A CENTURY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 1840-1940

In April 2017 I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London and saw the 'A Century of Photography 1840-1940' exhibition. It included photographs from Edward Weston, Man Ray and many more. The selected photographs show just how far photography and art has developed in less than two hundred years. A lot of the images were portrait photos of women, something which ties in to my work at the minute. It was interesting to see how the female style has changed, such as hair styles and fashion but also facial features. For example makeup around one hundred years ago featured very skinny eyebrows and very small lips which is very different from today. Going even further back some images show women with long natural unkempt hair, bare face and loose plain clothes, again just showing how the perception of females has changed in art over the years. The earliest photos in the exhibition are two tiny oval portraits from the 1840's which feature a woman on the first and a man on the second. In the earlier images they seemed less staged which was suprising to me, they weren't as posed and the subjects didn't look uncomfortable, but as the styles began to change, it seemed like photographers began trying new styles and in the 1920's and 30's the women had tightly curled hair and were posed infront of art deco style backgrounds like a magazine cover.