Fading Away Henry Peach Robinson Henry Peach Robinson

Fading Away Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach Robinson was born on the 9 July 1830 in Ludlow Shropshire and died on the 21 February 1901. He was an English pictorialist photographer who was known mostly for his pioneering combination printing joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage. This technique was first known in 1857 by Oscar Gustave Rejlander of Wolverhampton.

He was the youngest of six children. He was educated at Horatio Russell's academy in Ludlow until he was thirteen, when he took a year's drawing tuition with Richard Penwarne before being apprenticed to a Ludlow bookseller and printer, Richard Jones. While continuing to study art, his career was in bookselling in 1850. In 1852, at the age of 21, he exhibited his oil painting near Ludlow at the Royal Academy. Around this time, he also started taking photographs. After five years, he decided to make this new technique called Combination Photographs which then became his career.

• • Generated in 1858, Henry's Fading Away shows the peaceful death of a young girl due to tuberculosis. Her grieving family, her sister, mother, and fiancé precisely, are shown surrounding her. Measuring 24. 4 cm x 39. 3 cm, the photograph is an 'Albumen Print. ' In 1860, Henry explained the creation process of the negative to the Photographic Society of Scotland, which led to huge disapproval of such 'realist manipulations. ' Although, the photograph was the product of Robinson's imagination and the subjects are merely posing to create a touching albeit a realistic portrayal of a grieving family, many viewers felt that using a traditionally 'truthful' medium as photography to depict such a scene in falsity was too painful and shocking. One critic said that Robinson had cashed in on "the most painful sentiments which it is the lot of human beings to experience. " It seemed that since a photograph is usually a recorded proof of an incident that in reality took place in life, to see an 'untruthful' or artistic photograph was shocking to the viewers of the time. The public felt that though it was all right for painters to paint pictures on themes of death and grief, it was not natural for the photographers to falsify such a setting in the name of art. This controversy however, made him the most famous photographer in England the leader of the 'Pictorialist' movement. The exhibitions of "Fading Away" were a huge success. H. P. Robinson's work impressed Prince Albert too. He became a regular patron of the photographer's works.

This photoghraph was a Combination Print' that took him five negatives to create. It shows the peaceful death of a young girl.