The proliferation of pet photography is often thought of as a modern phenomenon; The National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, UK, reveals that portraits of our furry friends have always been a cultural obsession. History of photography (through pets) Highlights historic photos of our animal companions They are from the museum's collection, the oldest of which date back to the 1830s.
The first image in the exhibition, created by artist J.M. Burbank, utilizes the silver-based photographic negative/positive process pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1834 to create a collection of favorites. I am drawing a cat. The soft-toned image looks more like a pencil drawing than a high-contrast photograph, but it's not just a successful technical experiment; seduce the cat Portraits of his feline subjects. It's also an example of Burbank's small footprint in history. Burbank continued to exhibit his animal experiments throughout his 1830s in England.
Ruth Quinn, curator of photography and photographic technology at the National Museum of Science and Media, observed that the development of the photographic process can be traced through pet portraits throughout history.
“Even in the early days of cameras and printing technology, our beloved pets have always been immortalized in photographs,” Quinn said in a statement.
Naturally, the real origin of pet portraits is people who can't get enough of their domesticated companions. By the 1840s, Talbot's groundbreaking process flourished in a limited release capacity made available to the public by specific studios. While most works were content to commemorate their human subjects in this novel way, Mary Mitford, a prominent poet, novelist, and playwright of the time, exhibited her portrait in 1847. insisted on doing so. her dog. In these early stages of photography, it was doubtful that the animal subjects would be able to remain motionless for the duration of her four-minute exposure. But Mitford's dog, in keeping with Nicholas Henneman's image, remained perfectly still, performing with the patience of a loyal companion (or patient entourage).
Photography is not a field where there is only one innovator. In 1839, Frenchman Louis Jacquesman de Daguerre came to the attention of Talbot with his eponymous daguerreotype technique. This technique prints a single positive image directly onto a silver plate, producing spectacular results. People did not waste time creating daguerrotypes. dogErotic type, as well as an image of unknown origin from approximately 1846 in the museum's collection. Unlike Mitford's dog, this dog subject did not like to sit completely still, which caused some distortion in its image, even though it was a very good dog.
As William Wegman says, the only thing better than a pet portrait is one where the pet appears to be participating in a human activity. His post-1860s image entitled “The Old Batchelor” depicts a cat on top of a wine barrel alongside a glass and corked wine bottle. This image is an example of a “cabinet card”, which was a fashion in photography at the time, and used an albumen treatment to produce a high-contrast image of a hazy sienna wash. Cabinet cards were essentially the first meme, as they were designed to be exchanged or shared with family and friends. (Get it? It's a “batch” of wine. We all know bachelors drink a lot, but cats…well, not all memes are funny, anyway.)
As the saying goes, everything old is new again.
