Radio 4 has been running a series of 15 minute programmes looking at photography through the lives of five ground-breaking photographers. In Speed of Light, Laura Cumming takes us on an exhilarating journey across Britain, America and into Europe through the early years of photography. It was a revolutionary technology that changed the way we see ourselves forever. From Daguerre’s patent, in 1839, this new art hurtles forward at unbelievable speed - from close-up to collage, snapshot to montage, mugshot, news photography and more, all within two or three decades. To tell the story, Cumming delves into the lives of five ground-breaking photographers whose innovations transformed the medium, leaving us with some of the most affecting images ever made.
The five programmes are:
- Alexander Gardner, the Scottish photographer who became an eyewitness to the American Civil War. Gardner's haunting images, including his iconic photograph of Abraham Lincoln just days before his assassination
- William Notman, sails from Glasgow to Canada to open the nation’s most celebrated studio. Here he invents ingenious ways to depict hundreds of people – together - in the snow and ice, and to bring the outside, as it were, indoors.
- John Jabez Mayall takes the only known photograph of the painter, JMW Turner, as well as the first and most significant photographs of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. Mayall also captures the spirit of democracy with his carte de visites – pocket sized photographs - that anyone could buy of the stars of the day, from Wilkie Collins to Queen Victoria.
- Alphonse Bertillon invents the front-and-profile mugshot that is still used in the solving of crime today.
- Nadar, renowned for capturing the innermost thoughts of his Parisian sitters, who took the first aerial shots, and the first revolving shots, and put interviews with images for the first time, reaching forward to the advent of film and television.
Laura Cumming is Chief Art Critic of The Observer.
Listen to the series here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gd80/episodes/guide
