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SHADES OF LIGHT Based on text from the original book: Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988 Gael Newton, 1988 Australian National Gallery   Introduction    footnotes   The Travels were printed by Benjamin Motte in two volumes and illustrated with maps. Swift's authorship - of what appeared at first glance to be an authentic journal - was soon revealed. Captain Cook did not circumnavigate the continent; this was left to Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) in 1801-1803. By this time it was clear that 30'2'S. Jay entirely in Central Australia. Flinders' book, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), helped popularise the name Australia. Bernard Smith's European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960) remains the classic study of the impact of Pacific exploration, in terms of a relationship between art and science, in depictions of the Antipodes. Figures cited by S.J. Checkland in The Rise of Industrial Society in England (London: Longman, 1964), p.4. See The Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. 3 (Sydney: Grolier, 1983), p.53, and Bryce Fraser, ed., The Macquarie Book of Events, 2nd edn (Sydney: Macquarie Library, 1984), pp.63-7, for later demographic developments. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), pp. 1-2. Giphantia; or, A View of What Has Passed, "at is Now Passing, and During the Present Century, What Will Pass, in the World, extract from translation of 1761, in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), pp, 13-14. Gernsheim's The Origins of Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) is an authoritative account of the 'prehistory' and of the early inventors of photography. Ibid., p.6. Edward De Bono, ed., Eureka: An Illustrated History of Inventions from the K%eel to the Computer (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), pp.9, 194, A. Hyatt Mayor, Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (Princeton: Princeton' University Press, 1971), pp.612-13. The development of the camera obscura and camera lucida are dealt with in standard histories of photography. See also John H. Hammond, The Camera Obscura: A Chronicle (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1981) for a full history of their role as drawing aids and entertainments. An ms. account of the use of the camera obscura and lucida in Australia, by the author, is held by the Australian National Gallery Library. William Parker, ed., Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences, Selected Essays by Heinrich Schwarz (New York: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., Peregrine Smith Books and The Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985). Peter Galassi in his Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), p.30, n.2, acknowledges Schwarz's work as the stimulus to the exhibition of that title at the Museum of Modern Art. This view is not exclusive to Schwarz; a number of photohistories express similar views, e.g. Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: Godine, 1980). See also, Robert A. Sobieszek in 'Photography and the Theory of Realism in the Second Empire. A Reexamination of a Relationship', in Van Deren Coke, ed., 100 Years of Photographic History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1975), pp.46-50. Thomas Carlyle, 'Signs of the Times', (1829) extract printed in Christopher Harvie, Graham Martin and Aaron Scharf, eds, Industrialisation and Culture 1830-1914 (London: Macmillan for the Open University Press, 1970), pp.21-4. English critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) also equated photography with the growth of despicable mechanisation in society. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, 'Photography and Industrialisation: John Ruskin and the Moral Dimension of Photography', Exposure 21:2 (1983): pp. 10-13. Reprinted in Beaumont Newhall, op. cit., pp.93-4. Lady Eastlake's long essay on photography, which she saw as a new medium of communication, is described by Newhall as one of the first histories of the medium. Beaumont, Newhall, op. cit., p. 112, a reprint of Baudelaire's 1859 essay from The Mirror of Art, trans]. by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955). In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; transl. Harry Zohn, reprint (New York: FontanaCollins 1973), pp.219-53, Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.3. Peter Mason's The Light Fantastic (Melbourne: Penguin, 1981) is a highly readable account of the interrelationship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century research into light electricity and magnetism. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p.220, notes that 'Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film'. Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872), artist and developer of the electric telegraph in 1831-44, experimented with photographic processes and was one of the first to introduce the daguerreotype to America. See Helmut Gernsheim, op. cit., pp.99-120. McLuhan's first major book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), used the concept of a single world-city, generated by electronic media. The term 'global vil]age' appeared later in his Explorations in Communication, edited with Edmund Carpenter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p.xi. McLuhan describes photography as 'the mechanisation of the perspective painting' directly aiding the growth of the global village by'breaking the barriers of nationalistic vernacular space', p.208. Barzun's 1959 essay on the exhibition is reprinted in Irving and Harriet A. Deer, The PopularArts: A Critical Reader (New York: Scribners, 1967), pp.93-6. See also ch. 13,n.I1 for Allan Sekula's recent criticism of the exhibition. See frontispiece of catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955). Official illustrated catalogue, Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations 185 1, Reports by thejuiies, 4 vols (London: Spicer Brothers and W. Clowes and Sons, 1852). Part one of a series of etchings published in 1851 by Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) 1851: or The adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty Sandboys and family... See illustration by Nadar (18201910) titled Pluie de photographes, 1855, from journal Pour Rire, reproduced in William Parker, op. cit., pl.1, and Th6odore Maurisset's lithograph La daguerriotypomanie of December 1839, reproduced in Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville, 1984), p1.8. See Ralph Hyde, 'Mr Wyld's Monster Globe', History Today 10 (February 1970): pp. 118-23. Quoted in Denis Botting, Humboldt and 'The Cosmos' (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), p.257. Humboldt's promotion of a global perspective in natural history was highly influential. Cosmos was published in five volumes between 1845-1859 and widely read. See also Bernard Smith, op. cit., pp. 151-7 for a discussion of Humboldt. Frontispiece to supplement to the Illustrated London News, bound edition of volume 3, July-December 1843 (published January 1844). Quoted in Photojournalism, Life Library of Photography series (New York: Time Inc, 1971), p.62, Talbot, writing of his early camera pictures, described them as: I very perfect but extremely small pictures; such as might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist'. From his 'Some account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the process by which Natural Objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the Artist's Pencil', Athenaeum, no.589 (February 1839): p. 116. return to Introduction        next chapter           contents