The History of

Photography
 What is Happening Before
• Photography?
There has been an industrial revolution
• Changes socioeconomic and cultural conditions in
England & the world
• Our lifestyle comes out of this

• Creates class consciousness

• High/upper class are the Elite, old money
• Poor, lower class
• Rising middle class, new money, want to move into the
elite, feel they are superior to working class & want to
improve working class

• New inventions
•
Before Photography
Silhouettes
• Silhouettes were (and still are) "art for the people" in so
far as it provided a cheap and accessible access to
portraiture
• paintings were expensive
• Only for those who were high class
 Early Photographers
Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, first described the formation of
a crude optical image in about 350 B.C. He observed that when a beam
of light was allowed to enter a darkened room through a small hole an
image was formed. By holding a piece of paper six inches or so from the
opening he was able to capture the image. Though blurred and upside
down the image was recognizable.
Leonardo DaVinci, early in the sixteenth century, diagrammed in his
famous Notebooks the workings of a camera, complete with instructions
on how to use it.
 Transitioning to
•
Photography
Artists used optical devices to
aid them in the reproduction of
a view
• Camera Obscura
• Camera Lucida
• Artists would use these
devices and trace images

• No way to make the image stay

on paper
 What is
• We owe thePhotography?
name "Photography"
to Sir John Herschel, who first
used the term in 1839, the year the
photographic process became
public
• “DRAWING WITH LIGHT”
• More: the recording of light
onto light sensitive material
•
Two Processes
There are two distinct scientific processes that
combine to make photography possible.
• OPTICAL & CHEMICAL
• surprising that photography was not
invented earlier than the 1830s, because
these processes had been known for quite
some time.
• It was not until the two distinct scientific
processes had been put together that
photography came into being.
Process #1
• The first of these processes was optical.
• The Camera Obscura (dark room) had
been in existence for at least four
hundred years.
• There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a
Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci;
about this same period its use as an aid
to drawing was being advocated.
 Camera Obscura
• The idea of photography was
known, no one knew how to fix
the image to paper
• Camera obscura is the first
”known camera”
• It was essentially a ”dark room”
with a pin hole that allowed
light in
• The image was flipped and the
artist could trace it
The camera obscura was used in the painting of this picture. It was painted about
1660 by Jan van der Meer van Delft (aka Jan Vermeer). Vermeer was a famous
Renaissance painter. His paintings are known for their "camera-like" detail and
quality - but were painted 150 years before the invention of the camera.

View of Delft Girl with a Pearl Earring

1660 – 1661 1665
Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas
 The camera obscura was made portable by the 1700s by putting it in a box
with a pinhole on one side and a glass screen on the other. Light coming
through this pinhole projected an image onto the glass screen, where the
artist could easily trace it by hand. Artists soon discovered that they could
obtain an even sharper image by using a small lens in place of the pinhole.
Two types of portable cameras obscura.
 Camera Lucida
• A lens with a prism or
mirror that allows artists to
look at the drawing paper
with one eye & the scene to
be copied with the other eye
• The artist copied what they
saw
•
Process #2
The second process was chemical.

• For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been
aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had
made little distinction between heat, air and light.

• They also knew that silver salts were light sensitive

This is a picture of one of the first commercially
made daguerreotype cameras that was made in
1839. It was designed by Daguerre himself.
•
A Threat to Art
Why would photography be a threat?
• Do you think it belongs to the Upper
Class or the “everyman”?
• At that time some artists saw in
photography a threat to their
livelihood because it was quicker, less
expensive, and more accurate than
having your portrait painted
Some even prophesied that
painting would cease to exist.

People who painted people’s

portraits quickly went out of
business or became
daguerreotypists themselves.
 Johann Schulze

A German professor of anatomy, Schulze was experimenting with the

manufacture of phosphorus when he discovered that a combination of
chalk, aqua regia (a combination of nitric and hydrochloric acids), and
silver nitrate turned purple when exposed to light. By the process of
elimination he discovered that silver salts were the darkening agent.
Unfortunately, however, he failed to make use of this discovery. The
credit for applying Shulze’s results goes to Thomas Wedgwood.
 Thomas Wedgwood

The great English potter Josian Wedgwood used the camera obscura to
reproduce accurate drawings for his ornamental china and potter. His son
Thomas was the first to apply the idea of light-sensitive chemicals to the
camera obscura. Familiar with the camera obscura because of his father’s
work, and with Schulze’s discoveries about silver salts because of his
fascination with chemistry, Wedgwood produced silhouettes of insect wings
and leaves on white leather coated with silver nitrate. However, the process
was too slow to be used in the camera obscura, and there was not way to fix
and preserve the image.
 Joseph Niepce

Partial credit for the invention of photography has also been given to
Frenchman Joseph Niepce, who, after many disappointments,
successfully produced the world’s first photograph in 1827. To create
it, he coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, or asphaltum, placed
the plate in the camera, and made an eight hour exposure. To develop
the photograph, he rinsed the plate with lavender oil. Although the
image was far from perfect, it was a milestone in the advancement of
the art.
 Louis Daguerre
Another Frenchman, Daguerre, started his own search for the ideal fixing agent when his
brief partnership with Niepce broke up. In 1837, after eight years of searching, he found
what he was looking for, mercury vapor. Daguerre patented his process as the daguerreotype
process. The procedure involved making an exposure on silver foil that had been sensitized
with iodine. Following exposure, the foil was brought into contact with mercury vapor for
development. The image was made permanent with a solution of common salt.
Daguerreotype prints were an instant success. Studios were opened, and professional
photographers began giving portrait painters stiff competition for business. Gradually, over
the years, refinements were made in the lens and in the light sensitivity of the plates that were
use. The popularity of daguerreotype portraits leaped when a method was devised to soften
the tones and enrich the image.
 William Henry Fox
Talbot
Talbot, and English contemporary of Daguerre, made the next major contribution to
photography – production of the first negative image. Working with silver nitrate and sodium
chloride (salt), Talbot produced silver chloride, a compound more sensitive to light than
Daguerre’s foil plates. Talbot coated paper instead of glass or metal plates, to produce the first
negative image in 1835. Despite his disappointment at public indifference to his discovery,
Talbot made numerous experiments to perfect the process. While working to improve his
technique, Talbot discovered the latent image, an invisible image formed on film after
exposure but before development. He realized that the resulting negative would enable him to
reproduce an image easily. In 1841 he obtained a patent for his process, which he called the
calotype photographic process, derived from the Greek word calos meaning “beautiful”.
 Talbot Continued
Although Talbot did not enjoy the instant success of Daguerre, his
discoveries and contributions to photography were the keys that unlocked
the negative-positive image process, earning him recognition as the
father of modern photography.
 Joseph Petzval

The same year Talbot patented the calotype process, a Viennese

photographer, Petzval, designed the first fast portrait lens- a lens ten
times faster than the landscape lenses used in the daguerreotype cameras.
The daguerreotype, which was already being replaced by Talbot’s
negative process, was further relegated to the past by Petzval’s faster
lens, which relieved subjects from the necessity of sitting for
excruciatingly long sessions.
 Frederick Scott Archer
The English sculptor, Archer, invented the wet collodion
process while attempting to improve the calotype process he
used during sculpting. Archer decided to try using collodion, a
substance made by dissolving guncotton (nitrocellulose) in
ether. Archer made a mixture of the gelatin-like collodion and
potassium iodide and spread it thinly over a glass plate. He
then dipped the still damp plate into a solution of silver nitrate.
The plate had to be exposed immediately because it’s light
sensitivity dropped sharply as it dried. As soon as it was
exposed, the plate was developed in pyrogallic acid and fixed
with sodium thiosulfate. Archer’s original intention was to use
the collodion as a process for producing negatives, but it soon
became a popular method for positive production too.
 Julia Margaret Cameron
Cameron, one of the most remarkable amateur photographers of all time,
started work in the 1860s on what she considered a “divine art”. In her
photographs she attempted to record “the greatness of the inner as well as
the features of the outer man.” She pioneered in the use of close-up
techniques, large plates, and unusual lighting. She used an enormous lens
and demanded that her subjects sit frozen for exposures lasting five to
seven minutes. Her portrait subjects included the great, and the not so
great of the period.
 George Eastman
Though there are several others who contributed to the
progress of modern photography along our history of
photography timeline, the next big contribution was made
by George Eastman. He began as an amateur photographer
in 1877. Within twenty years he controlled the largest
photographic manufacturing company in the world. Can
you venture a guess at the company’s name?
 Eastman Continued
Introduced in 1888, the Kodak No.1, Eastman’s simple box camera was
the first camera to use roll film instead of plates or sheets. The camera
appealed to the masses of amateur photographers because it was small (6
½ inches x 3 ½ inches x 3 ½ inches) and simple to operate. The
advertising slogan “You press the button, we do the rest” indicated that
anyone who could press the button could get a good picture. Eastman
chose the name Kodak because the word mimicked the sound the shutter
made and was easily pronounced throughout the world.
The camera came loaded with enough
film for one hundred pictures and cost
twenty-five dollars. When the one
hundred pictures had been taken, the
photographer mailed the camera to the
Eastman plant in Rochester , NY. The
film was then processed, prints were
made, the camera was reloaded with
film, and the pictures and camera were
returned to the owner. Total cost for the
prints and new film was ten dollars.
 Other Advancements
In the 1890s, following on the heels of Kodak, a host of
manufacturers attempted to complete in the vast amateur
photography marketplace. The folding bellows camera, the twin-
lens reflex camera, and the “nodark” – a camera that processed
its own film- appealed to beginners throughout the world. Small
cameras became even more popular with Dr. Paul Rudolph’s
invention of a precision lens – the Zeiss Tessar.
 More…
Small simple cameras had been developed to appeal to those novice
photographers who wanted to preserve on film Jimmy’s sixth birthday or the
family vacation to the coast. In 1925 the serious photographer was provided
with a small, high-quality, hand-held camera that used 35 mm film and the Zeiss
lens – the Leica. Leicas established the standard for the modern-day 35mm
cameras. The inventor of the Leica, Oscar Barnack, started work on the camera
two years earlier as a means to pretest the exposure of movie film. It worked so
well that on mountain hikes he substituted the smaller prototype Leica for his
bulky field camera. Leicas have been in production since 1925 and have been
refined and improved so that today they are still among the world’s premier
cameras.
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