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GEORGE MÉLIÈS

George Méliès was born on 8th December,1861 in Paris, France. He was French illusionist, film director and a magician who experimented with motion pictures, the first to film fictional narratives. He was a great magician and also a great story teller. In 1895 when the movies of lumière brothers were shown in Paris, Méliès- The director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, was among the spectators. 

those films were based on real life having the novelty of motion, but he saw at once their further possibilities. So, he tried to buy cinematograph camera invented by lumière brothers, but they refused to keep a control over thier invention so he bought an animatograph and by modifying it he made it function like cinematograph camera as well.With a magician’s intuition, he discovered and exploited the basic camera tricks: stop motion, slow motion, dissolve, fade-out, superimposition, and double exposure.

He made more than 400 films between 1899 to 1912, the best of which combine illusion, comic burlesque, and pantomime to treat themes of fantasy in a playful and absurd fashion.To give comic effect he specialized in depicting extreme physical transformations of the human body.

His famous films were Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899; Christ Walking on Water)

 Le Voyage dans la lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon)

 Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904; The Voyage Across the Impossible)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XG1SaqDmqsEsSOOAdfmGPcPKI47eEwhN/view

Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904; The Voyage Across the Impossible)

Méliès also filmed studio reconstructions of news events as an early kind of newsreel. It never occurred to him to move the camera for close-ups or long shots. The commercial growth of the industry forced him out of business in 1913, and because of that he died in poverty.

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EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

Edward James Muggeridge was born on 9 April 1830 in kingston upon Thames, United kingdom. He was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. 

His experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, and he is known for his notable work in the Horse in motion. It started when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. But in 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford’s contention.

His work was widely published but also criticised and to encounter such criticism, He gave lectures on animal locomotion throughout the United States and Europe. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures.

This device display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Ptcum5ohL4wztwoBicA_TIToG6sv4Cj/view

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THE LUMIÈRE BROTHERS

Auguste Lumière born on 19 October 1862 and his brother Louis Lumière was born on October 5, 1864 in Besançon, France. These french brother were inventors and colonist manufacturers of of photographic equipment who devised an early motion-picture camera and projector called the Cinématographe. 

They created the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) in 1895, which is considered the first motion picture. This short film widely regarded as the invention of movies for mass audiences. The premiere was held at a private screening for an audience of 10.

The film was shot in 35mm, with the aspect ratio of 1.33.1 at 16 frames per second. The brothers were among the first filmmakers in world history, pioneering cinematic technology as well as establishing the common grammar of film. The brothers went on to work on hundreds of films in less than a decade. They also created the cinematograph, a motion-picture film camera that serves as both a projector and a printer. Developed in Lyon, this technology allowed multiple moviegoers to experience a projected film for the first time.

A shot from his famous film ie.  La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory).

“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”

A camera that they invented which could record, develop, and project film, but they regarded their creation as little more than a curious novelty.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JW1ay2uEjFTqYzIHv25pnHzA_i6V3ABK/view

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PUSHPA MALA

This artist was trained in many fields like photography, video-performances, sculpting, writing and she was also a curator and provocateur, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse. In the early times she has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”.She is known for her strongly feminist work and for her rejection of authenticity and embracing of multiple realities.As she is one of the colonist of conceptual art in India and a leading figure in the feminist experiments in subject, material and language, her inventive work in sculpture, conceptual photography, video and performance have had a deep influence on art practice in India.

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ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko was born on 23 November 1891 in  St. Petersburg, Russia. He was a Russian painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer who was a dedicated leader of the Constructivist movement and father of the modern Russian design.His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic but before that he also worked as a painter and a graphic designer. And after feeling the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition.

Most of the works of Graphic designers of 20th century was direct result of Rodchenko's earlier work in the field.One of his famous portrait of Lilya Brik has inspired a number of subsequent works, including the cover art for a number of music albums.

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NAN GOLDIN- The ballad of sexual dependency

Nancy ‘Nan’ Goldin is an American based photographer. she was born in Washington on 12 September 1953.she now lives in New York city, Berlin and Paris. During her work she explored  LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic.Among all her work, the most famous work is The ballad of sexual independency in which she documented the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. The Ballad was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers.

The ballad of sexual dependency-It Comprises almost 700 snapshot-like portraits sequenced against an evocative music soundtrack, It is a deeply personal narrative, formed out of the artist’s own experiences around Boston, New York, Berlin, and elsewhere in the late 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. Goldin’s Ballad is itself a kind of downtown opera; its protagonists—including the artist herself—are captured in intimate moments of love and loss. They experience ecstasy and pain through sex and drug use; they revel at dance clubs and bond with their children at home; and they suffer from domestic violence and the ravages of AIDS.

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CYANOTYPE

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process which was invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842.He was scientist. Anna Atkins was the daughter of his friend/colleague and was the first woman to create a photograph.She used this technique and produced the worlds first photographically illustrated book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions which also made cyanotype very famous.

The cyanotype process was one of the first non-silver technologies used to create photographic images. It creates a permanent cyan blue-print image.It is now referred to as blueprints and it mainly used by engineers as it is very simple and cheap method to produce copies of images.

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DAGUERREOTYPE

Daguerreotype, first commercially successful form of photography in the history.It is named after his inventor ‘Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’ of France, who invented the technique in collaboration with Nicéphore Niépce in the 1830s.The daguerreotype is a direct-positive process, creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative. The process required great care. The silver-plated copper plate had first to be cleaned and polished until the surface looked like a mirror. After that, the plate was sensitized in a closed box over iodine until it took on a yellow-rose appearance. The plate, held in a lightproof holder, was then transferred to the camera. After exposure to light, the plate was developed over hot mercury until an image appeared. To fix the image, the plate was immersed in a solution of sodium thiosulfate or salt and then toned with gold chloride.

By 1840, numerous portrait studio’s were opened but at that time daguerreotype was very expensive so only the wealthy people could afford to have their portraits. Although portraits was the most famous subject at that time but still the daguerreotype was used to record many other images such as topographic and documentary subjects, antiquities, still lives, natural phenomena and remarkable events.

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PHOTOGENIC DRAWING- Talbot’s process

William Henry Fox Talbot is the father of the negative-positive photographic process, as it is practiced today also called photogenic drawings. He was born in Melway; Dorsey, England in 1800 to a wealthy well established family. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge University. He was deeply interested and knowledgeable in a variety of subjects like botany, art, biblical, astronomy, mathematics  and ancient language.

 Beside all this he lacked the basic skill of sketching and In In 1833, frustrated by his own lack of skill as a draftsman, Talbot began experimenting with the possibility of creating accurate images of the world through mechanical and chemical means.By 1835 he had produced his first camera negative, and soon realised that a positive image could subsequently be obtained by further printing. These investigations were put to one side until 1839, when he was shocked to learn that the French painter Louis Daguerre had succeeded in creating the photographic process which became known as the daguerreotype.

Calotype- After knowing about daguerrotype, Talbot immediately made his own earlier researches public and in the course of the following year refined them to produce calotype-a process which produced a negative through the development of a ‘latent’ or invisible image. In the few years during which he was directly involved with photography, Talbot produced some masterly photographic images using the calotype process.In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura; those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image. 

The salt paper print- salt paper print was the dominant paper-based photogenic process for producing positive prints. It started from 1839, a type of photographic process also introduced by Talbot. This process is often confused with Talbot's slightly later 1841 calotype or ‘talbotype’ process, in part because salt printing was mostly used for making prints from calotype paper negatives rather than live subjects. Salt print was a printing out process whereas calotype was developing out process.

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THE CAMERA OBSCURA

Camera Obscura is a 19th century optical device that started the history of photography and was often used by artists to make quick sketches in the field.Camera Obscura was invented by Johann Zahn in 1685. It is a latin term which means dark room. It is a device in a shape of a box or a room that lets the light through a small opening on one side and projects it on the other. An inverted image from the outside world appears against the wall or screen opposite the opening. The principle of the camera obscura has been known since ancient times, and the device was used for viewing astronomical phenomena such as solar eclipses from at least the thirteenth century. During the eighteenth century the camera obscura enjoyed widespread popularity, and large camera obscura’s were constructed for use as public entertainments.

Camera Obscura was invented by Johann Zahn in 1685. Modern cameras, even high-end DSLRs, are physically nothing more than an advanced version of the camera obscura. Even the ancient Greeks were familiar with this optical gadget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvzpu0Q9RTU&ab_channel=NationalGeographic

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KEVIN CARTER

Kevin carter was a south African photojournalist, born on 13sept 1960 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He took his life at the age of 33. Also, he was a member of ‘The bang bang club’  and the recipient of a Pulitzer prize for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan. His story is also depicted in the book ‘The Bang Bang club’.

He recorded the film on racial strife and political chaos of his native South Africa, but he captured international attention and the 1994 pulitzer prize for a haunting photograph of a vulture patiently watching a starving Sudanese child. Despite his own comfortable suburban childhood, Carter rejected the inequities of apartheid in his native land at an early age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Carter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl

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RAJA DEEN DAYAL

The doyen of Indian Photographers, Lala Deen Dayal was born in 1844 at Sardhana in Meerut in United Provinces. He was one of the most widely recognized photographers from the Indian subcontinent. Today he remains among the most celebrated figures from this earlier era.Over the course of his remarkable career, Dayal opened studios in Indore, Secunderabad, and Bombay, employing over fifty staff photographers and assistants. Together, they produced more than 30,000 images of architecture, landscape, and people that have played a central role in how India’s past has been visualized.

After having received enough recognition, Deen Dayal decided to cover other parts of India to complete his architecture photograph series. He also set up studios in Indore, Secunderabad, and Bombay.

In 1885, he was introduced to the Nizam of Hyderabad. Deen Dayal accompanied the Nizam to ceremonial parties, receptions and hunting expeditions where he photographed his palaces, rich carpets, marble statues amongst many other riches. Dayal also photographed buildings and monuments of archaeological significance in the Nizam’s territories and documented events in the Nizam’s dominions, such as visits by viceroys and rulers of other countries.

One Interesting fact about him is he clicked the images of both royalty and commoners not like other photographers who clicked according to class divide.

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CHRISTINA DE MIDDEL

Cristina de Middel (born in 1975) is a Spanish documentary photographer and artist living and working in Uruapan, Mexico. she self-published The Afronauts in 2012, a photobook about the short-lived Zambian space program in Southern Africa. She was nominated for the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for The Afronauts. In 2013, she also received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography.

In 1964, the newly independent nation of Zambia began a space program with the intention of putting the first African on the Moon. The program was short-lived, but it reflected the excitement and ambitions of a young country and with that she created “The Afronauts,” a body of photographs, drawings and related sculptures. Fictional in most respects, “The Afronauts” nonetheless opens with an enlarged reprint of an actual letter from one Zambian minister to another, saying that “America and Russia may lose the race to the Moon, according to Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, Director of the Zambia National Academy of Space Research”.

Her re-creation includes photographs shot in Spain of people wearing spacesuits sewn from African fabric, and helmets that were streetlamp globes. Archival shots of African villages are altered to include midcentury astronauts.

“The Afronauts” is a smart and charming show. Rather than ridiculing Zambia’s ambitions, Ms. Middel compares them to the dreams of other nations and peoples.

https://vimeo.com/43859875

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THE DECISIVE MOMENT- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup, France. He was a French photographer whose humane, spontaneous photographs helped establish photojournalism as an art form. He was a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. Cartier-Bresson was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947.

For him the camera was a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a “meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

The Decisive Moment

The Decisive Moment—originally called Images à la Sauvette—is one of the most famous books in the history of photography, assembling Cartier-Bresson’s best work from his early years. Published in 1952 by Simon and Schuster, New York, in collaboration with Editions Verve, Paris, it was lavishly embellished with a collage cover by Henri Matisse.

This moment basically refers to capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.

Bresson made a great impact on photography, in part, due to his ability to capture such moments. The time between observing, composing, and shooting must occur with foresight and instinct.

This moment occurs when the visual and psychological elements of people in a real life scene spontaneously and briefly come together in perfect resonance to express the essence of that situation. Some people believe that the unique purpose of photography, as compared to other visual arts, is to capture this fleeting, quintessential, and holistic instant in the flow of life. For this reason, many photographers often mention the decisive moment, or similar ideas about capturing the essence of a transitory moment, when they describe their work.

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D-DAY

D-Day is about the story of Robert Capa and his photography that took place on 6 June 1944, He was an American legendary war photographer and photojournalist.

On 6June 1944 Robert Capa captured the moments of war, but only a handful of shots survived from what Capa captured that day, but the Magnificent 11, as they were called, became part of the day's lore.

On that day, more than 160,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy. It was, and remains, the largest amphibious invasion in history, and struck a critical blow to the Nazis, hastening the end of World War II. The man who arguably let the public witness the horrors of that day was Robert Capa-the sole photographer  who captured the first wave incursion on Omaha Beach that morning. His photographs, including an iconic image of a soldier crawling through the surf, became enduring records of the plight of the American soldiers. And they were almost lost forever.

Robert Capa clicked 4 rolls of 35mm and then send it back to office to make them RnD. But 3 of them got destroyed and nothing left in them but the 4th one got some pictures and john Morris(editor for life) ordered them to printed and this picture American soldier approaching shores clearly stands out and became the popular.

This photograph shows how Capa has to turn his back on the soldiers to capture that moment, also it showed the invasion in a way that it could be felt by the viewers.

The surviving photographs were sent across the Atlantic the following morning, and a selection was printed in Life’s June 19th issue with the headline: “Beachheads of Normandy: The Fateful Battle For Europe is Joined by Sea and Air.”

‘Life was the only eye witness that was really respected because there was no television’.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18S8o7fQR2U0HGLGcA04mWq2JTI1Y8HSl/view