Astronomers, geographers, and electricians freely acknowledge how much they are indebted to photography in making their celestial and terrestrial observations. Engineers, civil and military, employ photography largely in their plans and studies. Art, also, has recourse to photography, and is the only one of the liberal professions that is half ashamed to admit the aid it gains from the camera. If art admits it at all, it is done grudgingly, apologetically, and thanklessly. But there it is the old, old story of family quarrels and family jealousies. Old art might be likened to an old aunt that has grown withered and wrinkled, and peevish with disappointment, who, in spite of all her long-studied rules and principles of light and shade, harmony of colour, painting, "glazing," and "scumbling," has failed to win the first prize--that prize which a woman's ambition pants after from the moment she enters her teens until her dream is realized--that living model, moulded after God's own image, which, not having won in her mature age, she becomes jealous of the growing graces, the fresh and rollicking charms, the unstudied and ingenuous truthfulness of form exhibited by her niece. Old Art the aunt, Photography the niece. Readers, draw the moral for yourselves.
I have digressed, but could not help it. Photography is so young and lovely, so bewitchingly beautiful in all her moods, so fascinating and enslaving--and she has enslaved thousands since she first sprung from the source that gives her life. But to return to my theme.
The practice of photography, like the aspects of the country and condition of the people, was changed. "Old things had passed away, and all things had become new." The shining silver plates, buffing wheels, coating boxes, mercury pans, &c., of the old dispensation had given place to the baths, nitrate of silver solutions, and iron developers of the new. Ambrotypes, or glass positives, and photographs on paper, had taken the place of the now antiquated Daguerreotype. Mammoth photographs were the ambition of all photographers. The first full-length life-sized photograph I ever saw was in Washington, and was the work of Mr. Gardner, the manager of Mr. Brady's gallery. But a more republican idea of photography, which, strange to say, originated in an empire not remarkable for freedom of thought, soon became the dominant power. Cartes-de-visite, the many, ruled over mammoth, the few. The price of mammoth photographs was beyond the reach of millions, but the prices of cartes-de-visite were within the grasp of all; and that, combined with their convenient size and prettiness of form, made them at once popular, and created a mania.