Adam Norwood

Tag: 1800s

  • Victor Hugo: Symbolist Painter
    Visit the source: www.wikiart.org

    "Calling Card" by Victor Hugo; a painterly wash of texture and color with elaborate antique lettering hand painted on top that appears to spell "V I C T O R O G U H" (Victor but then Hugo backwards).

    I’ve never read any of his novels (I know I should!), but I only recently learned that Victor Hugo was also an artist and painter. I can only find a couple dozen low-res images online, but the impression I get is that he was ahead of the Symbolist painting movement by a couple of decades, and was working on these around the time his fellow French writer Baudelaire was cranking out Les Fleurs du mal. In any case they’re surprisingly weird and impressionistic, and seem to employ printmaking techniques that also make me think of early photographic experiments (see for example his Silhouette Fantastique or the wonderfully creepy Lace & Ghosts).

    The painting above seems to be named Calling Card and reminds me of an 1855-era Wayne White typography painting (it looks like the ornate lettering spells out VICTOR OGUH, with “Hugo” reflected backwards?)

    I wish there were better scans of these available!

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  • Lippmann Photography — First Color Spectrum Photos

    In the 1890s the French physicist Gabriel Lippmann devised a new method of taking photographs that led to the first photographic recording of color:

    Lippmann’s color photography process involved projecting the optical image as usual onto a photographic plate. The projection was done through a glass plate coated with a transparent emulsion of very fine silver halide grains on the other side. There was also a liquid mercury mirror in contact with the emulsion, so the projected light traveled through the emulsion, hit the mirror, and was reflected back into the emulsion.

    The resulting plates are pretty cool looking, as seen in the video — very similar to the discovery of holography decades later — and technically they record a wider spectrum of color than our standard modern imaging techniques. He won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his research, but the method was largely shelved due to the complexity of the process and the inability to make color prints, which also didn’t appear commercially until much later.

    In 2021 researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne published a paper on their research into Lippmann’s images, including a new method that lets us see the images closer to the original color captured in the photographic scene.

    Side trivia: among Lippmann’s doctoral students at the Sarbonne was Maria Sklodowska, later a winner of multiple Nobel prizes herself, under her better-known married name: Marie Curie!

     

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  • We will see Landscapes

    ’We will see… landscapes,’ they announced, ‘in which the trees bow to the whims of the wind, the leaves ripple and glitter in the rays of the sun.’ Along with the familiar photographic leitmotif of the leaves, such kindred subjects as undulating waves, moving clouds, and changing facial expressions ranked high in early prophesies. All of them conveyed the longing for an instrument which would capture the slightest incidents of the world about us.

    Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer writing about the dreams of photography pioneers Henry Cook and Gaetano Bonnelli, who in the 1860s invented a device called a photobioscope that combined stereoscope + zoetrope effects to show primitive short “3D” “movie” loops. It’s interesting to think about the decades in which photography was new and exploding in use, but it couldn’t capture the essence of normal day-to-day movement due to the long exposure times. 

    We’re still chasing those dreams, 150 years later.

    (Via this excellent Bright Wall / Dark Room essay on Totoro)

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