Photographic
History of Photography
Please read and answer the questions below…
Camera obscura literally means “dark room”. The phenomenon of light passing through a pinhole of a completely dark room and an upside down image appearing on the opposite wall was known for thousands of years back to the days of ancient Greeks like Aristotle. Arab astronomers used it to observe eclipses in the 10 century. During the 16 and 17 century artists looking for a way to accurately render perspective used the camera obscura as an aid to drawing.
It was the artist’s desires to some how fix and save the image they saw in the camera obscura that lead to the invention of photography. No one person is responsible for photography as we know it today. The history of photography is the history of curious inventors, artists and entrepreneurs building on each other’s success to capture light and keep it in a frame.
The first person to succeed in fixing an image from a camera obscura was Joseph Nicephore Niepce. Niepce was interested in printmaking but not skilled at drawing. He was looking for a way to let light do the drawing for him. His experiments led him to a substance that hardened when exposed to light. Niepce made a varnish out of bitumen of Judaea and oil. He coated a metal plate placed it inside a camera obscura and exposed the plate for 8 hours pointed outside his cottage window. In 1826 Niepce created the first photograph. He called the images heliographs. Niepce would further etch the metal plates and use them to pull prints.
A French artist who created large Trompe l’oeil paintings, meaning to fool the eye, contacted Niepce in 1827. Louis- Jacques –Mande Daguerre was a successful business man with his Diorama, a hall filled with huge painting, special lighting and props that spectators would pay to walk through and experience far away places. In 1829 Daguerre entered a 10-year contract with Niepce to perfect the process so that it could be a commercial success.
After years of experiments Daguerre developed a method of coating polished thin sheet of silver with fumes of iodine. He would expose the plate for 15 to 30 minutes. The images were developed by exposure to hot mercury vapor and then hardened with cold water. A final bath of salt water stopped the development process. Each image was a one of a kind on the delicate silver plate. Daguerre fashioned glass covers fit inside decorated boxes to hold the images.
On January 7, 1839 Daguerre announced his process to the French Academy of Sciences. In honor of their invention the French government agreed to pay a pension to Daguerre and the survivors of Niepce family, Joseph died in 1833. The Daguerreotype with its amazing detail was a success. Daguerre sold cameras, instructions and licenses to use the process.
Henry Fox Talbot was working on a method to fix images on treated paper at the same time the Daguerreotype was introduced. In 1840 Talbot discover his paper treated with salt and silver nitrate if only exposed for two to three minutes produced a negative image which could then be contact printed onto another paper as a positive. This allowed Fox to make multiple images from one exposure. Fox Talbot called his process “calotypes”. While not as commercially successful as the daguerreotype Fox Talbot was responsible for inventing the negative-positive process of photography. Fox Talbot published the first book with photographic illustrations in 1844 “The pencil of Nature”.
Scott Archer a British sculptor published his invention of a wet-collodion photography process in the Journal “The Chemist” in March of 1851. This process of Glass plates covered in a film of collodion, then dipped in solution of silver nitrate required the plate be exposed while still wet, them immediately developed. The We-glass process only requited two to three seconds of direct sunlight for exposure. The glass plate was a negative image from which multiple positive copies could be made. Because the plates had to be wet and developed on the spot 120 pounds of photo equipment had to accompany the photographer wherever he went. Archer gave his invention free to the world and the wet- glass process soon replaced the Daguerreotype as the preferred method of portrait photography.
Matthew Brady started his career as a Daguerreotype photographer setting up a studio in New York City and later a second in Washington DC. He switch over to wet plate by 1853. Brady took portraits of politicians, members of Congress and Presidents. His most famous portraits are of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln credited part of his success to the fine portraits by Matthew Brady. When the civil war broke out in 1861 Brady felt he had to document it. Imagine on the battlefield unable to take action photos because of the three-second-exposure time looking for ways to tell the story. All the time you have to keep with you a wagon of photo supplies and images on glass that had to be developed right then. Brady spent his entire fortune on his adventures in the Civil war but managed to cover every major battle. Over 6,000 plates have survived and are archived by the U.S. war department.
Eadweard Muybridge set out to settle a bet and established the principles of motions pictures. The question was does all four hoofs of a horse leave the ground when it runs? In 1877 Muybridge was hired by Ex-Governor Leland Stanford to photograph a horse running. Muybridge on the track covered in white on a sunny day set up 12 wet plate camera triggered by wires as the horse ran by. Frame three and four prove that yes all four hoofs are off the ground. Muybridge continued his study of human and animal locomotion taking over 10,000 photographs. He published many editions on the subject starting in 1887 with”animal locomotion”. At the time it was suggested to readers to cut out the photos and paste them inside a zoetrope where they seemed to be moving.
A young man was planning to take a trip when a friend suggested he take some photos. After looking at the 120 pounds of equipment necessary to take the photographs he did not take the trip but he was determined to find a better way to take pictures. George Eastman went into business selling an improvement on the wet plat, a prepared gelatin dry plate in 1881. Eastman continued experimenting and in 1885 invented flexible roll film. In 1888 he marketed the Kodak box camera. The camera came preloaded with 100 shot. All the customer had to do was press a button. The exposure time was less then a second. When completed the whole kit was mailed to the Eastman Kodak company and they mailed back the prints with a newly loaded camera. The Kodak took photography out of the professional studios and put it in the hands of everyone. The snapshot was born. The Kodak Company continues to this day making improvements on how people take and share photos.
Lewis Hine
In 1907 the National Child Labor Committee was granted a charter from Congress. A year later the committee hired Lewis Hine to research the ills of the child labor industry. For several years following, Hine traveled and photographed the exploitation of children in the work force. Hine’s photographs shocked the conscience of the nation and helped establish child labor laws.
Dorothea Lange
In 1935 Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Farm Security Administration to help resettle farmers who were destitute due to the Depression and massive drought in the Midwest. The director, Roy Stryker, hired a number of photographers to record the plight of the farmers in the Midwest. Dorothea Lange captured the anguish of the period in her 1936 photo of a migrant mother. The entire collection from the F.S.A., over 200,000 photographs are in the library of congress. Those images communicated to a nation the suffering of the poor in a way no newspaper article ever could.
Ansel Easton Adams
Ansel Adams applied his love of natural beauty with his meticulous interest in photography to create stunning photographs of Yosemite National park. Adams developed the zone system to help capture the full dynamic range of the subject. Adams used a large format camera, with a negative film size of 8”x10” for maximum resolution. He often set his camera at the highest f-stop f64 to get the greatest depth of field. He worked just as hard to preserve the environment as he did to photograph it. Adams worked with the Sierra club to lobby Congress for a Kings Canyon National Park, the Club's priority issue in the 1930's, and created an impressive, limited-edition book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, which influenced both Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and President Franklin Roosevelt to embrace the Kings Canyon Park idea. The park was created in 1940.
Harold Edgerton
Harold Edgerton became a professor at MIT in 1927. Edgerton said he wanted to make what was invisible visible. To illuminate what the eye could not see invented the electronic flash. To record what went by too fast he was a pioneer of high-speed photography. Edgerton was hired to take photos of an atomic bomb test and used a camera with a 10 foot lens and a shutter speed of over one millionth of a second. In 1934 the RoyalPhotographic Society awarded Edgerton a bronze medal and in 1973 he received the National Medal of Science. His image of a milk drop splashing displays the majestic beauty hidden in the milliseconds of nature.
Photojournalism
Photojournalism distinguishes itself from other forms of professional photography by its adherence to the principles of journalism: timeliness, accuracy, fair representation of the context of events and facts reported, and accountability to the public. While a wedding photographer may be documenting an actual event, his or her responsibility is to the client and the presentation that client would like to see. A journalist, on the other hand, cannot be held to the demands of the photographic subject, but rather he or she must be concerned with producing accurate news for the public. In addition to accuracy, the photojournalist must be careful not to exclude important parts of the context of the event being photographed.
Digital Photography
The same company that brought cameras to the masses with easy to use flexible film, helped the digital camera revolution along. 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. In 1987, Kodak released seven products for recording, storing, manipulating, transmitting and printing electronic still video images. In 1990, Kodak developed the Photo CD system and proposed "the first worldwide standard for defining color in the digital environment of computers and computer peripherals." In 1991, Kodak released the first professional digital camera system (DCS), aimed at photojournalists.
The first digital cameras for the consumer-level market that worked with a home computer via a serial cable were the Apple Quick Take 100 camera, which appeared in 1994. This camera featured a 640 x 480 pixel CCD that produced eight images stored in internal memory. It also had a built-in flash. Kodak followed in 1995 with its DC40 camera for the consumer market.
The power of photography is it can show us far away places, tell a story in a way words can not, instantly with all the emotion of the moment, capture history for all time and change how we perceive and think of the world around us.
History of Photography worksheet
Name ______Period ______Date ______
- What was the first use of the Camera Obscura?
Explain the contribution to photography of the following people and copy and paste an image associated with each of the names listed below:
2. Joseph Nicephore Niepce
3. Louis- Jacques –Mande Daguerre
4. Henry Fox Talbot
5. Scott Archer
6. Matthew Brady
7. Eadweard Muybridge
8. George Eastman
9. Lewis Hine
10. Dorothea Lange
11. Ansel Adams
12. Harold Edgerton
What were the exposure timesfor:
13. The first photograph
14. A Daguerreotype
15. A Calotype
16. A Wet-glass collodion
17. Flexible film
18. How is Photojournalism different from art photography like wedding portraits?
19. What year were digital cameras widely available to the public?
20. How might new advances in photography affect the world?