by Jeanne Willette | Mar 28, 2015 | Reviews
SCOUNDREL TIME, AGAIN—CENSORSHIP RETURNS Art of the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011 Like the swallows return to Capistrano, censorship of art returns every time forces of morality feel emboldened or threatened. Two decades ago, it...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 27, 2015 | Modern
NADAR AND THE CELEBRITIES Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910) The poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who never met a camera he didn’t pose for, wrote a famous diatribe against photography and its narcissistic pleasures. After a long preamble...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 20, 2015 | Modern
THE TROUBLESOME AMATEUR Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) A Question of Interpretation For early photographers one of the most astonishing aspects of camera vision was the lack of control of the maker. The plethora of detail must have been particularly shocking for those...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 16, 2015 | Reviews
GROWN UP DIGITAL. HOW THE NET GENERATION IS CHANGING YOUR WORLD (2009) By Don Tapscott Is the Internet changing our brains? We know what our brains look like on drugs—-but do we know what our brains look like on the web? Don Tapscott, one of the experts in...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 13, 2015 | Modern
THE CAMERA AND THE WAR Matthew Brady’s Operatives “My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.” Matthew Brady Without a doubt the best book written on the...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 6, 2015 | Modern
IMPERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY Maxime Du Camp (1822-1894) The Camera’s Vision Photography inherited the conventions of painting and these conventions are artificially organized into hierarchies that emphasize contents according to the subject matter. Other objects are...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 5, 2015 | Reviews
THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION—WHETHER YOU WANT IT OR NOT: VESTIGIAL THINKING/FUTURE THINKING Note: I wrote this article in September of 2010, long before there was the word or concept called MOOC. In the future—soon to be available for your...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 26, 2015 | Modern
ROGER FENTON IN THE CRIMEA The Beginnings of War Photography The Crimean War It would be interesting to create a history out of the importance of maps and the stories they tell. Take the map of Russia for example. The nation is huge but it is locked between the Arctic...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 20, 2015 | Modern
PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE VICTORIAN ERA Roger Fenton (1819-1869) Royal Patronage and Photography By the middle of the nineteenth century, the dominate power in the world was Great Britain, a pair of small islands off the coast of continental Europe. Thanks to its powerful...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 14, 2015 | Postmodern
THE NEW AVANT-GARDE: RETURN TO CHANGE presented by Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette to the College Art Association, New York, New York Saturday, February 12, 2011 A hundred and forty years ago, the art world in Paris faced a self-imposed crisis—or to be more...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 13, 2015 | Modern
PHOTOGRAPHING WATER AND SKY Jean-Baptiste-Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) Whether he wanted to be or not, Gustave Le Gray was a child of his time, deeply engaged in creating a national heritage for France through his photographic practice. After the French Revolution,...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 6, 2015 | Modern
PHOTOGRAPHING THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) “Watch the horizon, watch the horizon. . . that’s Le Gray.” Sam Wagstaff, 1987 Gustave Le Gray lived what is called a “slipping down life.” At the beginning of his...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 31, 2015 | Reviews
WHAT IF AL GORE HAD BEEN THE PRESIDENT? A Review of THE ASSAULT ON REASON, 2007, by Al Gore One of the great “what ifs” in American history is “what if Al Gore had become president in 2000?” Notice I did not say, “What if Al Gore had won the 2000 election?” For...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 30, 2015 | Modern
PRESERVING THE PAST Mission Héliographique: The Project Part Two The invention and development of photography straddled a transition period in both French and English art. The fact that photography was developed in the gap between a declining Romanticism and a rising...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 23, 2015 | Modern
PRESERVING THE PAST Mission Héliographique: Origins Part One One of the major problems raised by the French Revolution was the status of the Catholic Church. With everything old swept away, including the monarchy, the nobility, and religion itself, the brave new...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 17, 2015 | Reviews
REMEMBERING SARAH The deportation of French Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps raises questions similar to those asked of the Germans—how could such supposedly “civilized” peoples enter into a cold-blooded program of mass extermination? Sarah’s...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 16, 2015 | Modern
PAPER: THE OTHER PHOTOGRAPHIC METHOD Artists and Photography The Directorial Mode From the beginning, paper and plate had vied for being the appropriate support for a photographic image. It was by a mere series of chances that the daguerreotype gained ascendancy over...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 9, 2015 | Modern
THE DAGUERROTYPE AND PORTRAITURE Daguerreotypomania “Readiness” for Photography, Part Two In 1989 the French photographer, Gisèle Freund wrote Photography and Society in which she attempted to explain the role of photography in mid-nineteenth century...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 3, 2015 | Reviews
WITH WERNER HERZOG IN “THE CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS” Thirty thousand years ago. This is when art began. Chauvet Cave. This is where art began. Southern France near the Pont d-arc formation. This is where the first art was made. This is the oldest and...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 2, 2015 | Modern
HIPPOLYTE BAYARD (1801-1887) Another Inventor, Another Process The First Fake Photograph Among the many oddities of the history of the invention of photography is that not only was photography invented by so many people at the same time, but also that few of these...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 1, 2015 | Modern
The Panoramas: Rewriting History Representing history in France had always been fraught with difficulty for centuries. Not until the Third Republic (1870-1940) was it possible to report, write or make art without the threatening overhang of censorship, but, after the...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 26, 2014 | Modern
WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT (1800-1877) The Pencil of Nature (1836) THE CALOTYPE By 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot, an English gentleman, prominent landowner, accomplished mathematician, and amateur experimenter in the photographic arts had produced the world’s...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 20, 2014 | Other
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM 2008 BY NAOMI KLEIN Naomi Klein is my hero. She is beautiful and brilliant and can look at the sick world in which we are trying to exist, diagnose it, and give a prognosis for the future. If you want to understand...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 19, 2014 | Modern
WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT (1800-1877) Another “Inventor of Photography,” Same Time, Different Place Deep in the heart of Wiltshire, England, Lacock Abbey was established first as a refugee and retreat for Augustine nuns by Ela, the Countess of Salisbury, in...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 12, 2014 | Modern
THE DAGUERREOTYPE Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) “I am burning with desire to see your experiments with nature,” Daguerre wrote to Niépce in 1828. The partnership of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Jacques Daguerre was an unlikely one. Niépce was a...
