Pennell Fotografie

David Hockney. Secret Knowledge, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part Three | Letteratura artistica

The thesis of a systematic use of the camera obscura by Vermeer [120] actually already dated back to the nineteenth century. In 1891, in fact, the American etcher Joseph Pennell interpreted the difference in scale between the two figures, observable in Officer and Laughing Girl, as a consequence of the use of optical instruments [121] 

[121] Pennell, Joseph - Photography as a hindrance and a help to art, British Journal of Photography, no. 1618, vol. XXXVIII, 1891, pp. 294-296.


 

Many artists saw the perspective created by the camera lens as being as being a distortion, an unnatural reading of the subject. Yet, as would later be proved, the camera’s perspective was entirely natural—it was the expansion of perspective which was commonplace in paintings which was false. The painter George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) believed that photography “has unfortunately introduced into art a misconception of perspective which is as ugly as it is false,” and the American artist Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) was so disillusioned by the perspective created by the camera that he abandoned using photographs as reference.

For much of the second half of the nineteenth century, the lenses used in architectural and landscape photogra-phy were of relatively long focal length, requiring quite a substantial camera to subject distance in the case of churches and cathedrals. Such lenses—with a eld of view of between 10 and 30 were essential if large format images were to be created which exhibited the degree of sharpness demanded by early photographers. Until optical manufacturing techniques advanced suf ciently to eliminate spherical aberration, long fo- cal length lenses were the surest way of achieving a perfectly at image eld across the entire plate area. The effect of that was to create a slight compression of perspective—the atness about which Leighton, Watts, Pennell and others complained. By the end of the century, with wide-angle lenses offering elds of view of between 50 ̊ and 80 ̊, photography was able to create the same sort of enhanced perspective so beloved of painters.

 

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