Keith F. Davis

The High-Speed Photographs of Francis Blake

UNTIL RECENTLY, one of the most fascinating photographers in American history has gone almost completely unnoticed. The originality of Francis Blake's high-speed photographs of the late 1880s and early 1890s was clearly recognized at the time: they were exhibited, published, and widely praised. Unfortunately, however, this work was soon forgotten. It has taken a full century for historians to rediscover Blake's importance and to begin to include him in our history books. ¹ Every student of the history of photography knows the high-speed images that Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins made in the 1880s. Blake's work deserves similar recognition. This essay provides a concise outline of the nature and importance of his photographic achievement.

Background: Blake and Photography

Francis Blake (1850–1913) possessed an enviable array of scientific, technical, artistic, and civic talents. ² For most of his adult life Blake was a very wealthy man with the time and means to pursue his interests with great sophistication. He was, in many respects, an archetype of the proper, scientifically minded, politically conservative Victorian gentleman ( fig. 1 ). At the same time, his intelligence, restless curiosity, and profoundly analytical nature marked him as exceptional.

Figure 1. Francis Blake, ca. 1885–90.

Blake grew up near Boston. He excelled in mathematics in high school, and at age sixteen he took a position with the U.S. Coast Survey. His work for the Survey, from 1866 to 1878, gave him a thorough practical training in the science and technology of the day, especially in astronomical observations and time-keeping operations essential to the precise determination of latitude and longitude. After his marriage in 1873, Blake devoted enormous effort to the construction of a family estate, known as Keewaydin, in the Boston suburb of Weston. ³ His home included a state-of-the-art machine shop where he began experimenting with telephony in 1877. His most famous invention, the "Blake Transmitter," greatly improved the clarity of telephone communications and immediately became the industry standard. In 1879, he sold the rights to this device to the fledgling Bell Telephone Company for a generous share of company stock.

Photography became a central passion of Blake's adult life. It is not surprising that the medium fascinated him. The nineteenth century celebrated photography as one of the great technological achievements of the era, on a par with the railroad and telegraph. As both a science and an art, photography combined traits valued deeply by progressive Victorians: it was at once highly technical, precisely factual, broadly useful, and fundamentally democratic.

Blake took up photography at a critical period in the medium's technical and social evolution. ⁴ Prior to the 1880s, the medium had been largely the province of the professional. The introduction of the gelatin dry-plate negative process, however, beginning in the late 1870s, profoundly simplified the making of photographs. Ready-made plates from the factory eliminated the labor (and skill) of hand-coating one's own negatives. The ease of the new processes vastly increased the number of photographers; for at least a full generation, the amateur ranks grew each year at an almost exponential rate. ⁵ At first, these amateurs purchased tripod-mounted cameras in what were then considered small formats, from 31/4 × 41/4 inches to 5 × 8 inches. In the mid 1880s, hand cameras came into general use, liberating photographic picture making from the static perspective of the tripod. The most famous of these hand-held cameras, George Eastman's original Kodak, came on the market in 1888. The result was a genuine revolution in visual culture.

These technical and social changes vastly enlarged the world of photography and fragmented it. As amateurs took over the simplest documentary tasks, professional work became increasingly specialized. A third photographic faction arose by the early 1890s: serious amateurs who used the medium in a self-consciously artistic way. These artist-photographers sought to make beautiful, uplifting pictures in the name of poetic expression, rather than for financial gain. They borrowed heavily from the values and rhetoric of the established art world and sought to achieve the kind of public respect that leading painters and sculptors enjoyed. As a result, a complex network of camera clubs, photographic journals, and public exhibitions took form between 1885 and 1900.

The uniqueness of Blake's place in the history of photography is underscored by the fact that he did not fit comfortably into any of these three distinct realms. Blake recorded his own family life and surroundings—like thousands of other amateurs—but he did so with an altogether uncommon precision and seriousness. He applied the highest professional standards to his work but never used the medium for commercial gain. He participated in some of the leading artistic exhibitions of the day, but he never became part of a coherent aesthetic "movement" or philosophy. He was, in short, an independent and exceptional man who used the medium in correspondingly original ways.

Blake became serious about photography in 1884, when work on Keewaydin and his experiments in telephony were winding down. Blake did nothing halfheartedly: he constructed a lavish photographic laboratory ( fig. 2 ) and acquired the finest equipment. His first camera was a 5 × 8-inch model, but he soon purchased others in the 4 × 5-, 61/2 × 81/2-, and 8 × 10-inch formats. He also made an improvised portrait studio in his greenhouse, where he recorded such friends and visitors as the writer William Dean Howells ( fig. 3 ). In addition to making regular portraits of family members, Blake recorded himself in various poses and locations on the estate ( fig. 4 ). He also took his cameras on excursions, making pictures at the family's favorite resort hotel in New Hampshire or at the Illinois farm of his wife's cousin ( fig. 5 ).

Figure 2. Photography room, ca. 1886–93 (from original print).

Figure 3. William Dean Howells, 1886 (from originial print).

Figure 4. Self-portrait on steps at Keewaydin, ca. 1885–89 (from original print).

Figure 5. Windmill, Payson Farm, ca. 1885 (from original print).

While his choice of subject matter was not markedly original, the unusual rigor of Blake's vision is evident in these early photographs. He possessed a precise and subtle mind; his eye was equally exacting. His photographs of the photographic laboratory, for example, are at once accurate and elegant—like his equipment. His meticulous sense of organization is doubly apparent here: in the precise composition of his images and in the intrinsic order of what he records. As an engineer and inventor, Blake appreciated the functional beauty of superbly effective instruments. On a more intuitive basis, he understood what made a powerful and effective picture. The key, in both cases, was a sense of directness, precision, and efficiency.

Although Blake pursued photography strictly from personal interests, he did not work in intellectual isolation. He remained informed of the issues, concerns, and personalities of the larger photographic world. In October 1885, he joined the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, one of the first and most progressive of the amateur associations. He also became a member of the Boston Camera Club and, for several years, served as its vice president. These affiliations kept him in close contact with other photographers and fully up-to-date on a wide range of technical and aesthetic matters. In addition, he subscribed to the most serious photographic journals, including Anthony's Photographic Bulletin and Scovill's Weekly Photographic Times.

Stopping Time

While all of Blake's photographs have historic and aesthetic appeal, his greatest contribution to the history of photography, by far, lies in his high-speed images. Begun in 1886, this work continued through the late 1890s. It occupied a large portion of his overall activity in the field and became the basis for his public recognition as a photographer. Blake's stop-action images of trains, birds, horses, and athletes combine a still-startling rapidity of vision with a remarkable sense of pictorial structure. While this work stemmed logically from Blake's scientific interests, it transcends any notion of simple, analytical inquiry. Full of whimsy and wonder, these pictures reveal aspects of reality that are completely invisible to the naked eye. In profound ways, these pictures convey the radically inventive potentials of photography and the unexpected complexity of the real. In both respects, they are of vital importance to the thought and vision of modernism.

The originality of his work is undiminished by the fact that Blake was not the first or most famous photographer to make high-speed images. "Instantaneous" photography began in the early 1870s, with the research of three primary figures: Étienne-Jules Marey, in France; Ottomar Anschütz, in Prussia; and Eadweard J. Muybridge, in the United States. ⁶ Marey achieved public recognition before the others with the release of his 1873 book La machine animale (published in English as Animal Mechanism).

Muybridge, who remains the best known of this trio, began his experiments in 1872 under the sponsorship of California governor Leland Stanford. By 1879, Muybridge's photographs of trotting and running horses had received international notice. Viewers of the day were astonished at the odd positions of a running horse's legs—a seemingly familiar aspect of everyday life that, in truth, no one had ever seen before. One critic wrote: "All the former representations of horses in motion are reduced to worthless frauds by the latest scientific achievement in instantaneous photography." ⁷ Another, in sheer amazement, said that the sight of Muybridge's photographs "is enough to turn your brain." ⁸ After publishing The Attitudes of the Horse in Motion (1881), Muybridge launched an even more ambitious study of motion under the sponsorship of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. Here he met the painter Thomas Eakins and influenced him to make his own experiments in high-speed imaging. ⁹ Between 1884 and 1886, Muybridge exposed over 20,000 plates of human and animal subjects. To make these sequential images ( fig. 6 ), he used two or three banks of twelve cameras each and achieved individual exposures of nearly 1/2000 of a second. These image-grids present a curious blend of analysis and abstraction. By breaking the flow of actual experience into twenty-four or thirty-six discrete segments, Muybridge's pictures effectively multiply space and fragment time. These radical images prompted much discussion on the nature of vision and representation—the difference between "normal" and "instantaneous" impressions, for example, and the correspondence between scientific and artistic "truths." The culmination of this work came in 1887, with the publication of Muybridge's Animal Locomotion, a massive folio of 781 plates.

Figure 6. High Jump, 1885, by Eadweard Muybridge (from original print; Hallmark Photographic Collection).

Blake knew of Muybridge's work and clearly was influenced by it. He undertook his own venture into high-speed photography, however, for different reasons, and it yielded correspondingly different results. Properly speaking, Muybridge's photographic technology was strictly a means to an end: he used it as a tool to analyze human and animal movement. Blake's approach could be viewed as exactly opposite: he photographed human and animal subjects in the course of testing and perfecting a new photographic technology. This is not to diminish the astonishing originality of Blake's work, but to underscore its difference in motivation and meaning from that of Muybridge and others.

Blake tackled the problem of "instantaneous" photography at least as early as January 1886. At that time, he made a series of portraits of friends and family members ( figs. 7 , 8 ) caught in the act of laughing. ¹⁰ This is an extraordinary, and perhaps even unprecedented, series. Today, photographic convention assumes that the subject of a portrait should be depicted smiling. In the nineteenth century, however, very few people were pictured this way, for two basic reasons: the relatively long exposures made it difficult to hold a natural looking smile and, more importantly, nineteenth-century portraiture quite logically sought to convey a nineteenth-century notion of character. Victorians believed that one's character could not be revealed in superficial, highly transitory expressions, but only in a quiet, enduring manifestation of the inner self. Thus, the typically somber expressions of nineteenth-century sitters signified dignity, not dourness.

Figures 7, 8. (Top to bottom) John G. Hubbard laughing, 1886; Silas Payson laughing, 1886 (from original negatives).

Blake's photographs of laughers stand in stark contrast to the unsmiling portrait aesthetic of his time. They also, however, differ from today's "smile for the camera" convention. Blake sought to depict not faces that would appear "happy" to modern tastes but a boldly dynamic sense of spontaneous and highly transitory action. The faces of Blake's laughers are at once amusing and strange—familiar visages frozen in distinctly unfamiliar configurations. These are wonderfully paradoxical pictures. What could be more whimsical than the scientific effort to depict a laugh? What could be more serious than the attempt to describe states of being—both physical and emotional—that are at once so primal and so ephemeral?

From this beginning, Blake turned the bulk of his photographic energy to the problem of making high-speed images. This work was comprised of two complementary activities: his research in the design and construction of photographic shutters, and his use of this technology to create original and compelling pictures. His cousin John G. Hubbard assisted Blake in most of this work.

Blake undertook a systematic analysis of the leading shutter designs of the period. His results were so precise that photographic manufacturers and suppliers sent him lenses to test and greatly valued his comments and (infrequent) endorsements. Blake's analytical process was straightforward. He built a measuring device six feet tall, with increments to a tenth of a foot marked on the column. ¹¹ A silver ball, 23/8 inches in diameter, was dropped from the top of the column and photographed during its fall toward a padded box below. The sun, glinting off the ball's polished surface, produced a gleaming point of light. In the resulting photographs, this highlight creates a clear vertical line marking the ball's movement during the time of exposure. Blake carefully measured the beginning point and length of this line. He then consulted a specially prepared table on which he had worked out the time of descent to the nearest 1/10,000 of a second for each hundredth of a foot from 1.00 to 5.59 feet. Since there was always some minor variation in performance from exposure to exposure, Blake often made three negatives with a given shutter and averaged the resulting times. These tests became a familiar sight at Keewaydin, and many family members, including daughter Agnes, were eager to assist ( fig. 9 ).

Figure 9. Shutter Test (Agnes Blake), ca. 1888 (from original negative).

These trials revealed that the average working speed of commercial shutters was about 3/100 of a second. While adequate for routine use, this exposure speed proved too slow to freeze any significant motion. The limitation, Blake realized, stemmed from a fundamentally flawed design. During the time of exposure, a mechanical diaphragm (similar in concept to the iris of the human eye) opened and closed around the central axis of the lens. The mechanical process was far from instantaneous; in fact, it obscured half the light that could, in theory, have passed through the lens in the stated time of exposure. This presented a major obstacle to any significant reduction in exposure times. Blake realized that another shutter design, the focal-plane shutter, used briefly in the early 1860s, offered a far superior alternative. ¹² It employed a narrow horizontal slit that moved at a rapid, continuous speed from top to bottom directly in the front of the camera's film plane. Given a consistent rate of vertical movement, the actual time of exposure could be varied by adjusting the width of the opening. The narrower the opening, the more rapid the effective exposure. The enormous benefit of the focal-plane shutter lay in the fact that it transmitted twice as much light as the diaphragm design in an equivalent exposure time. The only theoretical objection to the moving slit concept was that it could record a quickly moving object in distorted form, since the entire negative was not exposed at once. Blake determined, however, that the rapid movement of the slit made such distortion unlikely. Moreover, the distorting effects of a moving subject could be greatly reduced by simply placing the camera further away. ¹³ With Hubbard's assistance, Blake constructed a shutter that yielded effective exposure times of 1/1000 of a second with a 1/5-inch slot, and 1/2000 of a second with a 1/10-inch opening.

Blake used this shutter to make the remarkable photographs produced over the following few years. His first subjects included the trains that passed by Keewaydin on the rail line leading to Boston. One of these images (see cover illustration) records not only the speeding train but the surrounding landscape and two laborers on the edge of Blake's estate. This breadth of view was deliberate (Blake did not crop his original negative at all in making this print), and to modern eyes it conveys a curiously surreal sense of juxtaposition and simultaneity. ¹⁴ In other exposures of the same subject, Blake cropped his negative significantly to focus boldly on the train engine alone. ¹⁵ These images demonstrate the genuine strangeness of high-speed vision: a speeding locomotive is frozen forever in a state of suspended animation, like a fly in amber. It was wonderful and paradoxical that the rapid movement of a small, handmade device (the focal-plane shutter) could so dramatically arrest the motion of that large and powerful machine. As the most advanced and rapid mode of transportation, the locomotive had profoundly altered cultural notions of time and space. In images such as this, Blake underscored photography's own contribution to this ongoing revolution in modern thought.

Blake continued his high-speed work with other subjects close at hand. In an effort to study the precise dynamics of such simple actions, he photographed himself and various friends walking and running. Similarly, he made an extended series of the stride pattern of a running horse ( fig. 10 ). ¹⁶ His son Benjamin was a willing subject, whether photographed in mid air, at the apogee of a jump ( fig. 12 ), or riding his new bicycle ( fig. 11 ).

Figure 10. 'Cow Pony' at Sharp Canter, ca. 1886–89 (from original lantern slide).

Figure 11. Boy on Bicycle (Benjamin Blake), ca. 1886–89 (from orignal negative).

Figure 12. Benjamin jumping, ca. 1886-89 (from original negative).

In 1889, in front of his carriage house, Blake produced one of his most acclaimed series: his images of pigeons in flight. Using a new lens acquired from the E. & H. T. Anthony firm in New York, Blake made many exposures of these birds ( figs.13 , 14 ). ¹⁷ It is easy to understand his fascination for this subject. The pigeons were so quick and unpredictable that the photographer could never anticipate their ultimate configuration on the photographic plate. Blake controlled as many variables as possible, of course, by attracting the birds with strategically placed seeds and then startling them with a loud noise just prior to making his exposures. Despite this systematic approach, each of Blake's photographs captures a pictorial instant that is at once unplanned and invisible to the naked eye. Blake's devotion to this subject suggests strongly that he was interested in far more than the simple mechanics of flight. Rather, one could infer, he was fascinated by the challenge of making interesting pictures from so unpredictable a subject—finding the most appropriate graphic form for these small, endlessly unique explosions of avian activity. Each of these delightfully spontaneous images hints at the vast pictorial worlds that lie hidden, and otherwise unseen, within the folds of the fabric of time. They embody the astonishing idea that things are strangely complex not only at both ends of the spatial scale (in the vastness of the cosmos and at the heart of the atom) but also within the apparently simple dimension of time.

Figure 13. Pigeons in Flight, ca. 1889 (from original negative).

Figure 14. Pigeons in Flight, ca. 1889 (from original negative).

Figure 15. Golfer, 1898 (from original negative).

Blake next turned his camera to a project that was more analytical than aesthetic in nature. In the summer of 1891, he made an extensive record of tennis players in action on the grass court at Keewaydin. Apparently, Blake had been contacted by James Dwight, a former champion of the sport who was then writing his book Practical Lawn Tennis. Blake made dozens of photographs of several renowned players—including Dwight, Edward L. Hall, Thomas Pettitt, and Richard D. Sears—as they performed the standard repertoire of strokes ( figs. 16 , 17 ). These pictures later illustrated Dwight's textbook (published in 1893), surely the first of its kind to employ stop-action photographs.

Figures 16, 17. Tennis players, 1891 (from original negatives).

Public Recognition

Blake's high-speed photography received wide recognition and praise beginning in early 1890. After turning down numerous requests to discuss his work publicly, Blake consented to lecture on his focal-plane shutter research at the April 14, 1890, meeting of the Boston Camera Club. This talk was so well received that he was asked to repeat it in the fall at the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York and to prepare it for publication. Within months, Blake's paper "Photographic Shutters" became the lead article in the February 1891 American Amateur Photographer, accompanied by a fine photogravure reproduction of one of his pigeon pictures; Anthony's Photographic Bulletin published it in three installments on March 14, March 28, and April 25, 1891. Unfortunately, because this detailed essay—Blake's only public statement on his work—is purely technical, it provides no sense of his aesthetic or expressive interests.

In this same period, Blake's photographs appeared in several prestigious exhibitions. The first major public showing took place in May 1892 at the Fifth Joint Annual Exhibition, a cooperative venture of the three leading amateur photographic organizations of the era: the Photographic Society of Philadelphia, the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, and the Boston Camera Club. The 1892 Joint Exhibition, presented in Boston, included fortyfive of Blake's prints in several groups, the largest section devoted to his most recent pictures of tennis players. In addition, Blake displayed five prints of a cantering pony, two of pigeons in flight, and one each of the New York Express train and Benjamin on his bicycle. All the images received enthusiastic praise. The Boston Record reported the exhibition under the headline "Blake's Great Feat":

The most wonderful specimens of this art, which its devotees are so zealously and justly endeavoring to raise above the plane of a mere mechanical science—such as is too largely the tendency of professional photography today—to the level of painting and drawing, are those shown by Francis Blake, and which as examples of instantaneous, are little short of marvelous. Mr. Blake is well known as the inventor of the "Blake transmitter" through which we talk every day over the telephone....
He took up amateur photography as a diversion and a recreation, and it shortly developed into a passion. His inventive genius could not be held in check. He became greatly interested in the wonderful results of the experiments made by Muybridge, whose instantaneous photographs of animals in motion, a feat never before accomplished and hitherto regarded as impossible, created so much talk a few years ago. But it is commonly conceded that today Francis Blake has eclipsed not only Muybridge, but Anschütz, in this peculiar department of human effort, which is at once an art and a science. ¹⁸

Blake was one of only twelve photographers in the exhibition to be awarded a medal for his work.

A few months later, Blake was invited to show this group of pictures again in the photographic section of the Eighteenth Triennial Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. The jurors awarded him a silver medal for his achievement. The almost surreal nature of these pictures is underscored by the jury's official comment, an amusing combination of sober reportage and whimsical speculation:

Mr. Blake's exhibit is worthy of special mention from a scientific point of view, showing the wonderful possibilities of photography in the taking of express trains going at full speed, horses running, birds flying, etc., etc. Next we may look for the photographing of persons at a distance, speech, and possibly our very thoughts. Some of Mr. Blake's pictures were made in the one-thousandth part of a second. ¹⁹

Concurrent with the Mechanic Association show in Boston, Blake sent a significant entry to the fall 1892 exhibition of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, in London. He also submitted three instantaneous studies to the Sixth Annual Exhibit of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia, in April 1893, for which he received another silver medal.

This 1893 exhibition appears to mark the effective end of Blake's exhibition career. Although he continued to receive invitations to show his photographs and requests for articles, there is little evidence that Blake responded to these inquiries. He still pursued the use of high-speed photography, but at a much more leisurely pace than before. In 1898, for example, he made a series of golfers in action ( fig. 15 ). Other than this group, however, his photographic production after 1891 appears to have been quite modest.

Blake's Legacy

Although it may seem strange today, Blake's withdrawal from the public realm of photography at the moment of his greatest success was actually wholly in character. A highly self-motivated man, Blake had taken up the medium strictly for his own intellectual and artistic pleasure. A proudly independent person—with an almost aristocratic sense of privilege and position—Blake took some real, but distinctly limited, pleasure in the attention of strangers. This qualified pleasure may well have been tempered by the unwanted demands on his time and energy that public exposure of his work invited. Further, the fastidious Blake probably grew impatient with the casual treatment of his pictures in the loosely organized shows of the day.

While brief, Blake's public activity in photography occurred at an important period in the medium's artistic development. As a critic of Blake's work had noted in 1892, photography was seen as both a science and an art—an inherently unstable combination of traits. From the mid 1880s to the turn of the new century, endless debate took place in photographic circles on the nature and potentials of the medium. The central question was one of enormous importance: did the art of photography lie in the unique nature (and limitations) of its technology or in the endless fertility of the human imagination? Was it a medium of prose or poetry, substance or spirit, the real or the ideal? The answer, as the medium's subsequent history has clearly demonstrated, is "both" and "all of the above." These apparently dichotomous positions in fact represent the ends of photography's creative spectrum, a long continuum from "pure" fact to "pure" invention.

As it happened, the dominant photographic aesthetic of the 1890s was an increasingly subjective, idealizing one. Leading artistic photographers employed soft-focus techniques, textured printing papers, and hand-manipulated negatives to achieve effects that were clearly expressive rather than merely descriptive. Contemporaries understood photographs as art only to the degree that an image revealed "the impress of the mind." ²⁰ As a leading art photographer stated in 1892, "A photograph gives us the naked truth, which has to be clothed by the imagination." ²¹ This artistic movement, known as "Pictorialism," powerfully influenced the vision of an entire artistic generation. Needless to say, Blake's work did not conform to this aesthetic. In contrast to the Pictorialist reverence for the ideas of timelessness, subjectivity, and a generic sense of the "ideal," Blake's photographs were explicitly about time, scientific analysis, and the wonder of the real. While Pictorialists strove to override the camera's inherent objectivity, Blake celebrated photography's precise, mechanical nature.

The stylistic tide would turn, of course, and a later generation would redefine the art of photography in accordance with—rather than in opposition to—its basic optical-mechanical means. New, modernist permutations of an essentially realist aesthetic were firmly in place by the late 1920s and early 1930s, with the influence of the American purist movement and the European "New Vision" aesthetic. The first of these, typified by the work of photographers such as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler, advocated a direct, unmanipulated use of the medium. While they made photographs rather different from those of Blake, the purists held a similar reverence for the idea of the camera as optical machine. The "New Vision" movement—exemplified by figures such as Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy—celebrated photography as a radically modern and flexible imaging technology. The result was the artistic use of cameraless images, unconventional angles of view, unusually fast or slow exposures, and an aesthetic appreciation for scientific or utilitarian photographs not originally created as art. This approach united a rigorously experimental approach with a playful embrace of chance and the unexpected. While these artists, too, used methods different from Blake's, they would have appreciated the originality, wit, and strangeness of his images.

By the 1930s, however, precious few remembered Blake's pictures—they had simply been out of public view too long. Although the first modern photographic history books were published in this period, none mentioned Blake. ²² In addition, a new generation of high-speed photographers was achieving effective exposure times (thanks to the invention of the stroboscopic flash) that made late-nineteenth-century work seem positively quaint. The best known of this group, Dr. Harold E. Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, produced exposures of one-millionth of a second, or even less, of all manner of animal and mechanical motion. ²³

Given all the benefits of hindsight, what is the significance of Blake's photography? From an art-historical point of view, its importance in large measure stems from the way it embodies late-nineteenth-century notions of realism, while anticipating the purist and "New Vision" photographic aesthetics of the 1920s and 1930s. Blake's photographs appear far more "modern" and "photographic" to us today than any of the classic Pictorialist works made at the turn of the century. Boldness and clarity are now seen as modernist virtues, while romantic idealization and impressionistic softness most typically register as mere sentiment, nostalgia.

The tension between these two aesthetic approaches—realism and idealism—lay at the heart of late-nineteenth-century creative thought. Blake's friend William Dean Howells was a leader in the literary realist movement. Howells stressed the importance of facts, close observation, and the meaning inherent in seemingly commonplace subjects. He applauded the objectivity of science and appreciated the "impartial fidelity of the photograph." ²⁴ Critics, in turn, found his novels vulgar and trivial and bereft of any ability to uplift or idealize. In response to such criticism, Howells quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic.... I embrace the common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low.... Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote.... The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.... The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual. ²⁵

Blake, like Emerson and Howells, was a firm believer in the value of fact and in the essential mystery of common things. The antirealist currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to subside before these values, in updated form, could again rise to artistic dominance.

Ultimately, Blake's photographs feel profoundly, prototypically modern. While created in the late 1880s, these pictures anticipate the most memorable creative work produced a full generation or more later. Disdaining the late-Victorian trappings of allegory and soft-focus symbolism, Blake photographed the most common, everyday things: laughter, birds, trains, a bicycle rider. To these subjects he applied an original artistic vision based on a boldly modern understanding of both time and the potentials of photography.

As I have tried to stress, something in Blake's work—a critical element of artistry, pleasure, and experimentation—transcends the strictly analytical. An odd and genuinely astonishing image in the Blake archive underscores this trait ( fig. 18 ). Blake heated the glass negative of this scene—a playful record of two friends jumping in the air—until the emulsion began to melt and run toward the bottom of the plate. The resulting image is exuberantly surreal: the distorted figures hover in the air, with their hats floating above them, over a wildly undulating landscape. While unusual in Blake's production, this image exemplifies the profoundly inventive spirit of his overall activity in photography. This picture is, at once, an expression of pure pleasure and of sober technical experimentation. Moreover, it powerfully conveys the essential duality of the photographic process: its ability to both record and invent visual worlds. This image, like most of Blake's other pictures, reveals a "reality" otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Only photography could create such visions, and Blake understood and relished this power.

Figure 18. Distortion, ca. 1886–89 (from original negative).

After nearly a century of neglect, Blake's place in the history of photography now seems secure. Gifted with a profoundly original mind, he used the camera to explore both time itself and the graphic possibilities of picture making. A perfect synthesis of analysis and intuition, his work represents a photographic vision that owes nothing to the influence of other mediums. By weaving Blake back into our history books, we complicate and revitalize a period that we thought we knew. This is enormously invigorating. The physical motion that Blake stilled in his pictures is returned to us in poetic form, as a delightful kind of conceptual energy.

KEITH F. DAVIS, Fine Art Programs Director, Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, Mo., has published many books on photography, most recently, An American Century of Photography: From Dryplate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection (2d ed., 1999).

NOTES

^1. George R. Rinhart, the noted collector and historian of photography, deserves credit for the modern rediscovery of Blake's work. Fascinated by a reproduction of one of Blake's pigeon pictures in an 1891 issue of American Amateur Photographer, Rinhart located Blake's descendants and purchased the vintage prints in their possession. The first publication of Blake's work in recent years (and perhaps in the entire twentieth century!) appeared in Thomas Weston Fels, O Say Can You See: American Photographs, 1839–1939. One Hundred Years of American Photographs from the George R. Rinhart Collection (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Two of Blake's high-speed images (Pigeons in Flight and Man on Bicycle) were included in this book (pp. 66–67) and in the accompanying exhibition. The first of these images was subsequently included (p. 232) in Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Koln, 1994). I included this same work (p. 53) and a second pigeon image (p. 16) in my An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection (Kansas City, 1995). It was published again (p. 74), with Engine of the New York Express (p. 18), in An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2d rev. ed. (Kansas City, 1999). To my knowledge, these are the only histories of photography to date to include Blake. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds the largest collection of Blake photographs as part of its voluminous Blake archive. The only other repositories of Blake's original prints are the Rinhart Collection, the Hallmark Photographic Collection, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unless otherwise indicated, all images in this essay are from the Francis Blake collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS).

^2. The basic facts of Blake's life and work are derived from several sources, but primarily from Elton W. Hall's unpublished manuscript Francis Blake: 1850–1913 (1997), a monumental compilation based on the even more monumental contents of the Francis Blake Papers at the MHS. I have been through much of this archive myself and have drawn my own conclusions on the importance of certain episodes, achievements, and ideas. In addition, useful short biographical sketches of Blake appear in the standard biographical reference works. See, for example, his entry in the National Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York, 1955), 22:25–26.

^3. This house, which was demolished some years ago, stood at the present intersection of the Massachusetts Turnpike and Route 128.

^4. For a more detailed overview of this subject, see chapter 1, "A Reluctant Modernism, 1885–1915," of my An American Century of Photography (1999).

^5. The rapid spread of interest in photography in American society worked its way, in essence, down the economic ladder. In the early 1880s, the process of photography was enormously simplified, but the equipment was still relatively expensive. Thus, most of these early amateurs were members of the upper and upper-middle classes. By 1900, however, when the Kodak Brownie camera was introduced (priced at only one dollar), the process was open to all but the poorest Americans.

^6. Numerous studies of Muybridge are available, including Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (New York, 1979). For an excellent survey of Marey's career, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago, 1992). For an early report of Anschütz's work in the American photographic press, see Philadelphia Photographer 23(Nov. 20, 1886):686–688.

^7.California Spirit of the Times May 8, 1880; reprinted in Photography: Essays & Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York, 1980), 142.

^8.Philadelphia Photographer 16 (Jan. 1879):22.

^9. Eakins made about two dozen such images in 1884–1885. See Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph (Washington, D.C., 1994).

^10. Elizabeth Blake, diary, Jan. 27, 1886, Francis Blake Papers, MHS.

^11. For Blake's description of this work, see his article "Photographic Shutters," published in both American Amateur Photographer 3 (Feb. 1891):67–73; and Anthony's Photographic Bulletin 22 (Mar. 14, 1891):144–146, (Mar. 28, 1891):174–177, and (Apr. 25, 1891):234–236.

^12. Blake stated in the above article that he first read about this design in Thomas Sutton's Dictionary of Photography (1867).

^13. As Blake wrote in "Photographic Shutters": "The possibility of distortion may be eliminated by setting up the camera at such a distance from the moving object that the angular value of its image on the sensitive plate shall be equal to or slightly less than the width of the shutter slot."

^14. One cannot help but think of such later modernist icons as André Kertész's Meudon, 1928.

^15. For example, see Engine of the New York Express. Speed: 48 miles an hour, reproduced (from one of Blake's own vintage prints) on page 18 of my An American Century of Photography (1999). The original negative of this image, in the Blake archive of the MHS, presents a considerably wider view.

^16. This reproduction is taken from Blake's lantern slide. To make his prints and lantern slides of this series, Blake cropped his original negatives considerably to focus solely on the horse and rider.

^17. To achieve the sharpest images possible, Blake placed his camera at some distance from his subjects. When these negatives were enlarged to make exhibition prints, he usually cropped them significantly. For example, compare the viewpoint of these images (modern prints, made full-frame from Blake's original negatives in the MHS) with the noticeably tighter view of one of Blake's vintage exhibition prints from this series, reproduced on page 74 of my An American Century of Photography (1999).

^18.Boston Record, May 7, 1892.

^19. This quotation and a full listing of Blake's subjects are included in Report of the Eighteenth Triennial Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Association held ... October and November, 1892 (Boston, 1893), 175–176, 182. It is reported here that Blake showed 36 views of tennis players, 5 views of 'Cow Pony' at Sharp Canter, 2 views of Pigeons in Flight, and single prints of Boy on Bicycle and Engine of the New York Express. Speed, 48 miles an hour. My thanks to Chris Steele for originally bringing this reference to my attention, and for his invaluable assistance in the first stages of this research.

^20.Report of the Eighteenth Triennial Exhibition, 229.

^21. Frank M. Sutcliffe, "How to Look at Photographs," Wilson's Photographic Magazine 29(Oct. 15, 1892):621.

^22. The most significant of these include Beaumont Newhall, Photography: A Short Critical History (New York, 1938); Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 (New York, 1938); and Erich Stenger, The History of Photography (Easton, Pa., 1939). Newhall's history went through three subsequent editions (through 1982); none mention Blake.

^23. Many books have been written on this work, beginning with Harold E. Edgerton and James R. Killian, Jr., Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography (Boston, 1939).

^24. William Dean Howells, "A Case in Point," Literature (Mar. 24, 1899):15. On this general theme, see for instance Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Thought and Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989); and David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (New York, 1995).

^25. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolph Kirk (New York, 1959), 40.

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