Form & Content-2

The Camera Arts

FORM & CONTENT

The darkroom became the studio of the photographer.  It was there where visual ideas translated into images:  an opportunity to manipulate the film negative, to explore techniques and discover the potential the photograph had in interpreting objects and ideas.

Alfred Stieglitz Links to an external site.understood this potential, and as a photographer, editor and gallery owner, was a major force in promoting photography as an art form. He led in forming the Photo Secession in 1902, a group of photographers who were interested in defining the photograph as an art form in itself, not just by the subject matter in front of the lens. Subject matter became a vehicle for an emphasis on composition, lighting and textural effects. His own photographs reflect a range of themes. The Terminal Links to an external site. (1892) is an example of “straight photography”: images from the everyday taken with smaller cameras and little manipulation.

In The Terminal Stieglitz captures a moment of bustling city street life on a cold winter day. A massive stone façade looms in the background while a half-circle of horses and street wagons are led out of the picture to the right. The whole cold, gritty scene is softened by steam rising off the horses and the snow provides highlights. But the photo holds more than formal aesthetic value. The jumble of buildings, machines, humans, animals and weather conditions provides a glimpse into American urban culture straddling two centuries. Within ten years from the time this photo was taken horses will be replaced by automobiles and subway stations will transform a large city’s movement into the twentieth century.

Other photographs by Stieglitz concentrate on more conceptual ideas. His series of cloud photos, called Equivalents Links to an external site., are efforts to record the essence of a particular reality, and to do it “so completely, that all who see [the picture of it] will relive an equivalent of what has been expressed”. His Equivalents photos establish a new level for the aesthetic content of ideas, and are essentially the first abstract photographs.

Darkroom Processes: The camera’s ability to capture a moment in time is not without difficulties. We’ve all had the experience where we declare “If I only had a camera with me!” On one hand, photographs taken in the studio are controlled productions, with the photographer working to find balances with lighting and composition. On the other hand, straight outdoor photography is unpredictable. Lighting and weather conditions change quickly, and so do the locations where the photographer will find that “one great shot”. To compensate for these variables, photographers typically take hundreds of pictures, bracketing shutter speeds and aperture settings as they go, then carefully editing each negative and print until they find the handful, or perhaps only the one, that will be the best image of them all.

The darkroom is where the exposed film is developed. It must be dark to eliminate any chance of outside light ruining the exposed film. In black and white film developing, a low-intensity red or amber colored lamp called a safe light is used so the photographer can see their way around during developing. The light emitted from the lamp is of a wavelength that does not affect exposure results.

 

 

Safelight used in the darkroom.
Licensed through Creative Commons

 

Other tools used in a darkroom are typically an enlarger, an instrument with a lens and aperture in it that projects the image from a negative onto a base. Photographic paper is then placed under the projected image and exposed to light. The paper is put into a series of solutions that progressively start and stop the development of the positive photographic image. The development process gives the photographer another opportunity to manipulate the original image. Specific areas on the print can be exposed to more light (“burning” or darkening areas) or less light (“dodging” or lightening areas) in order to bring up details or create more dramatic visual effects.  The image can also be cropped from its original size depending on how the photographer wants to present the final image.

 

Photograph of the body of water with dodge and burn text overlaid in order to give an example of the two effects.
Licensed through Creative Commons

Light meters are used to calibrate the amount of light available for a certain exposure. The photographer adjusts the aperture of the camera to allow for more or less light to fall on the film during the initial exposure. But light meters alone don’t guarantee the perfect photograph because they indicate the total amount of light, without respect to specific areas of light or dark within the format of the picture.

For this, the photographers Ansel Adams Links to an external site. and Fred Archer Links to an external site.created the zone system. The system relies on two interrelated factors – the visualization of how the photographer wants the print to look even before they take it, and a correct light calibration from all the areas by assigning numbers to different brightness values – or ‘zones’ on the value scale, from white to black and all the various gray tones in between. The zone system is tedious both in the field and in the darkroom, but, since its inception in 1940, has spurred creation of photographs absolutely stunning in their clarity, composition and graphic drama. Adams’ Taos Pueblo below is an example.

 

Ansel Adams, Taos Pueblo, 1942. Black and white photograph.
Collection of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Library of Congress Image in the public domain