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Detective Camera: He now began to push technique beyond the accepted limits. The hand Camera had been regarded by most pictorial photographers as unworthy of the "serious worker." Stieglitz saw it as a challenge. Borrowing from a friend
a 4 x 5-inch detective camera, he waited three hours on Fifth Avenue in a fierce snowstorm on February 22, 1893, to photograph a coach drawn by four horses.
These pictures came to be called "snapshots," a word used by hunters to describe shooting a firearm from the hip, without taking careful aim. The first Kodak, like many other detective cameras, had no finder: the Camera was simply pointed at the subject. The "brilliant finders" later built into the bodies of box cameras gave images only the size of a postage stamp. Careful composition was hardly possible with them, nor was it of concern, for most snapshooters had little artistic ambition.
Containing the New Optical Laws of the Camera Obscura or Daguerreotype, demonstrated that converging perpendiculars of the Camera image were indeed mathematically correct and concluded: "Art has always represented objects geometrically, or as they cannot be seen in the perpendicular and visually, or as they can be seen in the horizontal direction."3 But his findings were ignored. Indeed, amateurs were warned in manuals and instruction books never to tip the camera. Many hand cameras were even equipped with levels to assure the viewer that he was holding the Camera horizontally. |
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