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Past masters:
the art form may look simple enough,. |
Past masters: the art form may look simple
enough, but what is it that makes a good photographer a great
one? The curator of the Getty's collection, Weston Naef, explains.
There
are 1,600 photographers in the Getty collection, representing
the history of photography from the early 1840s onwards. A
new book and the accompanying exhibition at the Getty Museum
in Santa Monica, California, selects just 38 artists we have
defined as "Photographers of Genius". How were they
chosen? First, they had to be held in depth at the Getty.
They had to be ahead of their time. They had to exert a measurable
influence on their contemporaries or successors. They had
to prove they could repeat their performance at will.
Perhaps the greatest genius was William Henry
Fox Talbot, active between 1835 and 1877. He devised a two-step
process by which multiple positive paper prints could be made
from a single negative. He was also the first to recognise
that multiple paper copies could be mounted on to, or adjacent
to, a page of printed text. Photographs and books have been
connected ever since.
Yet each photographer selected has
advanced the art of photography. The early French photographer
Hippolyte Bayard, a contemporary of Fox Talbot, was the first
to put his own voice into his work. Each one of his pictures
says: "This is me, this is an expression of my inner
self." Meanwhile, Roger Fenton, a Briton, was the first
person to make a speciality of working indoors. He achieved
interior photographs which were extraordinary...You
can read more.
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