the history of

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the history of

• photography

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photographs..

• preserve personal memories

inform us of public events
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• they provide a means of identification

and of glamorisation..
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• views of far-off places on Earth

and in space
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• as well as microscopic scenes from inside and
  outside the human body

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

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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
photographers particular point of view.
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Photographys role in the visual arts is also a
matter of debate. From the start, the
photographers camera was seen as a challenger to
the painters 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.
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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.
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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.
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• "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.
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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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

The Music Lesson. 1600s
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• 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 eight-hour
exposure, which resulted in sunlight being
visible on both sides of the buildings.
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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.
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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.
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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 sitters 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.
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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.
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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
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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."
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Interest in daguerreotypes dwindled in Europe
after 1851, when English photographer Frederick
Scott Archer invented the collodion, or wet-plate
process. This was a negative-to-positive process,
but because the negatives were made of smooth
glass rather than paper, the collodion process
produced much sharper images.
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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.
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Photographers using the collodion, or wet-plate,
process hauled their large cameras, tripods, and
portable darkrooms to the farthest reaches of
Europes imperial quest in the years between 1850
and 1870.
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The Civil War in the United States (1861-1865)
was the first war to be thoroughly recorded by
photography
Matthew Brady
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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.
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In addition to recording the construction of
railroads, ships, buildings, and bridges,
photography proved useful to medicine and the
social sciences
Doctors wanted before-and-after pictures of
wounded Civil War soldiers to study the effects
of amputation and invasive surgery
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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.
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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.
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French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey also
followed Muybridges 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 subjects 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.
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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 Annans documentation
to justify replacement of Glasgows unsavory
slums with new development.
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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.
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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.
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In 1900, Eastman took mass-market 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.
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The snapshot expanded photographys territory to
include casual family scenes, candid views of
everyday life, and instantaneous images that
stopped motion in midair. 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.
The Snapshot
Originally a hunting term for shooting from the
hip
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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'.
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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..
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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 its 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
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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
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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
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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.
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In Paris, surrealists such as American expatriate
Man Ray saw photography as an avenue into the
subconscious or into a world beyond reality.
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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
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Today, the technology is massively advanced, with
high res cameras even incorporated as commonplace
in mobile phones
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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.
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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?
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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