Art: Magic Boxes

On March 3, 1839 a Parisian peepshow known as a Diorama, in which panoramic tableaux were exhibited, burned down. In it gapers could view Edinburgh by moonlight, the Swiss Alps, St. Peter’s in Rome and other romantic views set up and painted by its owner, M. Louis Daguerre. For several years Scenepainter Daguerre had been experimenting with photography, had invented a secret process for taking pictures on sensitized copper plates. Loss of the Diorama was the loss of Daguerre’s income. He accepted an annuity of 4,000 francs ($800) from the French Government for the secret of his invention, which was shortly the subject of a booklet soon translated into six languages, published in 26 editions.

Since that time photography has vitally affected the progress of both science and art has become serious business for thousands, a hobby for millions. Last week New York’s Museum of Modern Art continued its great series of loan exhibitions with the most-comprehensive exhibition ot photography ever held in the U. S. With 841 separate exhibits backed by a 225-page explanatory catalog, the Museum has attempted to present and illustrate the history and development of photography, and also to show a selection of the work of the greatest living photographers.

Organizer of the show and author of the catalog, which was hailed last week as one of the most concise histories of photography available in English, was the Museum’s librarian, Beaumont Newhall. With prints as well as actual pieces of equipment he has been able to show practically every milestone in the history of photography. Of particular interest is an 18th Century camera obscura, a box with a simple lens at one end, a ground glass screen at the other which showed an inverted image of any brightly lighted object at which it was pointed, was widely used by inept amateur painters. Other interesting pieces of apparatus: a complete outfit for sensitizing, exposing and developing daguerreotype plates; a portable darkroom for sensitizing the next great improvement over the daguerreotype, the messy short-lived collodion plates with which such photographers as Matthew Brady were able to make a fairly complete record of the Civil War (TIME, Nov. 16, 1931); the first Eastman Kodak, which took 100 two-inch pictures on a strip of sensitized paper, then had to be sent to the factory to be fitted with a new film; a model Leica camera used by Admiral Byrd.

Among the important old photographs on view:

¶A copy of the earliest known daguerreotype, a still life of a corner of Louis Daguerre’s studio showing plaster Cupids heads, a bas relief and a large straw covered wine bottle, taken in 1837.

¶A portrait of Massachusetts’ Supreme Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, looking like a disheveled bulldog in a white stock and rumpled tailcoat, taken around 1850.

¶A portrait of Victor Hugo seated on a rock during his exile in Jersey, taken by his son in 1853.

¶Sad-eyed Alfred, Lord Tennyson, taken in 1868 by one of the first and most ardent of amateurs, Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron. Mrs. Cameron was the first to use deliberate distortion of focus to get a soft, painting-like quality in her prints.

¶A rudimentary example of the composograph, The Two Ways of Life by Swedish O. G. Rejlander, made in 1857. This extraordinary picture of semi-nude Victorian beauties, bearded counselors and praying virgins (see cut) was made by carefully printing 30 separate collodion negatives on a single sheet of paper.

¶More of bearded Eadweard Muybridge’s studies in the mechanics of motion, made with a battery of electrically operated still cameras (TIME, Feb. 15), in particular one of a white horse jumping a fence with a jockey who had obligingly stripped himself of everything except a long black cigar.