The extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way we see
ISBN: 9780195150315
Oxford University Press
Hardcover, October 2009
320 pages 106 b/w illus.,7 color illus. 7 x 10
List Price:$39.95
Darwin's Camera tells the extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way pictures are seen and made. In his illustrated masterpiece, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871), Darwin introduced the idea of using photographs to illustrate a scientific theory. Creating the first photographically illustrated science book ever published, Darwin managed to produce dramatic images at a time when photography was famously slow and awkward.
During his investigation into the nature of emotions, Darwin commissioned photographs of children and adults in order to study specific facial expressions. Because of the dramatic delay between his subjects’ expressions and the photograph’s capture of them, Darwin used photographs made with electric currents to manipulate facial muscles into the desired expression. Using these and other staged photos, Darwin developed one of his most radical theories: emotions evolved biologically. With this, he altered the field of psychology, including the thinking of his later admirer, Sigmund Freud.
Darwin also influenced the course of photography. He mingled with artists on the voyage of HMS Beagle, collaborated with famed photographer Oscar Rejlander to make his pictures, and corresponded with many painters and photographers, such as Joseph Wolf and Lewis Carroll. Darwin's Camera provides the first examination ever of these relationships and their effect on Darwin's work, and how Darwin, in turn, shaped the history of art.
About the Author:
Phillip Prodger is Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the author of E.O. Hoppé's Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s; Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (OUP 2003); and co-editor of Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918. His writings on art and photography have been published in eight languages.
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