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6 INTRODUCTION
creativity in shaping the given material. In 1853, Sir William Newton suggested that the photographic image could, and should, be altered so as to make the result conform to the "acknowledged principles of Fine Art."18 His suggestion was heeded. Not content with what they believed to be a mere copying of nature, numerous photographers aimed at pictures which, as an English critic claimed, would delineate Beauty instead of merely representing Truth.19 Incidentally, it was not primarily the many painters in the ranks of the photographers who voiced and implemented such aspirations.
With notable exceptions the "artist-photographers" of those days followed a tendency which may be called "formative," since it sprang from their urge freely to compose beautiful pictures rather than to capture nature in the raw. But their creativity invariably manifested itself in photographs that reflected valued painterly styles and preferences; consciously or not, they imitated traditional art, not fresh reality.20 Thus the sculptor Adam-Salomon, a top-ranking artist-photographer, excelled in portraits which, because of their "Rembrandt lighting" and velvet drapery, caused the poet Lamartine to recant his initial opinion that photographs were nothing but a "plagiarism of nature."21 Upon seeing these pictures, Lamartine felt sure that photography was equally capable of attaining the peaks of art. What happened on a relatively high level became firmly established in the lower depths of commercial photography: a host of would-be artistphotographers catered to the tastes of the juste-milieu which, hostile to realism, still went for romantic painting and the academic idealism of Ingres and his school.22 There was no end of prints capitalizing on the appeal of staged genre scenes, historical or not.23 Photography developed into a lucrative industry, especially in the field of portraiture in which Disderi set a widely adopted pattern.24 From 1852, his portrait-carte de visite ingratiated itself with the petit bourgeois, who felt elated at the possibility of acquiring, at low cost, his likeness— a privilege hitherto reserved for the aristocracy and the well-to-do upper middle class.25 As might be expected, Disderi too preached the gospel of beauty.26 It met the needs of the market. Under the Second Empire professional photographers, no less than popular painters, sacrificed truth to conventional pictorialness by embellishing the features of their less attractive clients.27
All this means that such concern with art led the artist-photographers to neglect, if not deliberately to defy, the properties of their medium, as perceived by the realists. As far back as 1843, daguerreotypists renounced camera explorations of reality for the sake of soft-focus pictures.28 AdamSalomon relied on retouching for artistic effect,29 and Julia Margaret Cameron availed herself of badly made lenses in order to get at the "spirit"