History of Photography | The Origins of Photography

The Origins of Photography

Smile! As we begin our tour of photography.

When photography was "invented" in 1839, the scientific breakthrough brought forth a new way of seeing.

The visual culture of the world changed overnight as people grappled with the idea that you could record nature exactly as it appeared. In response to the new technology, art critics exclaimed "painting is dead!"

In this course, we'll trace the development of photography from its pioneering days in the 19th century to the experimental movements of today. We'll discuss major innovations and photographers in each period, and really put into practice what we're learning. So that you can creatively engage with course concepts, each exercise will require you to take photos that emulate historical styles, genres, or techniques.

The urge to capture detailed images of the world around us predates the invention of photography. In Ancient Greek times, painters used cameras to help them paint realistic images. The first cameras, called camera obscura, had no lenses and no way to "fix" or preserve an image.

The philosopher Aristotle is credited with discovering that light passing through a small hole into a darkened room projects an inverted image on an opposite wall. The technique, called camera obscura, works in much the same way as a modern camera captures an image through an aperture on film or in a digital image.

A camera obscura is a darkened box or room with a small hole. Outside of the hole is a bright scene or object. If you stand in the room long enough for your eyes to adjust, you'll see the scene outside projected on the wall.

As you can imagine, using the camera obscura to create images was laborious: painters spent hours painting over the projected image on a wall.

By the 19th century, European inventors were searching for more efficient, scientific ways to capture images. In 1826 or 1827, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first permanent photograph, an image of his farm called View from the Window at Le Gras. The image was captured on a metal plate covered with light-sensitive chemicals. The image is fuzzy and difficult to distinguish, but there it was: the first photograph!

On the left, you see Niépce's metal plate. On the right, an enhanced version of the metal plate shows the scene from his window.

 

View from the Window at Le Gras is housed at the University of Texas in Austin. The gallery there has a great video explaining how Niépce created this very first photograph. Watch the video

Although Niépce made his image in the mid-1820s, photography was not officially "invented" until the technology was given a name in 1839. In that year, an Englishman named Sir John Herschel coined the term "photography" and a French inventor named Louise Daguerre created the first photo that included a human.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris by Louis Daguerre is the first recorded photo of a human. This was likely a busy street, but early photo technology required a very long exposure (about 10 minutes in this case!). The only people who stayed still long enough to be captured were a man getting his shoes shined and the man doing the shining.

Daguerre had been working on "fixing" photographs in partnership with Niépce in the 1820s. In 1839, Daguerre presented a new way to capture images using copper plates sensitized with silver at France's Académie des Sciences, and his process, called the daguerreotype, took the world by storm.

While Daguerre and Niépce were busy in France experimenting with how to make one-of-a-kind images on metal, an Englishman named William Henry Fox Talbot was simultaneously and independently creating another photographic process, one that used a negative and allowed photographers to make multiple copies of an image.

Talbot's process, named the Calotype or Talbotype, used salted paper to create a negative, which could then be contact printed into a positive photo. Although his process was successful prior to the announcement of the daguerreotype, he didn't get his patent until 1841.

The Open Door (1844) by William Henry Fox Talbot.

Early Processes

Early photography was much different than the techniques we use today. First of all, camera technology was in its infancy. The first images used versions of the camera obscura or a lens-less "pinhole" camera.

As photography exploded onto the market, advanced cameras and lenses weren't far behind.

By the mid-19th century, a photographer could be seen with a large format camera not much different than the 4x5 or 8x10 film cameras you can still buy today.

In addition to being cumbersome, these early cameras were slow. Each shot would require you to reload the camera with a new plate (the equivalent of a single exposure sheet of film today). Most of the early processes required some coating or developing on the spot, so a pioneering photographer would need to bring some form of darkroom with them as well.

An early studio photographer with his camera setup.

 

This video will give you the basics for using a modern large format camera. Although much easier than early photography outfits, even a modern version is a challenge. Watch the video

In photography's early days, new processes were a dime a dozen. Some were commercially viable, but most were not. In general, we can break them down into one-of-a-kind or negative processes.

What follows is by no means a comprehensive list of early processes, but rather an overview of the most interesting or influential.

One-of-a-Kind Processes

Most unique image processes were made using metal plates coated with chemicals. These would be developed to reveal a "latent image" and then usually fixed with another chemical. These processes created positive images without the need for an intermediate negative step.

We've already discussed the Daguerreotype, which used copper sensitized with silver. The Tintype, invented in the 1850s, was incredibly popular in the later half of the 19th century. Much more affordable than Daguerreotype, tintype uses a very thin metal coated with lacquer.

The Ambrotype was briefly popular before the introduction of the tintype. An Ambrotype is a positive image created through chemical treatment of a glass negative. After converting the dark tones of the negative to white, the photo would be placed on a black backing, creating a unique positive.

Hard to distinguish with the untrained eye, both Tintypes (left) and Ambrotypes (right) usually came in a decorative case or frame.

Negative Processes

Talbot may have lost to Daguerre in the race to patent, but he certainly won in regard to the longevity and usefulness of his process. The negative to positive technique he created with the Calotype/Talbotype laid the ground for modern film photography.

The guiding principle of the Talbotype was that your initial exposure created a negative image, which could be displayed as such or could be contact printed to create a positive image. (Paper negatives were commonly used with all of the following processes but these same printing processes can be done today with modern film negatives.)

One of the most popular processes until it was replaced by modern silver gelatin paper was the albumen process. Made from paper coated in egg whites, salt, and silver, albumen prints have a characteristic brown hue.

The platinum process was popular in the late 1800s as well. Known for permanence and crisp details, the technique fell out of favor as the price of platinum rose.

An albumen print (left) and a platinum print (right).

 

Although it is possible to make positive cyanotypes, Anna Atkins created many negative "sunprints."

The cyanotype, a print with a characteristically blue hue, is the predecessor of the architectural blueprint. Invented by Herschel, the man who coined the terms "photography," "negative," and "positive," cyanotype was used extensively by Anna Atkins, who is considered the world's first female photographer.

The final influential process worth mention is the collodion process. Collodion is a technique of producing glass negatives, sometimes referred to as Wet Plate or Wet Plate-Collodion. The negatives were commonly treated with albumen during the heyday of collodion.

Evolution of the Lens

During the 19th century, the technology of the lens evolved rapidly. The idea of using curved glass to refract and focus light had been around for centuries, in glasses, spectacles, telescopes, and microscopes. Early camera obscuras used by painters were equipped with lenses.

Early photographers found simple convex glass lenses inadequate, so scientists worked to improve lenses. The first lens made from two different elements was created in 1829 by an optics firm in Paris to assist Niépce and Daguerre in their experiments.

The f-stop was introduced at that time with a fixed aperture (very unlike the variable aperture ring we are used to in modern lenses). The official Daguerrotype camera had a fixed f/16 lens.

The ability to adjust aperture stops was invented in 1858 by John Waterhouse, and by the late 1800s, an adjustable aperture was standard. The iris shape we see in lenses now was introduced around the turn of the 20th century. Our modern f-stop numbers weren't standardized until 1949!

The first "modern" lens was invented in 1890 by Zeiss and it is still being manufactured today. The Zeiss lens corrected many of the lens aberrations that plagued older lenses at that time.

Early Movements

In its infancy, photography sparked many different genres and movements. Let's take a look at some of the important innovations that made a lasting impact on the field.

Portraiture

Photographic technology was applied to portraiture very early in its history. The sudden ability to capture one's image on film fascinated everyone from the upper classes down to the common man. Soon daguerreotype and tintype studios were popping up in the US and Europe. It wasn't long before amateur photographers such as Lewis Carroll began taking portraits of friends.

A photo of Alice Liddle, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll).

Portraiture often took the form of a Carte de Visite, a small image on cardboard meant to be left as a calling card. The visitor's name and address was usually printed on one side, often with the photo studio and date.

A typical Carte De Visite, this one from 1888.

The carte de visite craze secured photography's place as a viable industry, with portrait studios multiplying and manufacturers creating the first photo albums to hold collections of them.

 

 

 

In the Victorian era, the practice of photographing recently deceased loved ones (called funerary portraiture, memento mori, mourning portrait, or post-mortem photography) was common. The high childhood mortality rate led to a large proportion of infant and child funerary portraits. Done as individual or family photos, these images were often the only likenesses of the deceased.

In this image, the inclusion of the coffins tells the story. In other post-mortem photos, the deceased is posed to look lifelike, at times even standing up with the help of metal supports.

Pictorialism

As people in the 19th century debated whether photography was an instrument of science, some photographers worked hard to create emotional, artistic work.

In the 1850s, a court painter named Sir William Newton made a statement about sharp, crisp photographs serving best as records for science and soft photographs being best for use by artists (at that time, painters used photos to copy scenes). His statements led to a flurry of activity and the birth of the Pictorialism movement.

Pictorialists worked to create mood and emotion within their photos. The actual subject matter in front of the lens was not as important as the feeling it evoked.

The pictorialists manipulated their photos often. They used blurring, scratching, retouching, and painting on prints. These interventions, as well as the pictorial choice of subjects seen in classic paintings, established the pictorialists' reputation as artists.

Most pictorialists were working with collodion negatives, which were sensitive to blue light, causing blank and blown out skies. Using combination printing (sandwiching two negatives of different exposures together) they created skies full of clouds.

It wasn't long before combination printing was exploited for other artistic purposes. The Two Ways of Life made by Oscar Rejlander in 1857 was created in a small studio using only a handful of models shot to scale, then composed and printed as a single image from around 30 negatives.

Pictorialists were the first to embrace artificiality in photography, from composites, to staging a scene, to controlling lighting, to retouching a negative. They emulated painters with their use of allegory, sentimentality, symbolism, and spirit.

Spotlight on Julia Margaret Cameron

During the time that portraiture was booming, a photographer named Julia Margaret Cameron was producing creative artistic portraiture in the style of pre-Raphaelite painting. Her photos embody an ethereal, soft focus look achieved with long exposures.

Cameron began photographing in the 1860s, when she was nearly 50 years old, barely 20 years after photography was invented.

Cameron was one of the first female photographers, and one of the first proponents of the idea that photography is art. She also had great business sense, filing for copyright on her photos even as the art form was still emerging.

Some of her contemporaries belittled her work as out-of-focus, sloppy photos of celebrities, while others lauded her artistic content.

Let's explore the background in Cameron's work in this slideshow:

Later in 1902, Alfred Stieglitz formed a group of pictorialists that included Gertrude Kaisebier, Alvin Langdon Colburn, and Clarence H. White that he called the Photo-Secession.

Photo-Secession members worked tirelessly to place photography into the realm of the fine arts, de-emphasizing the point-and-shoot techniques of Kodak's first snapshooters. They wanted to elevate processes that involved lots of hand labor, such as using gum bichromate, to show "the role of the photographer as craftsman and [to counter] the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium."

Kaisebier, Colburn, and White would go on to found the Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916. You can read more about this topic at the Metropolitan Museum of Art site.

This slideshow features the work of some photographers prominent in the pictorialist movement:

Straight Photography

When photography was invented in 1839, painter Paul Delaroche had exclaimed, "Painting is dead!" It was an apt summary of the prevailing opinion. Why spend painstaking hours painting an imperfect version of nature when the camera could record Truth exactly, even scientifically?

A new movement called straight photography emerged as a reaction to the ethereal, painterly qualities of pictorialism. Relying on photography's inherent sharpness and clarity, straight photography aimed to take art photography out of the hands of both science and painting.

Sometimes referred to as "Pure Photography," straight photography emerged in the early 1900s as a movement whose goal was to create photos that captured the "real" world without manipulations in processing. The prevalent idea among straight photographers was that the very objectivity of photography made it art.

Some prominent straight photographers included Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand.

A group of 20th-Century straight photographers in California called themselves Group f/64, a nod to the sharpness found at that aperture. This group prided themselves on un-cropped, crisp images shot on large-format cameras.

Group f/64 differed from other movements in photography, in part, because of their exclusivity and precise moment of beginning. In general, art movements evolve fluidly over time, often in reaction and resistance to other movements of the time. Group f/64 sprang into being in November, 1932, in San Francisco, when the members announced their group as part of a show opening. Their group was "devoted to exhibiting and promoting a new direction in photography that broke with the Pictorialism Movement prevalent in West Coast art photography."

	The founding members of Group f/64 were: Ansel Adams Imogen Cunningham John Paul Edwards Preston Holder Consuelo Kanaga Alma Lavenson Sonya Noskowiak Henry Swift Willard Van Dyke Brett Weston Edward Weston

In addition to influencing the aesthetic of photography, the Group f/64 altered the perception of the role of the photographer. Instead of merely being a technician or camera operator, the photographer was elevated to the role of selector… "it was the photographer's choice of form and his or her framing of it that made the picture." Weston dubbed this act "pre-visualization." Later in the 20th century, Henri Cartier-Bresson would expand on this concept in his term "the decisive moment."

You can read more about this topic at the Metropolitan Museum of Art site.

In this next slideshow, you will see why straight photography was influential to modern documentary photography. Both genres value an unadulterated image. The idea is to portray the true nature of landscapes, people, and architecture.

 

Discussion Share your thoughts and opinions on the early processes and art movements in photography in the Discussion area. Exercise Take a series of photographs that emulate early photography movements or processes.