"Photoshopping" Before Photoshop: Gustave Le Grey

Since the creation of Photoshop, we have become accustomed to airbrushed celebrities, slimmed down models, and pictures filtered to perfection. It is almost hard to imagine a world without Instagram and Hipstamatic, or even CatPaint, which actually lets you photoshop cats into all of your photos. However, there was a world without these things, and yet, despite the lack of editing software, photograph manipulation has always existed.

I recently read an article on Huffington Post about a current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop." The "Faking It" exhibit features approximately 200 photographs from the 1840s to the 1990 that have all been manipulated in some way. The exhibition is divided into sections, which are based on the various different reasons photographers used to manipulate the photographs. These include:

(1) creating a photograph that looks less like a photograph and more like that of the image we see with the naked eye, like that of Gustave Le Grey, which I will discuss further:

"Cloud Study, Light-Dark," Gustave Le Grey (photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

(2) manipulating a photograph so that it looks like a painted picture
(3) politically manipulated photographs
(4) novelty photographs:

"Man Juggling His Own Head," Unidentified Artist (photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

(5) photographs manipulated for magazines and newspapers

(6) photographs from the latter part of the 20th century by photographers harkening back to the early days of photograph manipulation processes

One of the processes that I found to be the most interesting was that which was employed by the 19th century French photographer, Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Grey. A student of drawing and painting, Gustave Le Grey was fascinated with the idea of creating vivid photographs of landscapes, which was hard to do at the time due to the monochromatic colors available. While portraits could be pigmented to make the sitters come alive, realistic landscapes were much more difficult to create. The proper exposure of both the land and the sky was difficult to achieve and could not be done without sacrificing the look of one for the other (Barnes).  

"Gustave Le Grey, 1854," by Alphonse De Launay (photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"The Great Wave, Sète, 1857," by Gustave Le Grey
 (photo courtesy of  the Victoria & Albert Museum)

However, to combat this, Le Grey came up with idea to print the landscapes using two separate negatives. One negative was exposed for the sky, the other was exposed for the land or the sea. Both of the colodion-on-negatives were then placed on albumen paper and printed in the sunlight (Barnes). The result was a realistically vivid print, like that of his 1857 "Great Wave":










The most fascinating thing about the work of Le Grey compared to that of the other photographers featured in the exhibition is that his manipulation work was done not to lie or deceive his viewers, or to achieve a political or idealogical gain, but to bring the natural beauty of the landscape into the photograph and to make it as realistic as he possibly could, given the tools of his time. Looking through the eyes of a painter, he believed it was his job to make photography an art form: "Since its first discovery, photography has made rapid progress, especially as regards the instruments employed in its practice. It now remains for the artist to raise it to its proper position among the fine arts" (Barnes).

In Sontag's article, "In Plato's Cave," she says that, "photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something" (Sontag, 10). Through his innovation, Le Grey was able to allow his viewers to experience something that was previously unattainable through landscape paintings and photographs.








References:

Barnes, M. (2003). Sea and sky photographs by Gustave Le Grey. Retrieved from http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/gustave-le-grey-exhibition/


"First Major Exhibition Devoted to History of Manipulated Photography Before Digital Age Opens at Metropolitan Museum October 11." The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved from http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/press-room/exhibitions/2012/faking-it

Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd.