Short answers, pulled from the story.
Photography comes from the Greek roots phos, meaning light, and graphe, meaning drawing or representation by means of lines, together meaning drawing with light. The astronomer John Herschel was the first to use the terms photography, negative, and positive.
Photography has several competing claims. Nicephore Niepce made the earliest surviving photograph from nature, the View from the Window at Le Gras, in 1826. Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype, announced in 1839, while William Fox Talbot created the negative-positive process, and Hercules Florence worked out a silver-salt paper process in Brazil starting in 1832.
The first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle published by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. The method took three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green, and blue filters.
Digital photography drew consumers away from film in the early 21st century, after a transition period centered on 1995 to 2005. Today more than 99 percent of photographs taken worldwide come from digital cameras, increasingly through smartphones.
The Fujix DS-1P, created by Fujifilm in 1988, was the first camera to both record and save images in a digital format. Sony had unveiled the Sony Mavica in 1981, which used a charge-coupled device but was not fully digital, and Kodak released the first commercial digital single-lens reflex camera, the DCS 100, in 1991.
In her 1977 book On Photography, Susan Sontag dismissed the objectivity of photography, writing that to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed and to enter a relation to the world that feels like knowledge and therefore like power. She also warned that the ability to censor pictures gives the photographer the power to construct reality.