the 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 fixedfocus 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 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
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.
Website:
http://www.youtube.com/dove
evolution=5XF66Ku4a9U
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