LESSON 4 HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY PART 1 INTRO TO COM MED

• Photography"


  By Sir John Herschel , who first usedthe term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public
• Words are derived from Greek words

  Light (Photos) and Writing"(graphein)
• two distinct scientific processes that made photography possible

  
  

  The first of these processes was optical.


  1. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been inexistence for at least four hundred years!

  
  

  2. In fact, a drawing exists, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci. During this period ,its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated

  
  

  3. These early "cameras" did not fix an image, but only projected images from an opening in the wall of a darkened room onto a surface, turning the room into a sort of large pinhole camera.
• A "portable" Camera Obscura made around 1676


  with an internal mirror to reflect the image onto a translucent screen set into the top.
• In 1600, Robert Boyle


  a founder of royal society, had reported that silver chloride turned dark under pressure but he appeared to believe that it was caused by exposure to the air, rather than to light
• The second process needed to

  invent the photograph, was

  chemical.
• Angelo Sala, in the early 17th century


  ,noticed that powdered nitrate of silver is blackened by the sun...
• In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze


  discovered that certain liquids change colour when exposed to light
• Modern photography is based on


  Schulze's discovery that light affects certain silver compound
• Thomas Wedgewood on 19th century


  successfully captured images but his silhouette could not survive, as there was no known method of making the image permanent
• First major breakthrough in producing a successful picture


  1827 by Nicephore Niepce using material that hardened on exposure to light. He used a POLISHED PEWTER
• Bitumen of Judea


  He used a POLISHED PEWTER PLATE covered with a petroleum derivative
• earliest surviving photograph, c. 1827


  View from window at Le Gras -

  Nicéphore Niépce
• On 4 January 1829


  Nièpce agreed to go into partnership with Louis Daguerre but he died four years later and Daguerre continued experiment
• Jacques Louis Mandè Daguerre


  1. Daguerre also found that an image could be rendered "permanent" by immersing it in salt.

  
  

  2. Soon Daguerre discovered away of developing photographic plates, a process which greatly reduced the exposure time from8 hours down to half an hour
• Photography was....


  instrumental in freeing artists from slavish, meticulous reproduction, enabling them to go into impressionism & other more creative experimental periods...
• Examples of Daguerrotype

  1. Early Daguerrotype by Gustav Oehme "Three Girls"1843

  
  

  2. Blacksmiths"- a hand coloured Daguerrotype 1850

  
  

  3. POST MORTEM" -Daguerrotypec1850
• Daguerreotype


  1. The announcement that the Daguerreotype "requires no knowledge of drawing...." and that "anyone may succeed.... and perform as well as the author of the invention" was greeted with enormous interest...

  
  

  2. "Daguerreomania" became a craze overnight

  
  

  3. They are fragile and difficult to copy

  
  

  4. Cost $1,000 in today's money

  
  

  5. A drawback of the Daguerreotypeprocess, besides being expensive, wasthat each picture was a once- only affair.
• William Henry Fox Talbot


  1. The process began with a negative image on paper. It was then printed on another sensitized piece of paper to produce a positive print (Calotype)

  
  

  2. He discovered another means to fix a silver image but kept it a secret

  
  

  3. After reading about Daguerre's invention, Talbot refined his process, so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people

  
  

  4
• examples of calotype

  1. Calotype Salt print "The Artist &the Grave Digger" by Adamson& Hill, c 1840

  
  

  2. Magdalen CollegeOxford by FoxTalbot, Calotype 1842
• Talbot's paper to the Royal Society of London, dated 31 January 1839, actually precedes the paper by Daguerre


  He wrote

  
  

  How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed on paper
• The earliest paper negative...


  Latticed window

  
  

  was produced by Talbot in August1835.
• Great advantage of Talbot's method


  was unlimited number of positive prints could be made
• Note 1

  1. Talbot patented this process, which unfortunately greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography!

  
  

  2. Both Daguerre and Fox Talbot were partly responsible, the former for having rather slyly placed a patent on his invention whilst the French government had made it freely available to the world, the latter for his law-suits in connection with his patents

  
  

  3. In the late 1840's, several experimented withglass as a basis for negatives, but the problemwas to make the silver solution stick to the shinysurface of the glass
• 1865 Albumen print


  a self portrait by famous French photographer Nadar with his wife & son
• COLLODION PROCESS.

  1851 a new era in photography it was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer
• Frederick Scott Archer

  
  

  Collodion Process


  1. it also required that the coating, exposure and development of the image should be done whilst the plate was still wet.

  
  

  2. The response of collodion to light was much faster than the other process, reducing exposure time to 2-3 seconds thus opening up new horizons in photography

  
  

  3. Th process was called SYRUPY, transparent liquid called COLLODION to hold silver compounds on glass

  
  

  4. Alas, the wet collodion process, although a great step forward, required a considerable amount of equipment on location but it is likely that the difficulties of the collodion process hastened the search for "instantaneous" photography.
• Another process developed by Archer

  
  

  AMBROTYPE - a direct positive


  1. It was a thin negative image on glass made toappear as a positive by showing it against ablack background. The reverse of the glassplate was either painted black or backed with ablack material
• The Ambrotype

  1. The wet collodion negative is mounted with a black background then a vignette mask & then glass.

  All mounted in a tooled leather holder.

  
  

  2. The same method was used to mount Daguerreotypes.

  
  

  3. The ambrotype was an inexpensive alternative to the daguerreotype, similar is size and also mainly used for portraits.

  
  

  4. These gave photography a boost and in mid 1850S, the mushrooming of photographic establishments reflected photography's growing popularity
• In London, a favourite venue was

  Regent Street where, in the peak of the mid 1860's there were no less than 42 photographic establishments!
• Dry plates could be


  1. developed much more quickly than with any previous technique.

  
  

  2. Initially, the material was very insensitive compared with existing processes, but it was refined to the extent that the idea of factory-made photographic material was now becoming a reality.
• The standard 2.5" x 4" format was


  patented by a Parisian photographer,Andre Adolphe Disderi, in 1854

  
  

  That allowed eight prints to be madeeverytime the negative was printed
• Antoine

  Claudet


  Claudet invented the red darkroom light, discovered away to reduce exposure time for daguerreotypes, and was the first to use painted backgrounds and props in photographs
• Celluloid


  Celluloid had been invented in the early 1860's - the search was on for a lighter and less fragile support than glass!
• Two key events which would make celluloid film a necessity had yet to happen

  -Roll film cameras and later on, motionpictures
• In 1884, flexible, roll up fil was produced by....


  George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester NY
• George Eastman


  1. Eastman developed commerial dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate.

  
  

  2. In July of 1888 Eastman's Kodak Camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest".
• Kodak box camera


  where quickly followed by the first "Brownie", introduced in February, 1900. The Brownie popularized low- cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot.

  
  

  With its simple controls and initial price of$1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and was also easy to use, carry & hand hold
• Brownie was named after


  after Frank Brownell, its inventor who was a subcontractor of Eastman Kodak
• Notes 2

  a. A pioneer in flashlight and trip-wire photography, Shiras captured this shot in Whitefish River, Michigan, around 1906using a remote-control flashlight camera triggered when an animal stepped on the trip wire.

  
  

  b. Underwater color photography was born with this shot of a hogfish, photographed off the Florida Keys by Dr. William Longley and National Geographic photographer Charles Martin in1926

  
  

  c. A symbol of mankind's giant leap, thisphoto of man's small step—astronaut Buzz Aldrin's—shows one of the firsthuman prints left on the surface of themoon. Aldrin took this photo of his own footprint during NASA's 1969 Apollo 11mission

  
  

  d. This famous "Blue Marble" shot represents the first photograph in which Earth is in full view. It was taken on December 7, 1972,as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth's orbit for the moon. With the sun at their backs, the crew had a perfectly lit view of the blue planet