PHOTOGRAPHS
Le Gray, Gustave
France (1820 - 1882)
Brig on the Water
1856
Albumen print from wet collodion on glass plate
11 3/4 x 15 1/2 in. (29.9 x 39.4 cm) image and sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.91

Trained as a painter in the academic tradition, Gustave Le Gray was one of the first artists to use the camera to mimic painting. His luminous seascapes were so effective in capturing dramatic natural occurrences that he was accused by critics of combining negatives—one a perfect image of the sky and the other of the sea—to print his extraordinary scenes. In fact, Le Gray developed just such a technique in the late 1850s, but Brig Upon the Water, his most acclaimed picture, was printed from a single, unaltered negative.

-- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, July 12 to November 10, 2002.

The technique of creating a single photograph with multiple negatives has been employed by photographers for over a century and a half. In 1856, when this image was made, photographic emulsions were not sensitive enough to capture detail in both the highlight and shadow areas of a landscape. To create the full range of tones seen here, Le Gray exposed two glass plate negatives, one for detail in the highlight areas of the sky, the other for detail in the shadow areas of the shoreline. He printed one negative, then the other, on a single piece of photographic paper. Today, multiple printing can be done on a computer, and digital cameras can render detail in a vast range of lighting situations unimaginable to photographers in the 19th century.

-- Label copy by Sylvia Wolf, Director, for The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age, July 9 to September 25, 2011.