Timeline
for the history of
photography…

The camera obscura was used as a tool for artists, draftspeople and scientists. Many artists used the
camera obscura or the modern camera as a painting or drawing tool to aid their compositions and help them
achieve realistic perspectives. This is a small selection for discussion, but include: Leonardo da Vinci,
Battista, Canaletto, Vermeer, and later Scottish artist David Octavia’s Hill, the Barbizon School (who used
photographs and designs coated on a photographic plate), French artists Edgar Degas, Henri ToulouseLautrec (both French Impressionists) and Andre Derain (Fauvism), Henri Matisse, Georges Braque
(Cubism), Georges Rouault, and later dada and Surrealist photographers/artists Man Ray and Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy. In America from the 1950s onwards, Robert Rauschenberg (Pop Art), Andy Warhol (Pop Art),
David Hackney (artist and later known for his photographic “joiner photos”) and super-realism painter Chuck
Close.

An article published in The Age (Thursday March 12, 2009, by Tom Kingston in Rome for the Guardian
newspaper) titled “Was Caravaggio a photo master?” says the following about how Caravaggio used
photography in his work:
Revered as the Baroque master of lifelike portraits and light and shadow, the 17 th-century painter
Caravaggio is now being touted as the first master of photographic technique – two centuries before the
formal invention of the camera.
The Italian artist has long been suspected of turning his studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a
hole in the ceiling to help project images on to his canvas. But new research claims that Caravaggio also
used chemicals to turn is canvases into primitive photographic film, “burning” images he then sketched over
for works such as St. Matthew and the Angel.
“We were already sure Caravaggio projected images of his sitters, but we have now found mercury salt in
his canvasses, which is light-sensitive and used in film,” said Roberta Lapucci, conservationist at Florence’s
SACI institute.
Ms Lapucci said she investigated the use of chemicals after building a camera obscura with artist David
Hackney.
“You get the image by turning the whole studio into the camera obscura, but you need darkness, and the
problem is you cannot paint in darkness,” she said. “X-ray fluorescence shows the presence of the mercury
salt in his canvases.
“That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the
surface, in his primer.”

The ancient Chinese in the 5th century AD looked at the observations of a man named Mo Ti who looked
at how reflection passing through a pinhole onto a dark surface produced an inverted image of an object.
Timeline
for the history of photography… page 2

Arab astronomers of the 9th century AD, and later in the 10th century an Arabian, Ibn Al-Haitian (Alhazen)
repeated Mo Ti’s visual experiments using a smaller pinhole for greater detail.

In the 1560’s, Italian Daniel Barbara noted that a lens could be substituted for a pinhole and revised the use
of the camera obscura. This produced a sharper and brighter image.

The camera obscura itself underwent many changes and refinements over time. In 1700, the camera
obscura was reduced from a fixed room with a small hole in one wall, to a small closet. It then was reduced
further to a small portable box with lenses instead of pinholes. Around
1750, the artist Giovanni Canaletto
was using a flat-field lens which minimized distortion. In 1807, William Hyde Wollaston constructed a
camera lucida. Light reflected off a subject, shone through a prism attached to a metal rod. This metal rod
was attached to a board on which drawing paper was laid. A peephole in the prism mean the subject and
paper could be viewed simultaneously and the image could be copied.

1666 – Isaac Newton showed that light is a source of colour, using a prism to split sunlight into different
colours (ie. red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) then recombine them to create white light

In 1725, a German anatomy professor, Johann Heinrich Schulze, noticed that a solution of silver nitrate in a
flask turned black when stood in sunlight. These were possibly the first “sun pictures”. He tried many other
things, but could not fix the image permanently.

1801 – Thomas Young suggests that the retina at the back of the eye contained 3 different types of colour
sensitive receptors – one sensitive to blue light, another to green, and another to red. The idea was that the
brain would use combinations of these colours to create any colour in the spectrum (that explains why old
televisions use these dots if you look really, really closely!)

Englishman Thomas Wedgwood makes “sun pictures” in the early 1800s with his father’s camera obscura,
with paper and leather-coated with a silver nitrate solution could capture no more than a faint image. This
image disappeared entirely if placed under anything stronger than candlelight.

1816 – Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French photographer, begins experimenting and creates a permanent
image in the camera obscura with light-sensitive paper by 1826. This is the first known “photograph”, View
from window at Gras”. It took 8 hours of exposure! Niece begins a collaboration with Louis Daguerre in
1827, who contacted him about working together. Their 10-year collaboration was cut short a few years into
the agreement when Niece died in 1833.

Louis Daguerre goes on to invent the Daguerreotype. The images are crisp, and exposure time is short –
about 30 minutes (in 1841, the scientist Petzval invents an f3/6 aperture on the portable camera obscura to
reduce Daguerreotypes down to 1 minute exposures). The technique was publicly announced in 1839 and
was a single direct positive image. Daguerreotypes could only be viewed from certain angles. But as
daguerreotype images were stored in special velvet-lined wooden boxes, many have survived.
Timeline
for the history of photography… page 3

Daguerreotypes came to Australia two years later after appearing in Paris (1841).

Also in 1841 - Unfortunately for British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, he went down in history as
the second inventor of fixing an image permanently to a surface. Fox Talbot had been working around the
same time as Daguerre and Niépce, but did not publish his findings. In 1834 he used silver chloride coated
paper to produce “negatives” of silhouettes, but it wasn’t until 1835 that his “mousetrap” camera obscuras
captured an image out of his library window at the property Lacock Abbey, creating the first negative. Unlike
Daguerreotypes, which could not be copied, Fox Talbot’s Calotypes made many positive prints from a single
negative, all within 5 minutes per print. However due to being on paper, the images were not as detailed as
Daguerreotypes. The scientist Sir John Herschel coins the terms “photography”, “negative” and “positive” in
1839 in response to Fox Talbot’s images. The Calotype (later Talbotype) is patented in 1841. Not only did
Fox Talbot manage to be first to produce negatives, but he also produced the first ever photography book –
a collection called The Pencil of Nature, which included pasted-in calotypes.

Early 1840s - The first American patent for a camera is given to Alexander Wolcott
1843

The first advertisement using a photograph appears in Philadelphia, USA, in

Claude Felix Abel Niepce de St. Victor uses egg white (albumen) to fix emulsions to glass plates in

In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented the wet plate/wet collodion process. Scott Archer does not patent
this technique and dies in poverty. Portable darkrooms were needed for this technique more so than other
forms of photography, as the plate had to be wet for exposures. From this process, two more were born: the
ambrotype (by American James Ambrose Cutting) and the tintype (also known as the ferrotype due to being
iron sheets coated in collodion), patented in America by Hamilton Lanphere Smith and other manufacturers
in 1856, with exposures of about 10 seconds.

1851 - Frenchman André Disderi invents the carte-de-visite, translated as “calling cards”, which use a
1847
version of the collodion process to create 3”x5” stamp-sized images, usually portraits. These become quite
popular due to being reproducible.

1854 - Frenchman Louis Désiré Blanquart Evrard proposes that paper could be used in printing using gallic
acid and also suggested the same for albumen paper

1859 sees the first panoramic camera patented, called The Sutton.

1859 also sees Thomas Young’s studies into colour taken further, by Scottish scientist James Clerk
Maxwell. In 1861, he takes three identical black and white photos of a tartan ribbon through different
coloured filters – one green, one red, and one blue. He projects them together with an overlay of a matching
coloured slide (ie. red slide over red-filtered photograph). In doing this “colour separation” method, Maxwell
invented what is believed to be the first ever colour photo.
Timeline
for the history of photography… page 4

Late into the 1800s, the dry plate negative is invented by Richard Kennett. It revolutionized photography
as the plate did not need to be developed straight away, like Archer’s method did. Photographers did not
need to have immediate access to a darkroom, meaning exposure times were shorter. As a result, cameras
did not necessarily need tripods anymore and darkrooms no longer had to be portable – huge leaps in
photographic technology.

In 1871, gelatin dry plates are proposed by Dr. Richard Leach Maddox as a good medium for photography.
He wrote in the British Journal of Photography that gelatin emulsion could be a collodion substitute. Gelatin
comes from the protein found in animal bones. Gelatin “emulsions” and “dry plates” were marketed by
companies from 1878 (including the Eastman Dry Plate Company in 1880). Images using gelatin could be
produced in a fraction of a second in normal sunlight and processed at the photographer’s leisure (a big
change from other types of photography up until then). Gelatin film was also fast enough to allow for handheld exposures.

In 1873, Professor Hermann Wilhelm Vogel developed a system of adding dyes to photographic emulsions,
developing “orthochromatic” film (a forerunner to colour film, which leads to Vogel in 1904 researching
panchromatic film sensitive to all visible colours)

Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer, invents a form of photography that is the forerunner to

1884, American George Eastman invents flexible, paper-based photographic film with his company,
motion pictures, in c.
1880
Eastman Kodak (the name “Kodak” was a made-up one, as Eastman wanted something that sounded
snappy and could be pronounced in any language)

1884 An American clergyman from New York, Hannibal Goodwin, patents a roll film with a flexible plastic
base

1888 sees Eastman patent the Kodak roll-film camera. The “Kodak Number 1” is the first simplified camera
system for the general public. It also marks the first system for mass developing and processing of film. The
cameras were bought for $25, including 100 shots, and when photos were taken the camera was sent back
to the factory. Images were developed, printed, and backed for a fee, then the camera was returned with a
new film replacement. However, tonal values were poor due to the paper used.
1889. This replaces

George Eastman goes on to produce the first transparent roll film the following year in
the paper backing for film used in the Kodak Number 1.

1890 sees F. Hurter and V.C. Driffield devise the first independent system for rating emulsions, leading to
the ASA/ISO film speeds we use today
1898

Hannibal Goodwin processes the first celluloid photographic film in

Also in the 1890s comes the use of half-tone photographs for use in the daily papers.
Timeline
for the history of photography… page 5

Again in the 1890s is the rise of the use of silver gelatin prints, the standard black and white paper used to
this day. The paper is coated with silver salts (usually silver bromide) and an emulsion of gelatin.

1912 – German chemists Siegrist and Fischer invent a dye that can be applied to colour film processing but
it is only in its infancy

1924/5 – the Leica camera invented by German Dr. Oscar Barnack. This makes photojournalism possible,
as seen in the kinds of imagery taken by the Magnum photographic agency. With the invention of this
camera, the age of using 35mm film is born.

Flash bulbs are invented by J. Ostermeier in 1929

This is followed by the electronic flash in 1931 by Harold Edgerton

1933 - French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is amongst the first photographers to show his work
made with a 35mm camera

1935 – Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr. (both American musicians and photography
technicians) help develop Kodakchrome for home movies. The following year sees this introduced into a
35mm format for cameras. In the same year, the Eastman Kodak Company invents the first colour slide film,
with Kodakchrome being a positive image (not a negative)

1940s – large-size factory laboratories take over film processing from individual chemists, although chemist
still continued to sell films

1947 – photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and David Seymour start the photographerowned Magnum picture agency. This agency became world-famous for specializing in photojournalism,
based on the versatility of the Leica 35mm camera. Magnum is still operating, with its exclusive
photojournalist memberships limited to 36 contributors

Kodakchrome colour negative film is marketed by Eastman Kodak in
1942

1947 – Dr Edwin Land invents an “instant” picture process whereby a special Polaroid camera sandwiched
the exposed negative with positive paper that revealed the image when peeled apart (by 1963, Dr. Land’s
Polaroid research team had invented the first colour picture material)

1950s – Kodak develops the chromogenic colour photograph; in other words, the type C photograph still
used today. It takes its name from Ektacolour paper type C, which was a photographic paper by Kodak
which were produced from colour negative film using silver halides and dye couplers in what has become
the most common of all colour processes

First digital image made in 1957. It shows researcher Russell Kirch with his baby son. The ghost-like, black
and white image included only 176 pixels.
Timeline
for the history of photography… page 6

1963 – first colour instant film developed by Polaroid

1973 – C-41 colour negative process introduced (still used today in colour film processing)

1978 – Konica releases the first point-and-shoot autofocus camera

1980s – a system called DX coding was introduced for 35mm film. Film cassettes were marked with a
special code that helped certain cameras to automatically set the required film speed, and help laboratories
identify and process film

1984 – Canon demonstrated the first digital still camera

1986 – Pentax release the world’s first 35mm compact with a zoom lens

1987 – the first digital camera developed, the Canon RC-760

1990 - Adobe Photoshop 1.0 released by Apple Macintosh computers

1990 – Eastman Kodak announces the photo-cd as a digital image storage medium

1991 – first digital SLR released, a Kodak DCS-100

1998 – first megapixel cameras introduced for the general public (consumer market)

2000 – Canon introduces the EOS D30, the first digital SLR for the consumer market

2000 – Sharp and J-Phone introduce the first camera-phone for a mobile phone in Japan.

2004 – Kodak ceases production of film cameras

2008 – Polaroid instant pictures cease to be made, meaning that existing stock is now being snapped up by
enthusiasts