History of photography

Jess White

What is a photograph?

• A photograph is a picture made using a camera, in which an image is focused on to light-sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment or stored digitally.

The first photograph – 1826

The first photograph, or the earliest known surviving photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, in 1826. The image depicts the view from an upstairs window at Niépce's estate, Le Gras, in France. He obtained the photograph by the process of heliography –he began experimenting with litographic printmaking, which led to his invention of heliography. During his trials with litography, he experimented with light-sensitive varnishes and then with images produced in camera, but he was unable to prevent the images from fading. In 1822, Niépce successfully made a heliograph from an engraving of Pope Pius VII, which was actually destroyed in an attempt to copy it some time later. Finally, in 1826 he coated a pewter plate with the same solution that he used in his previous experiments, and laced the plate into a camera. After he had left it to expose for around 8 hours, the plate was washed with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum – this dissolved away the parts of bitumen that had not been hardened by the light. The result was the picture on the left.

Innovations and advances of exposure times

• Exposures were made faster in 1840, when English chemist John Frederick Goddard discovered that adding bromine to a daguerreotype plate made it more light-sensitive – therefore speeding up the exposure time.

• A new lens was also designed and made by German-Hungarian mathematician Joseph Petzval had an aperture of f/3.5 and let in eight times the amount of light.

Pioneers of photographyA few of the pioneers of photography are; Angelo Sala, Carl William Scheele and Thomas Wedgwood.

Angelo Sala was a self-educated chemist that experimented with silver salts. In 1616, he published that the paper containing silver nitrate reacted with sunlight, causing it to darken. The same observations were made by Robert Boyle, who unfortunately gave the wrong explanation – he stated that the reaction occurred due to air and not sunlight.

Carl William Scheele was a Swedish scientist, who was also self-educated. He was especially interested in chemical analysis and worked particularly with the chemical reactions between silver nitrate and sunlight, therefore making a break through in the chemistry of photography. The records from his experiments were of a great importance for the next generations of scientists.

Thomas Wedgwood was the son of a well known pottery maker – Josef Wedgwood. In spite of his health problems and the interruptions of his studies, he continued to experiment with silver nitrate, in order to record programmes and images. He finally made it with the help of his friend Davy, one of the most important chemists of all time. Unfortunately, he had no way to fix the prints so he was destined to view them under very dimmed light, in order to prevent them from darkening.

First cameras

• The first camera invented was mad by Alexander Wolcott - his camera design was patented on May 8th, 1840. His invention made it possible for candid photos to be taken and not fade away with time. He also has the distinction of opening the earliest photography shop – that was known as a dagurran parlor – in New York City.

First woman photographer

Anna Atkins (March 16, 1799 –June 9, 1871) was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images – some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph and therefore, the first woman photographer.

1800’s Photographers

Mathew B. Brady (May 18, 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th-century American photographers. He was best known for his celebrity portraits and his documentation of the American Civil war.

William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) was a British inventor and photography pioneer. He invented the calotypeprocess – a precursor to photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries.

1900’s Photographers

• Edward Weston (March 24, 1886 –January 1, 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer – he has been recognized as one of the “masters of 20th

century photography”.

• Harold Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990) was a professor of electrical engineering ant the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope for an obscure labatoryinstrument into a common device. He was also deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography.

1900’s – Birth of 35mm cameras

• The Kodak Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak was a version advertised as "Soldier's camera" during WWI. It was manufactured from 1915 to 1926, sold 1,750,000 times.

• The Argus C3 was a low-priced rangefinder camera mass-produced from 1939 to 1966 by Argus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The camera sold about 2 million units, making it one of the most popular cameras in history. Due to its shape, size, and weight, it is commonly referred to as "The Brick" by photographers.

1900’s – Birth of 35mm cameras

• Typical elements of simple box cameras were combined in the Polaroid Swinger Model 20 - a non-focusable meniscus lens (Polaroid f17 100mm), a simple rotary single-speed shutter (1/200 sec.), and roll film as media, the first type of roll film for exposures which had to be pulled out of the camera to be developed in the light. It was an early one of the very cheap instant camera models of Polaroid, made from 1965 to 1970 in the USA and in England. Its earliest version was made in the US, with additional ”no" sign for insufficient light situations.

Iconic photography

• The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart. Her eyes are sea green - they are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years no one knew her name.

Colour photography

• Color photography was attempted beginning in the 1840s. Early experiments were directed at finding a "chameleon substance" which would assume the color of the light falling on it. Some encouraging early results, typically obtained by projecting a solar spectrum directly onto the sensitive surface, seemed to promise eventual success, but the comparatively dim image formed in a camera required exposures lasting for hours or even days. The quality and range of the color was sometimes severely limited, as in the chemically complicated "Hillotype" process invented by American Daguerreotypist Levi Hill around 1850. Other experimenters, such as Edmond Becquerel, achieved better results but could find no way to prevent the colors from quickly fading when the images were exposed to light for viewing. Over the following several decades, renewed experiments along these lines periodically raised hopes and then dashed them, yielding nothing of practical value.

Photography movements

• Naturalism – Peter Henry Emerson (May 13 1856 – May 12 1936) was an English photographer who promoted photography as an independent art form. He also created an esthetic theory called “naturalistic photography”.He originally trained as a physician, and first began to photograph as a part of an anthropological study of the peasants and fishermen of East Anglia.

• Surrealism – Man Ray (born in 1890) was an American, renowned representative of avant-garde photography in the 20th century, and is considered as the pioneer of surrealist photographer. Ray’s artistic work is very diverse – he was a painter, object artist and a film maker. He was the very first artist whose images/photographs were more valuable to collectors than his artwork, he therefore made a significant contribution to the evaluation of photography as a form of art.

• Abstract – Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. Strand was born in New York City. In his late teens, he was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. It was while on a fieldtrip in this class that Strand first visited the 291 art gallery, where exhibitions of work by forward-thinking modernist photographers and painters would move Strand to take his photographic hobby more seriously..

Photography movements

• Photo-journalism – Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 2009) was an American photographer, she was particularly recognized for her street photography of and around New York City. She has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time”. Levitt grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She dropped out of high school and went to work for a commercial photographer, where she taught herself photography. While teaching art classes to children in 1937, Levitt became intrigued with the the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children’s street culture of that time. She purchased a Leica camera and began to photograph these works, as well as the children who made them.

• Social documentary – Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Most of Evans’ work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10 inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are literate, authoritative and transcendent.

Digital manipulation

• Photo, or digital manipulation is the application of image editing techniques to photographs, in order to create an illusion or deception after the original photographing has took place. An enhancement or correction is known as retouching, whereas doctoring refers to more involved processes, which often purposefully deceive the viewer or misrepresent the scene.

Original photograph

After manipulatio

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Thomas Knoll

• Thomas Knoll is an American software engineer who created Adobe Photoshop. He initiated the development of image processing routines in 1988. After Tom created the first core routines, he showed them to his brother, John Knoll, who worked at Industrial Light and Magic. John liked what he saw, suggested new features, and encouraged Tom to bundle them into a package with a graphical user interface. In 1989, John successfully sold the program to Adobe Systems which brought it out as Photoshop. Tom was the lead developer until version CS4, and currently contributes to work on the Camera Raw plug-in to process raw images from cameras.