The Power of Images: the Making of an Icon

Sorting through a bundle of ephemeral scraps I'd brought back from my recent trip to Edinburgh and the Festival, I came across a page I'd torn from the Saturday Magazine supplement of the Scotsman. It was a listings page that contained a small (roughly 3cm square) photograph of Florence Nightingale.

(A number of programmes were broadcast during August to mark the centenary of her death)

Roland Barthes and others have written at length about the compelling power of photographs, but I was interested to know why I was drawn to this particular image.

The tight head-shot of a Victorian subject against a dark background immediately called to mind Julia Margaret Cameron's iconic images, though I knew that the photograph wasn't hers.

At that small scale, reproduction through a coarse dot screen gave the image a contrasty, Warhol-like, graphic arts quality. The semi-abstract reduction of the image to a matrix of dots is more apparent when the image is enlarged.

Primarily though, it is the quality of the character we read into the face that draws our attention, for it is the face of a woman whose life and achievements working for the public good have become legendary. Like the votive image of a saint, versions of this portrait now adorn everything from key rings and cushion covers to tee shirts.

It is a face that seems to signify goodness through its serene, self-confident expression and simple beauty — the simple beauty, that is, of someone who possesses regular features. She could well be seen as a Madonna, or the heroine of a story by the Brontés or Dickens. I liked it enough to wonder where the image came from.

There appear to be eight known photographs of Florence Nightingale in existence, and the source of this one seems to be a carte-de-visite photograph taken (probably) by Goodman of Derby.

The invention of the wet collodion photographic process in about 1851 gave photographers the opportunity to make good quality glossy albumen prints from glass negatives. These prints could be mounted onto card and sold.

Cartes of famous Victorians were published in large numbers for the public to collect and mark an important stage in the evolution of celebrity culture as we know it today. Although eminent Victorians recognised the value of promoting their image through photography, things did not always go smoothly. There is a story of Alfred Lord Tennyson's discomfort at being pestered in public by a stranger who recognised him from his photograph.

Having found the source of my newspaper image, I was intrigued by slight but significant differences between the faces in the cropped and original versions.

The red outline indicates the original height before vertical compression.

It's clear that the crop in the newspaper version has been tilted to make the head more upright. Interestingly, it has also been compressed vertically, which has the effect of making the eyes and mouth seem wider and the face more square. There has also been a significant amount of cosmetic retouching to make the facial features more defined, the lips fuller, the pupils larger and more limpid. In effect, she has had a make-over as good as any modern-day cover girl.

It would be interesting to find out when this enhancement took place. Although Victorian portrait studios employed retouchers to correct blurry eyeballs and remove disfigurements, I suspect that we are looking at a more recent attempt to glamourise this remarkable woman whose fame rests after all on her deeds rather than her looks.

While the manipulation of this particular photograph is clearly not something to get too bothered about, it does suggest that there may be ethical issues concerning the veracity of nineteenth century photographs as they are used by the mass-media today. The great power and strength of photography for the Victorians was its ability to hold up a mirror to the world and record what it reflected with utter truthfulness. It is a pity if we are to see such honesty treated too casually.

New Experiments

It's been a very busy second half to the Autumn Term. First Year National Diploma students keen to experiment with lots of unfamiliar techniques. They used an old Jessops Powerflash motordrive head (MD400) to strobe with their camera shutters open on B. There were the inevitable problems of overexposure sometimes when the subject didn't move far enough between flashes. I showed them how to produce a similar effect by using a motordrive to take a rapid sequence of single frames which could be layered in Photoshop and selectively blended to create a strobe-like composite image. The shot above was the first attempt. With care, I'm sure some really nice sequences could be made.



A few of the students were curious to know about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, though none knew what it was. I decided to demonstrate in class, using as an example two of the students who were taking a break near the window. It was fairly late on a very dull November day and the room lights were on. With the digital camera steady on a tripod, I asked the girls to remain very still while I took two shots, one metered for them, the other metered for the scene outside. The two images are shown at the top, with burnt-out highlights coloured red and textureless shadows coloured blue.

Again, I layered them in Photoshop with the indoor shot uppermost. I then carefully erased the window in this layer to expose the background scene of the lower layer. The hair was the trickiest part and there was a slight mis-registering between the layers to cope with. So, it's not perfect but I'm quite pleased with it as my own first attempt to have a go at this technique.



Another technique I've been trying to get students interested in, is pushing photograms beyond the familiar arrangements of keys and coins and other everyday items. Charity shops always have shelves of ornamental items such as the glass bowls I used for these images. Scanning the photogram and manipulating it in Photoshop, I was able create some psychedelically coloured animated .gifs.


The enlarger I used to make these photograms was in a pretty filthy condition, as I found out when I took the prints out into the daylight. The black background was covered in thousands of tiny dust specks. In this photogram, though, they looked like a myriad tiny stars, blinking away behind a baleful planet hanging there in a vast space. It seemed a logical step to colourise the scan to enhance this illusion and to add some random coloured shaped to create an imaginary perspective.


Lots of other creative ideas are developing. Having just repaired our UV exposure unit, I'm ready to roll again on cyanotypes and salt prints (always a favourite with students). Parts for an infra-red and a sound flash trigger are sitting on my workbench. And then there's stop motion animation and stereoscopic photography . . .