A sepia-toned Piazza San Marco glows under a false moon, its gaslights hand-painted onto the negative. Carlo Naya’s darkroom alchemy transforms daylight into a quiet, imagined Venice—what details betray the illusion?

#Venice #PhotographyHistory #ClevelandMuseumofArt
https://clevelandart.org/art/2009.350

Want to read: Everything Is Photograph by Patricia Albers 📚:

I don’t usually post about books in the queue, but I just found this one, and wanted any other photographers interested to see it. Kertész took over 100,000 photographs, exhibited worldwide, and was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica.

https://cliff538.com/2026/05/13/want-to-read-everything-is.html

#books #photography #history #photographyhistory

Your art history post for today is actually photography history: by Kazumasa Ogawa (Japanese, 1860-1929), “Iris Kæmpferi,” 1896, colored collotype, 27.9 × 20.8 cm (11 × 8 3/16 in.), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. #arthistory #photography #PhotographyHistory

From Public Domain Review: ‘Ogawa Kazumasa, a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher known for his pioneering work in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era. Studying photography from the age of fifteen, Ogawa moved to Tokyo aged twenty to further his study and develop his English skills which he believed necessary to deepen his technical knowledge. After opening his own photography studio and working as an English interpreter for the Yokohama Police Department, Ogawa decided to travel to the United States to learn first hand the advance photographic techniques of the time. Having little money, Ogawa managed to get hired as a sailor on the USS Swatara and six months later landed in Washington. For the next two years, in Boston and Philadelphia, Ogawa studied printing techniques including the complicated collotype process with which he'd make his name on returning to Japan.

In 1884, Ogawa opened a photographic studio in Tokyo and in 1888 established a dry plate manufacturing company, and the following year, Japan's first collotype business, the "K. Ogawa printing factory". He also worked as an editor for various photography magazines, which he printed using the collotype printing process and was a founding member of the Japan Photographic Society.’

Your photography history post for today: by the photography studio of Southworth and Hawes (American, active 1843–1863), Woman in Black Taffeta Dress and Lace Shawl, ca. 1850, daguerreotype with applied color, 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches (21.6 x 16.5 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. #photography #PhotographyHistory #vintagephotography

From the The Daguerreian Society: “A daguerreotype is the earliest widely adopted form of photography, introduced in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. It produced a highly detailed, one-of-a-kind image on a polished silver-coated copper plate. No negative was involved—each daguerreotype is a unique object…

The daguerreotype was revolutionary: It produced images with unprecedented accuracy and detail; made portraiture accessible to the middle class; and led to the rise of a booming photographic industry during the 1840s–1850s, as studios rapidly spread across Europe and the United States.”

Your photography history post for today: by Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978). Child with Apple Blossoms, Tennessee, 1948. #photography #photographyhistory #womenphotographers

From the Brooklyn Museum: ‘For 60 years, Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894–1978) used her camera to confront urgent social issues of her time, from urban poverty to labor rights to racial terror and inequality…

After starting out as a pioneering photojournalist—a rare role for women at the time—Kanaga would become known for her modernist still lifes and celebrated portraits. She captured the dignity and resilience of marginalized people, such as Black workers during the Jim Crow era. Unique among her peers, including her friends Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham, Kanaga employed modernism’s powerful visual language to take on inequities by provoking thought and fostering empathy. As she put it, “Most people try to be striking to catch the eye. I think the thing is not to catch the eye but the spirit.”’

Your photography history post for today: by Eugène Atget (1857-1927), “Boulevard de Strasbourg,” 1912. #photography #PhotographyHistory #vintagephotography #darkroomphotography #darkroom #blackandwhitephotography

From the International Center of Photography “Eugène Atget was a French photographer best known for his photographs of the architecture and streets of Paris. He took up photography in the late 1880s and supplied studies for painters, architects, and stage designers. Atget began shooting Paris in 1898 using a large format view camera to capture the city in detail. His photographs, many of which were taken at dawn, are notable for their diffuse light and wide views that give a sense of space and ambience. They also document Paris and its rapid changes; many of the areas Atget photographed were soon to be razed as part of massive modernization projects.

Atget’s photographs drew the admiration of a variety of artists, most notably Man Ray, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Man Ray even used one of Atget’s photographs for the cover of his surrealist magazine la Révolution surréaliste. The photographer Berenice Abbott preserved Atget’s prints and negatives and was the first person to exhibit Atget’s work outside of France.”

By Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), “Flood Refugees, Louisville, Kentucky,” 1937. #photography #photographyhistory #womenphotographers

From Phillips Auctioneers, New York, Apr 4 2019: “Flood Refugees, Louisville, Kentucky, dramatizes the humanitarian crisis created by the flooding of the Ohio River in 1937, which killed nearly 900 people and displaced thousands more in Louisville, hitting that city’s African-American quarter especially hard. At the time, the Louisville flood was considered one of the three most disastrous floods in American history.

Margaret Bourke-White was dispatched by LIFE magazine in January to cover the story, and she arrived on the last flight into Louisville before the airport closed. Hitching rides on rowboats and a raft, she made her way into the city and photographed throughout the flood zones. The photograph offered here is the best of that series, capturing the harsh juxtapositions of American life at the time in a single frame. It was first published in LIFE in February 1937. The irony of the billboard’s message was lost on no one: as LIFE’s caption wryly observed, 'It was going to take a lot of money to restore the American standard of living in the cities and towns of the Ohio Valley.'”

Over 80 years ago, but it could be today, in so many places. Your photography history post for today: by Wayne Miller (1918-2013), Two Boys, Naples, Italy, 1944. #photography #WarPhotography #photographyhistory #worldwarII

Excerpts from his obituary in the New York Times: ‘Mr. Miller, the Chicago-born son of a doctor and a nurse, was given a camera as a high school graduation present and a few years later enrolled in art school. Quickly determining that it did not suit him, he joined the Navy, and that, perhaps surprisingly, was where he got his first real chance to do what he wanted to do: “to photograph mankind,” he once put it, “and explain man to man.”

Mr. Miller was one of a half-dozen photographers asked by the photographer and curator Edward Steichen to join a special Navy photography unit he had formed during World War II. Mr. Miller traveled the world in his new role, capturing American soldiers in battle from the Philippines to the south of France, hopscotching his way through combat zones with rare freedom for a soldier…

“Miller’s work is intimate but never presumptuous; each black-and-white image retains its mystery,” [critic Margo] Jefferson wrote. “You realize there is more to know about this community than a camera’s eye — or ours — can find. It is part of his gift that he knows this, too.”’ ~ By William Yardley, “Wayne Miller, Photographer of War and Peace, Dies at 94,” The New York Times, May 25, 2013.

Your photography history photo for today was taken 81 years ago: an Italian boy looks out over the river Adige and the Victory Bridge (Ponte della Vittoria), dynamited by the Germans, photo by Schmidt, 196th Signal Photo Co., Verona, Italy, 26 April 1945. #photography #WarPhotography #photographyhistory

From the Army Pictorial Center, Signal Corps Photographic Center: ‘The 196th Signal Photographic Company under direction of Army Pictorial Service became activated on 24 February 1945 at Trespiano, Italy…

The mission of this command was to gather both still and motion pictures. The pictures to be secured were of many varieties. While their primary objective was to secure pictures of combat, the various missions entailed all types of record, historical, publicity, strategic and others of a morale-building nature. The company had a laboratory, which moved constantly with the organization itself and a well set-up headquarters personnel which had to keep the forward elements of the command teams always supplied with materials and necessities to aid them in completing their hazardous missions. For instance, in keeping the vehicles always read for their difficult journeys through rough terrain. Seeing the food, PX supplies, changes of clothing and photographic supplies were ever on hand. The Headquarters camera repair department had to have the cameras always in top condition. This was particularly difficult due to the many miles that separated the photo combat teams and the headquarters of these teams…

There were many problems to consider. One of them was the difficult terrain over which the teams traveled and the absolute necessity of getting their pictures back to Corps. After all, old pictures, of a particular news and noteworthy occasion are of no value if too late to tie in with the news of that particular sector engaged at the time. Getting the pictures to Corps, then flown back to rear laboratories and processed and flown to the States after censorship, was carried on with the least possible delay. Another thing was the constant traveling forward and backward under constant enemy fire.”