Daguerre’s Abstraction

Abstract

The understanding of abstraction in so-called Western art theory is usually a narrative ‘towards’ purism or universalism. The impact of photography on these discourses is usually related to this in its function of representational realism, and attempt to join modernist discourses through a tern to abstraction. Photography is more rarely examined in terms of its contribution to abstraction. This paper turns to that question by looking at the early role of photography in constructing abstraction, notably in pictures made by Louis Daguerre.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The best recent historical work on Daguerre’s career is Pinson.

² In the subsequent craze for portraits, of course, the body of the subject was fixed, seated with a head clamp, even with the new faster lenses that were developed. The first ever public portrait studio in Europe opened two years after these pictures, in 1841, in the Polytechnic Institution building off Cavendish Square in London.

³ The nuanced distinctions between these terms “sympathy” and “empathy” is interesting. In the OED, sympathy is defined as “affected with the same feeling as another”, and empathy as the “power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) object of contemplation”. The Wikipedia entry, by contrast, is dominated by accounts drawn from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and the study of “mirror neurons”, etc.

⁴ However, Leroy is of course quite wrong to say that the paint strokes are black, since the impressionists regarded black as a “non-colour” (see Shapiro 214). In fact, these “blacks” are made by nuanced shades, contrasts and context. In this winter cityscape, it is the impression of black, created by multi-colour tones, that is used to create the “multitude” of these middle-classes strollers.

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David Bate

David Bate is Professor of Photography at the University of Westminster, and is a practicing photo-artist. David's recent publications include the photobook Zone (Artwords, 2012) and the widely used book Photography: Key Concepts (Berg, 2009).