Why did local governments pass no-posting ordinances, one of the factors leading to the demise of poster houses?
Posters have an important history in protest and politics that will come up in future chapters, I am sure, but I was struck in my reading that one of the factors hurting poster houses in the late 1800s was that local governments had no-posting ordinances. Why?
Well, first, the traveling circuses and shows depended heavily on the colorful posters printed to publicize their shows. This article by Architectural Digest estimates that each town had over 600 posters put up in each town: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/circus-posters-article
So, that’s a lot of posters in one town! One article I found described it as “wallpapering” the town, and it seems like that is accurate, because circuses also paid farmers to let them paint mural and ads on the sides of barns. I also discovered that vintage circus posters are highly collectible today and that many people are very interested in the history of circuses. This is a great site: https://circushistory.org/category/posters/
I spent an hour looking, but in the end I couldn’t find anything about local town ordinances against posting being a factor in the decline of the huge poster houses that serviced the circuses. I did discover some great resources about posters being an important part of the history of graphic design however
:https://emuseum.ringling.org/collections and
https://www.neh.gov/article/american-circus-all-its-glory
Some chemistry questions since Meggs was vague: What is light sensitive asphalt (bitumen of Judea)? And what is the collodion used for the wet-plate emulsion in photography?
From https://photo-museum.org/niepce-invention-photography/ it says that bitumen of Judea is a natural tar or petroleum-like material, which means it is a hydrocarbon with long chains of carbon. The “Judea” refers to where it is found (Syria), as well as the fact that is has been used since ancient times as a resin and varnish.
From https://www.hnoc.org/virtual/daguerreotype-digital/wet-plate-process collodion is a viscous solution of nitrocellulose dissolved in alcohol and ether. Nitrocellulose is also called cellulose nitrate, a mixture of nitric esters of cellulose, and a highly flammable compound that is the main ingredient of modern gunpowder and is also employed in certain lacquers and paints (from https://www.britannica.com/science/nitrocellulose)
I ran out of time to fully answer this one, but looking up the chemistry of early photography made me realize that many of the chemicals used were quite toxic and even poisonous (like the mercury vapor used in the earliest processes). How long did it take for people to realize the poisonous nature of early photography?
And yes, it turns out that photographers from the early era did not lead the longest lives!
See https://100asa.com/blog/analog-photographers-throughout-history-have-had
https://dp.la/exhibitions/evolution-personal-camera/early-photography?item=1039
What is the difference between a camera obscura and a camera lucida?
The invention of photography was really about capturing a permanent form of the images that the ancients created using the camera obscura, a box that could project images onto a wall using sunlight. But in reading about William Henry Fox Talbot, a true polymath who was interested in a wide range of topics, the article mentioned that he was frustrated with drawing from a camera lucida, not a camera obscura. So what is the difference?
Camera obscura
The technical principles of the camera obscura have been known since antiquity. While we are unsure who made the first camera obscura (or set up or found a room with a natural mirror to reflect the light), Mozi (470 to 390 BC), a Chinese philosopher wrote that the image in a camera obscura is flipped upside down because light travels in straight lines from its source.. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle noted that “sunlight travelling through small openings between the leaves of a tree, will create circular patches of light on the ground.” Our first indication that people had actually built one comes from Ibn al-Haytham (AD 965–1039), also known as Alhazen, who described a ‘dark chamber’ and experimented with images seen through the pinhole.
By Leonardo da Vinci’s time (early 1500s), scientists and artists were making and using the camera obscura. It is essentially a room or a small box where light reflects off an object on the outside and comes into the box through the lens, which projects an image onto a screen or wall. The image will be upside down and reversed. This is exactly how a camera works, except there is no way to permanently capture the image.
Camera Lucida
The camera lucida was invented in 1807 by a British scientist, William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828). Camera lucida is Latin for “light chamber”) and is a device that uses two lenses set up in such a way that you can project an image of an object or scene on your drawing paper. For example, you could project an image of a vase with flowers on the table onto your desk so that you could easily trace the image and help make a better drawing. Artists and illustrators also used it to reduce or enlarge the image so they could reduce/enlarge their drawings.
Here’s a picture of one of the original camera lucidas from the Smithsonian at https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1184286
Useful links:
https://magazine.artland.com/agents-of-change-camera-obscura/
https://www.liveabout.com/using-a-camera-lucida-2578623