R05 Historical

Fading Away (1858)

Fading Away is a composition of five negatives. If one examines a large copy of a print closely one can see the "joins", particularly the triangle of grey with no detail in it. One has to remember, of course, that these were contact prints - there were no means of enlarging at that time.  It is clear that many who admired "Fading Away" had no idea that it was a combination print and when, in 1860, Robinson outlined his methods at a meeting of the Photographic Society of Scotland, he was greeted with howls of protest from people who seemed to feel that they had been deceived. There was much discussion about what one correspondent referred to as "Patchwork", rather than composition, and Robinson began to conclude that perhaps it might be better in future not to divulge the secrets of his craft, but leave people to enjoy the finished product!

Henry Peach Robinson (9 July 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire – 21 February 1901, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent) 

was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage.
Robinson was educated at Horatio Russell's academy in Ludlow until he was thirteen, when he took a year's drawing tuition with Richard Penwarne before being apprenticed to a Ludlow bookseller and printer, Richard Jones.Robinson, the leading art photographer of the 1860s, was the first to illustrate the work of Tennyson, and as he stated, he believed that he followed Pre-Raphaelite principles in doing so.

The Lady of Shalott.1861.

 The Lady of Shalott by Henry Peach Robinson is unique, for it is the only known photograph that illustrates this subject so popular in painting and book illustration. Despite Robinson's efforts to create an imaginary scene, the result is a photograph so naturalistic that it looks more like a scene of a theatrical production than an imagined view. The viewer cannot willingly suspend disbelief and imagine that he or she sees the Lady on the river. Rather, the viewer sees a model lying in a boat merely pretending to be the Lady of Shalott. Robinson, who brought Tennyson's strange vision down to the level of the mundane, realized his failure to depict the weird and unearthly in a photograph.The photograph exemplifies the limitations of photography as an illustrative medium. Despite its somewhat comical appearance, the photograph sincerely attempts to illustrate the poem, and in so doing it suggests the emerging importance of photography as a serious art form.