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Just
Press Their Button:
Before
the ‘Kodak Era’, and prior to comic strips emerging
as an entertaining sales device for newspapers in the mid-1890s,
artists were already using many of the graphic techniques that
were later incorporated into the creation of comics. This room
contains selected examples of pre-comics and early comics material
focusing on photography, cameras and photographers. The
graphic artists whose work is seen here were clearly very sensitive
to the sociological phenomenon of photography that was unfolding
before their eyes. This is clear not only from the sheer quantity
of commentary on the medium, but also because it began so immediately
after photography’s ‘invention’ in 1839. Daumier
is the obvious exception to the notion that populist artists are
omitted from art history, and in the works in this room he is
the link between the two, often separate worlds of popular graphics
and ‘high art’. Photography was still topical twenty
years after its invention, as is seen here in the Daumier drawing
of Nadar floating over Paris in his balloon. This was published
in Le Boulevard in May 1862, and by then photography studios were
apparently so thick on the Parisian ground that they deserved
to be skewered by Daumier’s graphic hyperbole. The public
in the 1860s, in Europe certainly, but throughout much of the
planet, was both oppressed and inspired by the onslaught of modernity
in all its manifestations, each of which provided content-grist
for the graphic artist’s mill. Photography, one might propose,
was, along with medical advances, perhaps the most benign of modernism’s
plethora of inventions. One of the questions the material in this
room seeks to answer is: “How did the scientific discovery
of photography become a populist pastime so quickly?” These
images provide a sampling of how photography, as projected into
the public’s imagination, was perceived as a versatile form
that could be taken into the field, brought to its consumers in
a horse-drawn cart, or brought into fashionable salons for a special
event. A link between photography and fashion is made here, for
instance, by the parody of the ‘fashionable’ in which
women’s dresses are decorated with photographs, a style
proposal that didn’t really catch on, fortunately, although
the T-shirt with an image on it could be said to be its contemporary
cousin. One
of the most important impacts that photography had was its revolutionary
ability to mirror ‘the actual’, which by the late
1840s, with Daumier and Courbet, was a nascent movement in painting
known as ‘Realism’. That mirroring of ‘the actual’
was subsequently taken up by comics artists in the 20th century,
albeit after many diversions into ‘comics’ fantasy
worlds, some of which were as unbelievable as those in a Renaissance
painting. If 19th century graphics depicted photographers and
cameras as part of ‘the actual’, as part of picturing
the wave of modernity washing over European cities, by the beginning
of the 20th century George Eastman’s success in marketing
‘The Kodak’ was such that by 1900 the public’s
use of the camera was taken for granted. By the time Kodak entered
the picture, the appearance of cameras in comics could be said
to be an early form of ‘product placement’. The 1905
Buster Brown (after whom the Kodak Brownie was named) barnyard
comic strip shown here is a good example of the complexity of
early comics material and the way that photography could be used
to invoke a wide range of emotional feelings, from longing (see
the frog, lower left) to practical advice in the form of chicken-remorse
over the laying of an egg on top of a haystack. The
material shown here is a mix of graphic artifacts and enlargements
made from originals. Each one tells a different story about photography,
photographers and cameras, and each reveals facets of the complex
relation between people and photography that has evolved, in part,
as a result of graphic material informing readers about the trials,
tribulations and rewards that await camera users. The material
in the opposite room continues the story of photography in the
comics in the 20th century. Bill Jeffries
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