Photography

In the world of art, the camera and the computer were born yesterday. Although the earliest known drawn and painted
images date back to the Stone Age, and the earliest surviving print was made well over one thousand years ago, images
recorded by a camera or created on a computer belong entirely to our own modern era.

The camera relies on a natural phenomenon known since antiquity: that light reflected from an object can, under
controlled circumstances, project an image of that object onto a surface. It was not until the 19th century, however, that
a way was found to capture and preserve such a projected image. With that discovery, photography was born, and after
photography, film and video, which recorded the projected image in motion over time.

Camera technology is essential to business, advertising, education, government, mass media, and entertainment. It has
commercial applications and personal applications, and they are widely available to both professional organizations and
individual consumers. Among these individuals are artists, who have carved out a space for human expression within the
vast flow of information and images that the camera has enabled.

Origin

Early in the 11th century C.E., the Arab mathematician and physicist Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham (also known as
Alhazen in the West) set up an experiment in a dark room in which light from several candles passed through a pinhole
in a partition, projecting images of the candle flames onto a surface on the other side. From his observations, Alhazen
deduced that light travels in straight lines, and he theorized that the human eye worked along this same principle: light
reflected from objects passes through the narrow opening of the iris, projecting an image of the outside world onto a
surface in the dark interior. Alhazen’s works circulated in translation in Europe, where early scientists continued his
investigations into the behavior of light, but it was not until the Renaissance that a practical device was developed to
harness those principles. It was known as the camera obscura, Latin for “dark room.”

With the development of lenses during the 16th century, the camera obscura could be made to focus the image it
projected. Artists of the time, concerned with making optically convincing representations through perspective and
chiaroscuro, welcomed this improved camera obscura as a drawing tool.

The Still Camera and Its Beginnings

Despite the sophistication of modern photographic equipment, the basic mechanism of the camera is simple, and it is no
different in theory from that of the camera obscura. A camera is a light-tight box with an opening at one end to admit
light, a lens to focus and refract the light, and a light-sensitive surface to receive the light-image and hold it. The last of
these—the holding of the image—was the major drawback of the camera obscura. It could project an image—but there
was no way to preserve the image, much less walk away with it in your hand. It was to this end that a number of people
in the 19th century directed their attention.

One of those investigators was Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor. Working with a specially coated pewter
plate in the camera obscura, Niépce managed, in 1826, to record a fuzzy version of the view from his window after an
exposure of eight hours. Although we may now consider Niépce’s “heliograph” (or sun-writing), as he called it, to be the
first permanent photograph, the method was not really practical.

Niépce was corresponding with another Frenchman, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who was also experimenting with
methods to fix the photographic image. The two men worked separately and communicated in code to keep their
progress from prying eyes. When Niépce died in 1833, his son Isidore continued the experiments. It was Daguerre,
however, who in 1837 made the breakthrough, recording an image in his studio that was clear and sharp, by methods
that others could duplicate easily. Daguerre’s light-sensitive surface was a copper plate coated with silver iodide, and he
named his invention the daguerreotype.

Daguerre’s invention caused great excitement throughout Europe and North America. Entrepreneurs and the general
public alike were quick to see the potential of photography, especially for portraits. It is hard to realize now, but until
photography came along only the rich could afford to have their likenesses made, by sitting for a portrait painter. Within
three years after Daguerre made his first plate, a “daguerreotype gallery for portraits” had opened in New York, and such
galleries soon proliferated.

Yet for all its early success, the daguerreotype was ultimately a blind alley for photography. The process produces a
positive image, an image in which light and dark values appear correctly. This image is unique and cannot be
reproduced. The plate is the photograph. The future of photography instead lay with technology that produced a
negative image, one in which light and dark values were reversed. This negative could be used again and again to create
multiple positive images on light-sensitive paper. Instead of a single precious and delicate object, photography found its
essence as an art of potentially unlimited, low-cost multiples. An early version of the negative/positive print process was
the calotype, which used a paper negative. Toward the middle of the 19th century, the vastly superior collodion process
was developed, which produced a negative on glass.

The long exposure time and bulky equipment of early photography meant that a photograph was still a special occasion,
an occasion for standing still. By the 1880s, however, technical advances had reduced exposure time to a fraction of a
second, allowing cameras to capture life as it happened, without asking it to pose. Then, in 1888, an American named
George Eastman developed a camera called the Kodak that changed photography forever. Unlike earlier cameras, the
Kodak was lightweight and handheld, which meant it could be taken anywhere. Sold with the slogan “You press the
button, we do the rest,” the camera came loaded with a new invention, a roll of film, enough for one hundred
photographs. Users simply took the pictures (which quickly became known as “snapshots”) and sent the camera back to
the company. Their developed and printed photographs were returned to them along with their camera, reloaded with
film.

The Kodak and cameras like it opened photography up to amateurs, and it quickly became a popular hobby. Although
serious photographers continued to oversee the development and printing of their own work, they, too, benefited from
the portable, lightweight technology. Almost anywhere a person could go, a camera could now go; almost anything a
person could see, a camera could record. Daily life, the life any one of us lives, became photography’s newest and
perhaps most profound subject.

Bearing Witness and Documenting

One way in which photography changed the world was in the sheer quantity of images that could be created and put
into circulation. Whereas a painter might take weeks or even months to compose and execute a scene of daily life, a
photographer could produce dozens of such scenes in a single day. But what purpose could this facility be put to? What
was the advantage of quantity and speed? One early answer was that photography could record what was seen as
history unfolded, or preserve a visual record of what existed for a time. We could call these purposes bearing witness
and documenting, and they continue to play important roles today.

Photographs bearing witness to events appear in newspapers and magazines the world over. Around 1900, the first
process for photomechanical reproduction—high-speed printing of photographs along with type—came into being, and
with it a new concept, photojournalism.
Photojournalism quickly became concerned about more than just getting a photograph to illustrate an article. Although
a single photograph may be all the general public sees at the time, photojournalists often create a significant body of
work around an event, a place, or a culture.

A photograph, of course, shows us the present moment, a split-second of today. But the present is always slipping into
the past, and what exists today may well not exist tomorrow. That basic realization inspires photographers who use their
artistic skills to document.

Photography and Art

The development of photography has been seen as freeing painting and sculpture from practical tasks such as recording
appearances and events, and it is certainly true that Western artists began to explore the potential of abstraction and
nonrepresentation only after photography was well established. Ironically, to many people’s way of thinking, the older
forms took the definition of “art” with them, leaving photography to assume many of the traditional functions of art
with none of the rewards.

Yet from the beginning there were photographers and critics who insisted that photography could also be practiced as
an art. Today, over 150 years later, photography is fully integrated into the art world of museums and galleries, and many
artists who are not primarily photographers work with photographic images.

One characteristic of photographs that disqualified them as art in many people’s eyes was their sharply detailed
objectivity, which seemed to preclude personal expression. Another stumbling block was the medium’s increasing
popularity and ease. The Kodak camera had brought photography within reach of almost everyone, reinforcing the
notion that it was simply a matter of framing the view and pushing a button.

It was precisely “the rest” that obsessed the photographers of the international Pictorialist movement, the most
influential of the movements that sought to have photography accepted as an art. Pictorialists embraced labor-intensive
printing techniques that allowed them to blur unwanted detail, enhance tonal range, soften focus, and add highlights
and delicate veils of color, resulting in images that drew close to painting in their effects.

Pictorialism flourished from 1889 until the outbreak of World War I, during which time it successfully demonstrated that
photographs could be as beautiful and expressive as paintings. But with developments such as abstraction, Cubism, and
nonrepresentation, painting was changing, and photography would change as well.

Alfred Stieglitz championed a type of photography that came to be known as “pure” or “straight” photography.
Practitioners of straight photography consider it a point of honor not to crop or manipulate their photographs in any
way. The composition is entirely visualized in advance, framed with the viewfinder, then photographed and printed. With
its emphasis on formal values and faithfulness to the essence of the medium, the aesthetic of straight photography was
enormously influential for much of the 20th century.

Artists have made photography itself part of the subject of their art, examining its role in society, the particular vision of
the world it promotes, and the assumptions we make about it. One of the first artists to look critically at photography
was Hannah Höch. Born in 1889, Höch came of age during the decades when photomechanical reproduction first
allowed photographic images to appear in newspapers, periodicals, posters, and advertising. Everyday life was suddenly
flooded with images, and a constant flow of secondhand reality began to compete with direct experience. Höch’s
response was to use these “found” images as a new kind of raw material.

One complaint that had been lodged against photography from the very beginning was that it recorded the world in
black-and-white instead of in full color. Early techniques for color were in place by around 1910, but it was not until the
1930s that color began to be widely used, and then only in advertising. Serious photographers continued for decades to
prefer black-and-white, feeling that color lacked dignity and was suitable only for vulgar commercial photography. Such
prejudices began to crumble during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, many artists have adopted color photography as a
primary means of making images.

The computer has been welcomed by many artists who work with photography as a natural extension of the medium.
Developed during the 1990s, digital cameras use no film at all but, instead, store photographs as data. For
photojournalists, digital cameras allow images to be transmitted back to a newspaper over the Internet. For artists, the
technology allows them to gather photographic images, feed them into a computer, work with them, and print the end
product as a photograph.

The camera and the computer are technologies of the modern age that have transformed our world. They were not
developed with art in mind; yet, because artists chose to work with them, they have yielded new art forms for our era.