Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the modern age

Description

Photography was entangled with art from the very moment of its invention by painter and printmaker Louis Daguerre in 1839. Painting with Light is the first publication to explore photography's complex and fascinating inter-relationship with painting and sculpture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Opening with the experimental beginnings of the medium in the 1830s and 40s, the book covers the full range of photography in Britain up to the early 1900s, concluding with its flowering as a distinct art form in Pictorialism, which sought to express emotional and imaginative states through the photographic image. Spanning seventy-five years from the daguerreotype to very early colour photography, the book explores pioneer photographers, the Pre-Raphaelite circle and ravishing Symbolist and Pictorialist works, including landscapes and life studies, documentary and scientific realism, and images that experimented with atmospheric and psychological effects. Organised chronologically, it features essays on the camera before the1840s; David Octavius Hill's pioneering photography studio; the connections between early photographic and artistic approaches to nature; social realism; and anti-naturalism and the supernatural. It uncovers the issues raised by exchanges between photography and other media, many of them still live today, from the question of copying versus creating and truth versus lies to artist versus machine and tradition versus modernity. Mixing iconic and rarely seen works, Photography into Art includes over one hundred illustrations accompanied by refreshing new scholarship - making this the essential book for collectors, gallerygoers and photography enthusiasts alike

Carol Jacobi is curator of British art, 1850-1915 at Tate. Hope Kingsley is curator for education and collections at the Wilson Centre for Photography, London.