History of photography

photographs..
preserve personal memories

inform us of public events

they provide a means of
identification…

and of glamorisation..

views of far-off places on Earth

and in space

as well as microscopic
scenes from inside and
outside the human body

Many specialised commercial categories, including
fashion, product, and architectural photography, also fit
under the broad umbrella that defines photography‟s
function in the world today….

To mid-19th-century
observers, photography
seemed capable of capturing
the world whole rather than
describing and interpreting it
as drawing did. They called it
the “mirror with a memory.”

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes who coined the
phrase „Mirror with a Memory‟

But 20th-century critics have argued
whether photography is indeed a direct
trace of experience, like the mark of a
footprint in the sand, or instead a
reflection of the photographer‟s
particular point of view.

Photography‟s role in
the visual arts is also
a matter of debate.
From the start, the
photographer‟s
camera was seen as a
challenger to the
painter‟s brush. Its
ability to effortlessly
render
tones, detail, and
perspective
effectively put an end
to the practice of
certain forms of
painting, such as
portrait miniatures.

It is believed today
that photography
created an impetus
for painters to
forsake
straightforward
description in favour
of more interpretive
or abstract styles,
such as
impressionism,
cubism, and abstract
expressionism.

Before mentioning the stages that led
to the development of photography,
there is one amazing, quite uncanny
prediction made by a man called de la
Roche (1729- 1774) in a work called
Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was
possible to capture images from
nature, on a canvas which had been
coated with a sticky substance. This
surface, so the tale goes, would not
only provide a mirror image on the
sticky canvas, but would remain on it.
After it had been dried in the dark the
image would remain permanent. The
author would not have known how
prophetic this tale would be, only a few
decades after his death.

"Photography" is derived from the Greek words
photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw")

The word was first used by
the scientist Sir John F.W.
Herschel in 1839. It is a
method of recording
images by the action of
light, or related
radiation, on a sensitive
material.

camera obscura
the camera obscura developed out of the simple, lens-less
'pinhole camera' which was used, perhaps a 1,000 years
ago, to project an image of the sun and safely view eclipses.
The incorporation of a lens in the seventeenth century (or
maybe even earlier) produced a much brighter image and
the camera obscura, as we know it today, was born.

the camera obscura is based on a simple
principle. If you go into a dark room (thus
the name, the Latin camera, "room", and
obscura, "dark") and punch a small hole in
the wall, the image outside will be
projected inside.
Light from only one part of
a scene will pass through
the hole and strike a
specific part of the back
wall. The projection is
made on paper on which
an artist can then copy the
image if desired.

The principle of the camera
obscura can be demonstrated
with a rudimentary type, just a
box with a hole in one side.

During the Victorian era many seaside
resorts had a camera obscura which
was usually set up in a small octagonal
building near the beach or on the pier.
Inside, the visitor could watch a moving
colour picture of the view outside.

The Music Lesson. 1600’s

There is
speculation that
Vermeer used a
camera obscura
for his paintings

Photography as a useable process goes back
to the 1820s with the development of chemical
photography. The first permanent photograph
was an image produced in 1826 by the French
inventor Nicéphore Niépce. However, the
picture took eight hours to expose, so he went
about trying to find a new process.

Nicéphore Niépce's earliest
surviving photograph, c. 1826.
This image required an eighthour exposure, which resulted in
sunlight being visible on both
sides of the buildings.

Daguerreotypes
Working in conjunction
with Louis Daguerre, they
experimented with silver
compounds based on a
Johann Heinrich Schultz
discovery in 1724 that a
silver and chalk mixture
darkens when exposed to
light.
First daguerreotype

Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the
work, eventually culminating with the development
of the daguerreotype in 1839, reducing the
exposure time down to half an hour.

The daguerreotype plate was made
by brazing or coating a copper
plate with silver - silver being the
photographic emulsion.

The image was able to capture a
very fine, rich detail – superb
even by today's standards. The
technique is still reproduced by
devotees today.

The low-cost
daguerreotype became
so popular that, by the
end of 1839, Paris
newspapers were
referring to a new
disease called
Daguerreotypomania.
People were by far the most
common photographic subject of the
19th century. Photographic portraits
were much less expensive than
painted ones, took less of the sitter’s
time, and described individual faces
with uncanny accuracy. So great
was the sense of presence in these
pictures that photographers were
often called on to take portraits of
the recently deceased, a genre now
known as postmortem portraits.

The Daguerreotype process, though
good, was expensive, and each
picture was a once-only affair. That,
to many, would not have been
regarded as a disadvantage; it meant
that the owner of the portrait could be
certain that he had a piece of art that
could not be duplicated. If however
two copies were required, the only
way of coping with this was to use
two cameras side by side. There was,
therefore, a growing need for a means
of copying pictures which
daguerreotypes could never satisfy.

Different, and in a
sense a rival to the
Daguerreotype, was
the Calotype
invented by William
Henry Fox Talbot,
which was to
provide the answer
to that problem.

the calotype negative provided
the first practical method of
producing prints on paper from a
camera exposure

The earliest paper negative we know of was produced in August 1835; it
depicts the now famous window at Lacock Abbey, his home. The
negative is small (1" square), and poor in quality, compared with the
striking images produced by the Daguerreotype process. However, the
great advantage of Talbot's method was that an unlimited number of
positive prints could be made. By 1840, Talbot had made some
significant improvements, and by 1844 he was able to bring out a
photographically illustrated book entitled "The Pencil of nature."

Interest in
daguerreotypes
dwindled in Europe
after 1851, when
English
photographer
Frederick Scott
Archer invented the
collodion, or wetplate process. This
was a negative-topositive
process, but
because the
negatives were
made of smooth
glass rather than
paper, the collodion
process produced
much sharper
images.

Using the collodion method, French painter and
photographer Adolphe Disdéri in 1854 invented
the carte-de-visite, a form of photographic calling
card, which soon became the new rage.

Photographers using the collodion,
or wet-plate, process hauled their
large cameras, tripods, and portable
darkrooms to the farthest reaches of
Europe‟s imperial quest in the years
between 1850 and 1870.

The Civil War in the United States
(1861-1865) was the first war to be
thoroughly recorded by photography

Matthew Brady

As industrialization came
to define Western life in
the 19th century, industry
employed photography
to portray its successes
and strengths. For
example, in 1857 British
photographer Robert
Howlett took pictures of
the British steamship
Great Eastern, the largest
vessel of its day.

In addition to recording the
construction of railroads,
ships, buildings, and
bridges, photography
proved useful to medicine
and the social sciences

Doctors wanted beforeand-after pictures of
wounded Civil War
soldiers to study the
effects of amputation and
invasive surgery…

Psychologists studied photographs of mental
patients in an attempt to visually discern their
disorders. Photographers recorded the features of
criminals, not only as a means of identification, but
also in an effort to identify physical
characteristics, which criminologists then believed
might correspond with criminal behaviour.

The development of faster cameras in the 1870s
spurred scientists and others to use
photography in the study of human and animal
movement. In 1878 Muybridge used a series of
photographs of a galloping horse to demonstrate
to the world that the animal lifts all four feet off
the ground at once.

French physiologist
Etienne-Jules Marey also
followed Muybridge‟s
example and devised a
special camera to record
sequential photographs on a
single plate.

The resulting photographs
showed an echoing trail of
images that recorded the
subject‟s movement in both
time and space. Marey used
this method to develop
insights into the flight of
birds, human
movement, and the
workings of the human eye.

In the last quarter of the
19th century the camera
helped record the plight
of the
dispossessed, displaced,
and overlooked. One of
the earliest attempts to
document urban poverty
was made by Scottish
photographer Thomas
Annan, who aimed his
camera at the
empty, unsanitary
alleyways of Glasgow in
1868
City officials commissioned
Annan’s documentation to
justify replacement of
Glasgow’s unsavory slums with
new development.

As photography celebrated its 50th
anniversary in 1889, the average

person was familiar with what
photographs looked like and
probably kept some at home, but
few people took photographs
themselves. In addition, most
photographs existed as unique
originals, because copies were
still difficult to make.

All this soon changed as a
result of two important
introductions: the simple-to-use
Kodak camera and the halftone
printing process.

The use of photographic film was
pioneered by George Eastman, who
started manufacturing paper film in
1885 before switching to celluloid in
1889. His first camera, which he
called the "Kodak," was first offered
for sale in 1888. It was a very simple
box camera with a fixed-focus lens
and single shutter speed, which
along with its relatively low price
appealed to the average consumer.

The Kodak came pre-loaded
with enough film for 100
exposures and needed to be
sent back to the factory for
processing and reloading
when the roll was finished.

In 1900, Eastman took massmarket photography one step
further with the Brownie, a
simple and very inexpensive
box camera that introduced the
concept of the snapshot. The
Brownie was extremely popular
and various models remained
on sale until the 1960s.

The snapshot expanded
photography‟s territory to include
casual family scenes, candid views
of everyday life, and instantaneous
images that stopped motion in
midair.

The Snapshot

The photographs of
Frenchman Jacques Henri
Lartigue, who began taking
snapshots at the age of six,
best exemplify this. In this
snapshot, taken when he
was ten, his teenage cousin
appears suspended over a
flight of stairs, miraculously
posing for the camera in the
middle of her flying leap.

Originally a hunting term
for shooting from the hip

35mm
As early as 1905, Oscar Barnack had the idea of
reducing the format of negatives and then enlarging
the photographs after they had been exposed. As
development manager at Leica, he was able to put his
theory into practice. He took an instrument for taking
exposure samples for cinema film and turned it into
the world's first 35 mm camera: the 'Ur-Leica'.

As the technology for reproducing
photographs improved in the first
decade of the 20th century, a new
world of images began to make
the world seem smaller and its
manufactured goods more
desirable. Along with motion
pictures, which the Lumière
brothers of France introduced to
the world in 1895, photographs in
reproduction led to new concepts
of celebrity, culture, advertising,
and entertainment, all of which
depended on the availability of a
mass audience…..

One example of the new
visual culture provided by
photomechanical
reproduction is the birth of
picture magazines, so called
because their contents were
defined as much by
photographs as by text.

National Geographic magazine became
hugely popular because of it‟s exotic
photographs from around the world. It
was one of the first publications to use
colour photography.
traditional butter making in the Palestine, from March 1914 National Geographic

Fashion photography
developed along with the new
picture magazines. Confined
at first to studio portraits of
society women in their finery,
it turned to professional
models and professional
photographers to enliven
images and entice the reader.

Cecil Beaton

The new approach to
photography in the editorial
content of magazines was
matched by an increasingly
sophisticated use of
photography in advertisements.

Steichen. Steinway & Sons piano advertisement [Mother & son]

Photography played a significant
part in dada and surrealism, art
movements that encompassed
literature and theater as well as
painting and sculpture. Dada artists
in Germany, such as John
Heartfield, developed a form of
nonsensical photo collage around
1920, using it to express
dissatisfaction with social
conventions and to satirize
government institutions.
Hurrah, the Butter is All Gone!
John Heartfield, 1935
This image is another example of how
photomontage has been used to make sharp, and
often satirical political points. John Heartfield, a
German, produced this picture in response to a
comment by Herman Goring during the food
shortages in Nazi Germany. Goring said: "Iron has
always made a country strong, butter and lard
only make people fat." By picturing a family under
the Nazi regime eating an iron bicycle, Heartfield
satirizes and shows the foolishness of Goring's
comment, and in general the Nazi regime's
disregard for the basic needs of its people.

In Paris, surrealists such as American
expatriate Man Ray saw photography as
an avenue into the subconscious or into a
world beyond reality.

Digital Photography
Digital camera technology is directly related to
and evolved from the same technology that
recorded television images.

In 1986, Kodak
scientists invented
the world's first
megapixel sensor,
capable of
recording 1.4
million pixels that
could produce a
5x7-inch digital
photo-quality print.

APPLE QUICK TAKE 100 .1994. The first mass-market color digital camera. 640 x 480 pixel CCD. Up to eight
640 x 480 resolution images could be stored in internal memory

Today, the technology is massively advanced, with high res
cameras even incorporated as commonplace in mobile phones

Digital Manipulation of Images
Doctoring photographs has been
around almost as long as
photography itself, but as digital
imaging hardware and software
has both advanced and come
down in price, the practice of
digital image manipulation has
become much more
commonplace and faked photos
are becoming harder to detect.
In fact, digital photo
manipulation -- commonly
referred to as 'photoshopping' -has recently become a popular
pastime, and many consider this
photographic fakery to be a new
art form.

But when it works its way into
photojournalism and the media, the
issue of ethics comes to the forefront.
How far can we take digital image
manipulation and still maintain
photographic integrity?

Today photography remains a vital and inextricable part of
contemporary art, as well as retaining its commercial and more
everyday uses. The invention of various digital means of making,
altering, and transmitting images has thus far failed to curtail
interest in traditional methods of picture making. Nor has such
technology lessened the faith most people have in the
documentary truth of photographs.

Cindy Sherman

History of photography

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