Altering The Camera Image: The concept of pre-visualization precludes the possibility of altering the Camera image after exposure. Concern with subject matter is paramount in much recent work that stresses the banal, the commonplace, and even the abnormal. The creation of situations and environments specifically for the Camera to record has become popular. Painters as well as photographers are exploring the mix of the media. Many photographers feel that both the negative and the print are but a means to an end; not considering them sacrosant, they do not hesitate to alter them with hand work.
The Camera obscura, at first actually a room big enough for an artist to enter, was useless until it became portable. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a lens was fitted into one end of a two-foot box, and the other end was covered with a sheet of frosted or ground glass. The image cast on the ground glass by the lens could be seen outside of the camera. A perfected model, resembling the modern reflex camera, had the ground glass flush with the top of the box, the image being thrown upon it by a Mirror placed at an angle of 45°. It had the advantage that the image was not upside down, and the artist could trace it by laying thin paper over the glass.
To the criticism that gum printing was not purely photographic, but relied on skill of hand, he answered that his work was the exact opposite of the painter, that he removed the pigment, rather than laying it on. He claimed that he did not paint over or add to the photographic image but merely revealed the image by brush development, altering only values and tones.
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Photography
