Although many early itinerants made portraits in courtyards or hotel rooms, a studio was essential for most 19th-century commercial practitioners, and their numbers grew rapidly. There were already 86 in New York City alone by 1853; in London they increased from about a dozen to over 150 between 1851 and 1857. Top photographers in major cities boasted sumptuous establishments that might include, in addition to the studio itself, a front-of-house sales and reception area, dressing and waiting rooms, and processing laboratories. Gustave Le Gray's studio in the Boulevard des Capucines between 1855 and 1859 boasted old-master paintings and statues and fabulously expensive carpets and furniture, was depicted in the illustrated press, and became a magnet for the fashionable elite. Such premises consciously vied with the studios of leading portrait painters; in 1913, indeed, the London portraitist Emil Hoppé took over John Everett Millais's 27-room studio/mansion. By the 1930s the rise of advertising photography had put versatility and flexibility at a premium. The New York premises occupied by Victor Keppler in 1933, for example, or Bert Stern in the 1960s incorporated state-of-the-art lighting and processing equipment, and facilities for creating everything from table-top pack shots to Hollywood-like fashion sets and interiors.
At the most basic, the advantage of working in the studio instead of in the open is that the studio can be warm and dry: it also provides a fixed address, which is handy for commercial photographers. A second advantage, greater today than in the first decades of photography's history, is that the light in the studio is more controllable.
In the earliest days, artificial light sources were weak, and materials were slow, so daylight was essential. The ideal studio had huge northfacing windows, and glazed roofs on the north side: north lights never admit direct sunlight, but are always lit by diffused skylight. The further south the studio, the steeper the roof must be: in the tropics roof-lights must always be diffused. In the southern hemisphere, south lights replace north lights. Complex systems of opaque and diffusing blinds allow considerable control of the light.
Despite an inevitable reliance on the vagaries of the weather, many excellent pictures were taken in daylight studios. Most were portraits, though (for example) Roger Fenton's still lifes from the 1840s are still very impressive today. Not until the rise of photographically illustrated books and magazines in the early 20th century was there much call for advertising and editorial photography as we now know it. And although advertising photography was well established by the Second World War, it was only after 1945 that advertising budgets became really large. The late 1960s and early 1970s were in many ways the heyday of the industry, with plenty of money changing hands.
For obvious reasons, photographic studios adopted artificial lighting, especially electric lighting, as soon as it was feasible: most were so equipped by the end of the 19th century. When cool-running, powerful studio flash units became available, from the 1950s onwards, many studios switched to these from continuous or ‘hot’ lights, though plenty to this day prefer the effects obtainable with tungsten lighting.
Apart from light, the other thing that a photographic studio needs is space: far more than most people realize, except for ‘table-top’ photography which can be accomplished in the corner of any room with a reasonably high ceiling. For comfortable working with portraiture, for example, the camera typically needs to be up to 3 m (10 ft) from the subject; there must be at least one metre (3 ft), and preferably a couple of metres (6 ft), behind the subject if shadows are not to be thrown on the background; and the photographer needs at least a metre behind the camera. This translates to a minimum of 5 m (16 ft) and preferably 6 or 7 m (19 to 22 ft).
Then there must be room either side of the subject to set the lights, ideally at least a couple of metres (6 ft) each way: with a subject plus a bit of background only a metre wide, this means the studio must be 5 m wide (16 ft). Finally, if any sort of lighting from above is required, a ceiling of much less than 3 m (10 ft) is likely to prove inconvenient, as many have found when they try to convert their garages into studios. Walls are normally painted white; black is arguably better, but oppressive, and coloured walls affect the colour of the light. Of course it is possible to take excellent portraits in significantly smaller spaces, with walls of other colours, but it will be harder work than if a large studio is available.
Quite apart from shooting space, a studio requires a great deal of storage space. Lights and light stands take up a lot of room; so do ‘bounces’ or ‘flats’, large sheets of plywood or expanded polystyrene, painted white on one side to reflect light back on to the subject, and black on the other to absorb unwanted light. In a commercial studio, these are normally 120 × 240 cm (4 × 8 ft). Many studios rely on seamless background paper, normally supplied in rolls 2.75 m (9 ft) wide, and these have to be supported as well as stored. Other studios use fabric backdrops up to c.3.5 m (12 ft) square. And this is before you start to consider props, or indeed (with inanimate subjects) storage space for the things to be photographed.
General advertising work makes the greatest demands on a studio. One client may want a motor car photographed; another, a tiger lying on a sofa; a third, a model trying on lingerie. These examples illustrate further requirements: access, so that the car can be driven in, the possibility of building a cage to contain the tiger, a changing room for the model. The expense of maintaining such a studio explains the popularity of hire studios, as found in most major commercial centres: the photographer hires not only the space but also (as needed, whether from the studio or from other sources) cameras, lights, and even assistants.
At the other extreme, some sorts of ‘high-street’ portraiture are simple, formulaic, and can be set up with the lights, backdrops, etc. all but nailed down. In 1950s portrait studios it was not unusual for three or four set lighting plots to be marked on the floor of the studio with brass studs: the photographer or his assistant just set the lights for whichever one was needed.
Instead of tripods, many studios are equipped with pillar-type stands, which allow the camera to be lowered to floor level, or raised 2 m or more above the ground (a popular height is 2.4 m (8 ft) ) in a few seconds: much faster and more convenient than a tripod, though heavy (typically around 50 kg (1 cwt) ) and, again, bulky.
The fact that a discussion of camera equipment can be left until last shows just how unimportant it is, relative to all the other considerations involved in setting up a studio. The history is one of continually diminishing formats. Before the Second World War, 18 × 24 cm (7 × 9 1/2 in), whole-plate (16.5 × 21.6 cm; 6 1/2 × 8 1/2 in), and 20.3 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in) were the smallest that would be used for high-end work. Portraits were often shot on half-plate (12 × 16.5 cm; 4 3/4 × 6 1/2 in) or 12.7 × 17.8 cm (5 × 7 in) or 13 × 18 cm (5 × 7 in); anything smaller was regarded as an economy job, though quarterplate (8.3 × 10.8 cm; 3 1/4 × 4 1/4 in) and even smaller sizes were popular in the 19th century and up to 1914.
By the end of the 1960s, 8 × 10 in was generally reserved only for top-flight advertising work, and 4 × 5 in was the norm for still lifes, though portraiture had shifted to a considerable extent to roll-film. By the end of the 20th century, roll-film (especially 6 × 7 cm; 2 1/3 × 2 3/4 in) was pretty much the standard for everything, and the second-hand market was glutted with 4 × 5 in monorail cameras, the staple of the business for three or four decades.
When digital cameras started to come in at the very end of the 20th century, they were employed for two sorts of work. At the low end, for high-volume jobs such as catalogue photography, they allowed significant savings in shooting time and materials, though quality was inferior to film. At the high end, where budgets could stand the high cost of scanning backs and the like, the gains in quality as against film were often less important than faster time to press, and there was the immediate certainty, without having to wait for processing, that the shot was ‘in the bag’.
— Roger W. Hicks
See also backdrops, studio; food photography; makeover photography.Bibliography
- Pritchard, H. Baden, The Photographic Studios of Europe (1882).
- Keppler, V., Man + Camera (1970).
- Life Library of Photography: The Studio (rev. edn. 1982).
- Sagne, J., L'Atelier du photographe (1992)
