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Despite their relative isolation on the island,
the Shute family quickly adopted almost all the technological innovations of photography
that occurred during the late nineteenth century. For example they mastered the
ambrotype (developed in 1854), which still produced a direct positive image on
glass, but an image much easier to view than the daguerreotype. From 1855 the
tintype, a direct positive image on metal, gained wider appeal and the Shutes
quickly incorporated it into their photographic repertoire.
Up
until that time, the Shutes had worked mainly with daguerreotypes. And like Samuel
Morse and Mathew Brady (the photographer who went on to famously document the
American Civil War), the Shutes produced a great deal of portrait photography.
But 1851 witnessed the introduction of the wet plate process or collodion photography
with its modern and efficient negative/positive process. Like
Brady, Shute and his father quickly adopted the new medium. But while Brady was
guided by his plan to sell the Civil War images to the United States Congress,
the Shutes oriented their work to the consumer market. While Richard G. Shute
responded to national developments and trends, he also responded well to changes
in customer interests and to his competitors on the island. The
generation following the Civil War witnessed many more photographic and artistic
innovations. In 1871 dry photographic plates were introduced and mass-produced.
By the end of the decade the paper photograph was introduced. But the art of photography
began to develop as well. U.S. geographical surveys, geological surveys, and railroad
companies came to produce landscape photography that suggested the opulent beauty
of Asher B. Durand's canvases. Shute's interest in unposed
subjects, often sitting or walking about the beach, suggests the innovative style
of his famous contemporary, Peter Henry Emerson, who published his Naturalistic
Photography in 1889. Emerson argued that photography should mirror the phenomenological
world as precisely as possible. And the publication of Emerson's aesthetic theory
came just as Shute was beginning his most productive period. And interestingly
enough, he too never seeks to transform the landscapes and seascapes of Martha's
Vineyard. Perhaps with the advent of magnesium flash lighting
in 1878, Richard G. Shute found it possible to better record images of interiors
too. He photographed the elegant drawing rooms and parlors of many of the historic
Edgartown hotels. But he also documented the relative austerity of the Methodists'
homes at Cottage City. But for the most part Shute still emphasized
the beauty of the island itself, a topic which certainly reflected the consumer
trend toward a more naturalistic theme. And this is how he captured images for
the rest of his career. From the 1900's through the 1920's
Shute seems to have remained oblivious to the whole Photo-Secession movement,
which rejected photography's documentary value. The new movement employed a whole
new printing process and argued for the manipulation and retouching of images.
Photographs were to be transformed into works of art-even abstract art. Richard
G. Shute though lived out his days on the island, isolated from the new, extravagant
movement. Also, with his limited formal education, he did not seem to ever take
an interest. It is all the more reason his images remain so extraordinary in their
power to document the island's transitions and history.
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