I came across this series courtesy of an entry in a blog. It was originally shown in 2007; I acquired the DVDs and have decided to view them all as part of background to photography.
Episode One was entitled "Fix the Shadows", a slightly enigmatic title for an hour of viewing on the first 70 years or so of photography.
The episode commences with shots taken of Meudon,a Paris suburb, by Andre Kerstez in 1920s. One image is of a street including a man carrying something. The narrator suggests that our enquiring minds want to know who the man is, what is he carrying? Suggests that this is the Genius of Photography: to find "the secret strangers that lie beneath the world of appearances".
The programme starts with Talbot and Daguerre, making a contrast between the foresight of Talbot, a quiet studious man with interest in ecology but a desperate inability to draw, who invented a system that could reproduce images time and again on paper thus enabling the masses to indulge in the pursuit, and the narrow appeal of Daguerre, a flamboyant Frenchman whose invention was fundamentally flawed by its inability to reproduce and consequently to appeal to a wide audience.
Before these two, there had been cameras obscura but breakthroughs came when it was realised that some chemicals reacted to light but these two finally came up with a method to reproduce images, firstly Daguerre in January 1839 and then Talbot a few months later.
I was struck by the sheer beauty of Daguerrotypes - the mirror with a memory as they were called. The inability to reproduce images did make for a more intimate process.
It was realised quickly that photography is all seeing but undiscriminating.
Muybridge was the Englishman who ,having taken some stunning panoramics of San Francisco among other works, teamed up with Stanford, a railway baron, to make the first moving images and in so doing proved that horses do indeed lift all hooves of the floor when trotting.
1850 -1900 saw photography become unashamedly commercial. Nadar was a leading portrait photographer in Paris, deliberately taking less then entirely flattering shots.
The programme then pursued the old chestnut of whether photography is art. Chuck Close: "Photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent but the hardest in which to have a personal vision". Vernacular photography was photography taken for a reason - usually to record, for example, crime scenes. The contrast was pictorialism, an early 1900s antidote to vernacular photography, that was deliberately low light and ultimately boring. We are shown some of Lartigue's work.
The programme looked at the invention of Kodak by George Eastman, the founder of the popular camera with a name made up by Eastman and discusses the consequent democratisation of the medium.
