History of Photography

I

Introduction

History of Photography, development of the art and technique of producing images known as photographs. Photography is so much a part of life today that the average person in the United States may encounter more than 1000 camera images a day. Photographs preserve personal memories (family snapshots) and inform us of public events (news photos). They provide a means of identification (driver’s license photos) and of glamorization (movie-star portraits); views of far-off places on Earth (travel photographs) and in space (astral photographs); as well as microscopic scenes from inside the human body (medical and scientific photos). Many specialized 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.” 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. To be sure, some of the truths that photography seemed to tell at one time were later shown to be biased. These arguments have brought attention to the ways photography has been used as a tool in support of industrial progress, colonialism, government propaganda, social reform, and various disciplines in the social sciences, especially ethnology (the study of human cultures) and criminology (the study of criminal behavior).

Photography’s role in the visual arts is equally 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. Moreover, it is widely believed today that photography created an impetus for painters to forsake straightforward description in favor of more interpretive or abstract styles, such as impressionism, cubism, and abstract expressionism. Photography itself has been defined as an essentially modern art because of its relative newness and its reliance on the machinelike camera. A fascinating subplot within the story of photography is its complex and still-evolving role as a medium of art like painting, its supposed antagonist.

This article traces the progress of photography from its invention in the 1830s until today, focusing on its role in shaping modern Western visual culture and following its development as both an art form and a practical tool for documentation. It also looks at the effects of photography’s evolution from a technically complex process requiring considerable skill to one that is available to anyone who can press a button. For more detailed information on the technical aspects of photography, see Photography.

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II

Origins

Photography is a method for producing lasting images by means of a chemical reaction that occurs when light hits a specially prepared surface. It was invented during the first three decades of the 19th century as a direct consequence of advances in chemistry and optics (the science of the behavior of light). The word photography comes from two Greek words that mean “writing with light.”

Although the technology is fairly recent, the origins of photography lie in an artistic technique known as single-point or linear perspective, which was developed in the early 1400s. Pioneered in Italy by architect Filippo Brunelleschi and others, the system of single-point perspective provided painters with a method for depicting three-dimensional space on a flat surface. It is based on the notion of a single observation point and results in lines that appear to recede into the distance by converging on a fixed point on the horizon, called the vanishing point.

In the 16th century many artists employed a boxlike device known as a camera obscura (Latin meaning “dark room”) as an aid to depicting space with single-point perspective. This consisted of 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. The camera obscura was used by Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Also essential to the invention of photography was knowledge of the light sensitivity of certain materials. More than 2000 years before the invention of the camera obscura, the ancient Phoenicians knew that a certain snail, the purpura, left a yellow slime in its wake that turned purple in sunlight. In the 18th century a German anatomy professor, Johann Heinrich Schulze, observed that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. But the idea of making pictures using this phenomenon did not occur to him. That innovation required the talents of a later generation of scientists.

By 1800 a young English chemist, Thomas Wedgwood, had succeeded in producing images of leaves on leather that he had treated with silver salts. However, he could find no way to halt the darkening action of light and his leaf images eventually faded into blackness. His attempts to capture the image displayed by a camera obscura also proved unsuccessful. For the birth of photography two key discoveries were still needed: a way to combine a light-sensitive material with the camera obscura, and a way to fix, or make permanent, the resulting image.

III

Invention

In the 1820s French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was experimenting with improvements to the new printmaking technique of lithography. In the process he discovered a way to copy engravings onto glass and pewter plates using bitumen, a form of asphalt that changes when exposed to light. He first coated a drawing or etching with oil so that light would shine through it more easily, then placed it on a bitumen-coated plate and exposed the plate to light. Light shining through the paper burned an image into the dark bitumen, creating a nearly perfect copy of the original. Niépce could then etch and print this image using traditional printmaking techniques. In 1826 he put a bitumen-coated plate in a camera obscura, which he then placed with its lens facing the window of his estate in central France for eight hours. The resulting image, View from the Window at Le Gras (Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas at Austin), is the earliest camera photograph still in existence.

In 1826 Niépce began sharing his findings with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, an artist and theatrical designer who owned a theater in Paris. This theater, the Diorama, provided a popular spectacle consisting of large, painted scenes that were shown in succession, changing before the viewers’ eyes. Like Niépce, Daguerre hoped to find a way to create images from the camera obscura, but he had little luck until the two decided to become partners in 1829. Even then, Daguerre’s most important discovery came only in 1835, two years after Niépce’s death. Daguerre found that the chemical compound silver iodide was much more sensitive to light than Niépce’s bitumen, and he placed a copper plate coated with silver iodide in a camera obscura. After exposing this plate to light for a relatively short time and then to fumes of mercury, an image appeared. One problem remained: The image darkened over time. But in 1837 Daguerre solved this final obstacle by washing away remaining silver iodide with a solution of warm water and table salt.

On January 7, 1839, Daguerre’s process, called the daguerreotype, was announced to the French Academy of Sciences, and hence to the world. The announcement by respected French scientist François Arago was brief but nonetheless created a sensation. Newspaper accounts spoke of pictures 'given with a truth which nature alone can give to her works.' Half a year later the French government gave Daguerre and Niépce’s son, Isidore, lifetime pensions in exchange for their release of all rights to the invention and public disclosure of the process. The daguerreotype was to become France’s gift to the world.

Just three weeks after Arago’s announcement in Paris, William Henry Fox Talbot, an English amateur scientist, read a translated account of the discovery. Perturbed, if not distraught, Talbot recognized Daguerre’s invention as similar to his own unpublicized process, which he called photogenic drawing. Talbot moved quickly to claim priority over Daguerre, writing to members of the French Academy and presenting his process in a paper to the Royal Society in London, England.

To create a photogenic drawing, Talbot first coated a sheet of drawing paper with the chemical compound silver chloride and, placing it inside a camera obscura, produced an image of the scene with the tones reversed (a negative). He then placed the negative against another coated sheet of paper to produce a positive image. Talbot did not find a way to make the image permanent until a month after Daguerre’s announcement. But his photogenic drawing process—later refined and renamed the calotype—forms the basis for most modern film technology, which relies on negatives to produce multiple positive prints.

For a number of reasons, including the imperfections of Talbot’s process, the daguerreotype was the method of photography that first took the world by storm. The low-cost daguerreotype became so popular that, by the end of 1839, Paris newspapers were referring to a new disease called Daguerreotypomania. With improvements in its sensitivity to light, the daguerreotype quickly proved ideal for portraiture. By 1840 daguerreotype studios throughout Europe and in the United States were producing unique, detailed likenesses that were set inside hinged leather cases. An emerging middle class gazed in amazement at its own image in these 'mirrors with a memory.'

Photography arrived in the United States due to the enthusiasm of Samuel F. B. Morse, an American artist and inventor. Morse visited Daguerre in Paris in March 1839 and observed a demonstration of the daguerreotype process. Morse returned to the United States to spread the news, and by year’s end new practitioners such as John Plumbe of New York City and the Langenheim brothers (William and Frederick) of Philadelphia had mastered the daguerreotype process and set up successful portrait studios. The yen for daguerreotypes persisted in America well into the 1850s, long after European photographers had switched to a much improved positive/negative process derived from Talbot’s method. Most pictures of the California Gold Rush of 1849, for example, are daguerreotypes.

IV

Early Uses

A

Portraiture

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. Miniature painters, who had previously supplied the least expensive form of portraiture, quickly went out of business or became daguerreotypists themselves.

Although thousands of daguerreotype portrait studios operated in the 1840s, only a few portraitists chose to use Talbot’s process. Among the most distinguished were Scottish photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, who worked together in Edinburgh producing atmospheric portraits that were admired for their similarity to paintings.

Interest in daguerreotypes dwindled in Europe after 1851, when English photographer Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion, or wet-plate process. Like Talbot’s calotype, 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. Glass was also more durable than paper, so it was easier to produce many paper prints from one glass negative.

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. Taken with a special camera that produced eight poses on one negative, the carte-de-visite—and its larger sibling, the cabinet card—created a market for celebrity photographs in France and England. Cartes, as they are known, were both traded and collected; they served to connect royalty with commoners, actors with their audiences, and old society with the newly prosperous.

In the United States, the carte-de-visite played second fiddle to ever-cheaper variations on the daguerreotype theme. The first of these, the ambrotype, was nothing more than a glass negative backed with black material, which enabled it to appear as a positive image. Patented in 1854, the ambrotype was made, packaged, and sold in portrait studios as the daguerreotype had been, but at a lower cost. Even less expensive was the tintype, patented two years later, which substituted an iron plate for glass. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) tintypes were the most readily available form of location portraiture. Tintype photographers often worked from the back of horse-drawn wagons, photographing pioneer families and Union soldiers.

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