed large collections of carte de visite that implicated the statement of special photo albums in windows. In these containers were gathered portraits of family, friends and acquaintances, thus becoming a sort of " family atlas "which allowed the recognition of mutual ties, roles, expectations and social identifications.

Nineteenth Century Iran

 Qajar Era

The Qajar dynasty
 Persian: دودمان قاجار‎ Doodmān e Qājār; also romanised as Ghajar, Kadjar, Qachar etc.; Azerbaijani: Qacar) was a Persianize native Iranian royal family of Turkic origin,which ruled Persia (Iran) from 1785 to 1925. The Qajar family took full control of Iran in 1794, deposing Lotf 'Ali Khan, the last of the Zand dynasty, and re-asserted Persian sovereignty over large parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In 1796, Mohammad Khan Qajar seized Mashhad with ease, which was under Durrani suzerainty,putting an end to the Afsharid dynasty, and Mohammad Khan was formally crowned as shah after his sacking of Tblisi.In the North Caucasus, South Caucasus, and Central Asia the Qajar dynasty eventually permanently lost many of its controlled areas to the Russians in the course of the 19th century.

Dervishes were a common subject for foreign photographers of the late Qajar period. 

These photographs helped to create and fed the stereotypes of exotic Easterners, but nevertheless they are useful historical records of the period.

Antoin Sevruguin

Photographs of Iranian dervishes by Antoin Sevruguin are mostly taken around 1900 to 1905.

Dmitri Ivanovich Yermakov

Photographs of the Russian photographer, Dmitri Ivanovich Yermakov, are mostly taken during the early 1870s during his trip to Iran.

IZMIR ' de DERVISLER 1903 

DERVISLER URFA 1905

Antoin Sevruguin

Again in 19th Century!!!

Carte de Visite   Cabinet Card

 1860-880s            1870s-1900

Image on ALBUMEN coated paper

Next stop San Pietro !!!

La vulva d'oro del Risorgimento

!click the title!



The mid-nineteenth century saw the simultaneous birth of couture, photography, and modern art. For women of the Italian aristocracy, as well as the aspiring bourgeoisie, the three arts provided a new world of spectatorship and self-satisfaction. Virginia Oldoini, Countess Castiglione, was a voracious client of both couture and photography, acquiring fashion from the new maisons de couture of Worth and Pingat.



Albumen silver print, from glass negative

Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913)
In 1844 Pierre-Louis Pierson began operating a studio in Paris that specialized in hand-colored daguerreotypes. In 1855 he entered into a partnership with Léopold Ernest and Louis Frederic Mayer, who also ran a daguerreotype studio. The Mayers had been named "Photographers of His Majesty the Emperor" by Napoleon III the year before Pierson joined them. Although the studios remained at separate addresses, Pierson and the Mayers began to distribute their images under the joint title "Mayer et Pierson," and together they became the leading society photographers in Paris.
Pierson's 1861 photographs of the family and court of Napoleon III sold very well to the public. Pierson and Leopold Mayer soon opened another studio in Brussels, Belgium, and began photographing other European royalty. After Mayer's retirement in 1878, Pierson went into business with his son-in-law Gaston Braun, whose father was the photographer Adolphe Braun








Albumen is the clear 'white' of hen's eggs, and is used to hold the light sensitive salts used to make a print on the top of the paper surface. They can be regarded as a development of the Salted paper print, and there is some overlap between the two processes.
Albumen Prints