Photography as Reportage

Let’s go into a tad more detail about Mathew Brady; the gentleman who took the “Freedmen” photograph. He dramatically proved the ability of photography to provide a historical record and define human history. When the American Civil War began, Brady set out in a white duster and straw hat carrying a handwritten pass from Abraham Lincoln. Brady invested $100 000 to send assistants to help document the War.

From his photography wagons a great national trauma was etched forever in the collective memory of the American society. Brady’s intense documentary of the War altered society’s tendencies to romanticize war, dramatically. After this war, photography became an important documentary and communicative tool. It became common for photographers to be hired to accompany expeditions into the unexplored western territories.

Eadweard Muybridge was another adventurous photographer. He photographed Yosemite, Alaska and Central America. At some stage Leland Stanford, a former governor of California and president of the Central Pacific Railroad, commissioned Muybridge to document Leland’s theory that a trotting horse will lift all his feet off of the ground simultaneously. A $25 000 wager rested on the result of the photographic investigation.

During this project Muybridge became interested in photographing a horse’s stride at regular intervals. He reached success in 1877 and 1878. He lined up a battery of 24 cameras. All the cameras faced an intense white background caused by the Californian sunset. They were equipped with rapid drop shutters that were slammed down by springs and rubber bands as a trotting horse broke threads attached to the shutters. This resulted in a sequence of photographs that captured the horse’s action in time and space. Stanford won the wager as his theory was proven to be correct.

A logic, and seemingly obvious, extension of Muybridge’s innovation was the development of the kinetic medium motion-picture photography.

Eadweard Muybridge, plate published in The Horse
in Motion, 1883. Sequence photography proved the ability
of graphic images to record time-and-space relationships.
Moving images became a possibility.

The 19^thcentury inventors like Talbot, documentalists like Brady and incredible poets like Cameron had significant influences on the development of Graphic Design. But with the 20^th century came new technologies that radically altered printing processes and the nature of illustrations. In these years photography also became an increasingly important reproduction tool. Soon, photomechanical processes replaced handmade printing plates. Illustrators gained new level of freedom. And the printing age was radically altered by the textural and tonal properties of the halftone process.