Free to follow every thread. No paywall, no dead ends.
Photography: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Photography
In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce captured a view from his window at Le Gras that would become the earliest surviving photograph from nature, yet the process required an exposure time of at least eight hours, and likely several days, to record the scene. This image, known as View from the Window at Le Gras, was created using a bitumen-coated pewter plate that hardened where light struck it, leaving the unexposed areas to be washed away with a solvent. The resulting image was a faint, positive print that took days to form, a testament to the slow, painstaking nature of early photographic experiments. Niépce, a French inventor, had been working on this process for years, seeking a way to capture the world as it appeared to the eye without the need for a human hand to draw it. His partnership with Louis Daguerre would later refine the process, but it was this initial attempt that laid the groundwork for the entire field. The camera obscura, a dark chamber with a small hole that projected an inverted image onto a surface, had been known since ancient times, but Niépce was the first to combine it with a light-sensitive material to create a permanent record. The exposure time was so long that the moving traffic on the street below left no trace, and only the two men standing still near the bottom left corner of the frame remained visible. This image, though faint and imperfect, marked the beginning of a new era in visual representation, one that would eventually transform how humanity saw and recorded the world.
The Race for Permanence
Louis Daguerre, who had partnered with Niépce before the latter's death in 1833, redirected his experiments toward silver halides, a material that Niépce had abandoned years earlier due to its inability to produce light-fast images. By 1837, Daguerre had developed a process that used a silver-plated surface sensitized by iodine vapor, developed by mercury vapor, and fixed with hot saturated salt water. The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of hours, a dramatic improvement that made photography more practical. In 1838, Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person, a view of a busy Paris street where only one man, having his boots polished, stood still long enough to be visible. The existence of Daguerre's process was publicly announced on the 7th of January 1839, creating an international sensation. France soon agreed to pay Daguerre a pension in exchange for the right to present his invention to the world as the gift of France, which occurred when complete working instructions were unveiled on the 19th of August 1839. Meanwhile, William Fox Talbot, a British inventor, had been working on his own process, creating crude but reasonably light-fast silver images on paper as early as 1834. After reading about Daguerre's invention, Talbot published his secret method and created the calotype process, which used the chemical development of a latent image to greatly reduce exposure time. Unlike Daguerre's process, Talbot's created a translucent negative that could be used to print multiple positive copies, the basis of most modern chemical photography. The race for permanence had begun, and the world was watching.
Common questions
Who captured the earliest surviving photograph from nature and when was it taken?
Nicéphore Niépce captured the earliest surviving photograph from nature in 1826. The image known as View from the Window at Le Gras required an exposure time of at least eight hours to record the scene.
When did Louis Daguerre publicly announce his photographic process to the world?
The existence of Louis Daguerre's process was publicly announced on the 7th of January 1839. France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension in exchange for the right to present his invention to the world as the gift of France on the 19th of August 1839.
Who took the first permanent color photograph and what principle was used?
Thomas Sutton took the first permanent color photograph in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle. This method involved taking three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green, and blue filters to recreate a color image.
Which company unveiled the first commercially available digital single-lens reflex camera and when?
Kodak unveiled the DCS 100, the first commercially available digital single-lens reflex camera, in 1991. This event marked the birth of commercial digital photography and the transition from film to digital formats.
When was the most expensive photograph sold at Sotheby's London and for how much?
On the 7th of February 2007, Sotheby's London sold the 2001 photograph 99 Cent II Diptychon for $3,346,456. This sale made it the most expensive photograph at the time and demonstrated the value of photography as a form of artistic expression.
Who invented the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of meteorological parameters?
Francis Ronalds invented the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of meteorological and geomagnetic parameters in 1845. These cameras produced 12- or 24-hour photographic traces of atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity.
Color photography was explored beginning in the 1840s, but early experiments required extremely long exposures and could not fix the photograph to prevent the color from quickly fading when exposed to white light. The first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. Maxwell's idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green, and blue filters, providing the three basic channels required to recreate a color image. The first color photograph, a tartan ribbon, was taken by Thomas Sutton, but the process was cumbersome and required special equipment. Autochrome, the first commercially successful color process, was introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907, incorporating a mosaic color filter layer made of dyed grains of potato starch. Kodachrome, the first modern integral tripack color film, was introduced by Kodak in 1935, capturing the three color components in a multi-layer emulsion. The development of color photography was hindered by the limited sensitivity of early photographic materials, which were mostly sensitive to blue, only slightly sensitive to green, and virtually insensitive to red. The discovery of dye sensitization by photochemist Hermann Vogel in 1873 suddenly made it possible to add sensitivity to green, yellow, and even red, bringing color photography ever closer to commercial viability. The evolution of color photography was a slow, deliberate process, one that required the collaboration of scientists, inventors, and artists to achieve the vibrant images we see today.
The Digital Revolution
In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a charge-coupled device for imaging, eliminating the need for film: the Sony Mavica. While the Mavica saved images to disk, the images were displayed on television, and the camera was not fully digital. The first digital camera to both record and save images in a digital format was the Fujix DS-1P created by Fujifilm in 1988. In 1991, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100, the first commercially available digital single-lens reflex camera, marking the birth of commercial digital photography. Digital imaging uses an electronic image sensor to record the image as a set of electronic data rather than as chemical changes on film. An important difference between digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography resists photo manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper, while digital imaging is a highly manipulative medium. This difference allows for a degree of image post-processing that is comparatively difficult in film-based photography and permits different communicative potentials and applications. Digital photography dominates the 21st century, with more than 99% of photographs taken around the world through digital cameras, increasingly through smartphones. The transition from film to digital was not immediate, as early films were somewhat more expensive and of markedly lower optical quality than their glass plate equivalents, and until the late 1910s they were not available in the large formats preferred by most professional photographers. The digital revolution has transformed the way we capture, share, and interpret images, making photography more accessible and versatile than ever before.
The Art of the Lens
During the 20th century, both fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the United States, a handful of photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski, F. Holland Day, and Edward Weston, spent their lives advocating for photography as a fine art. At first, fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles, a movement called Pictorialism, often using soft focus for a dreamy, romantic look. In reaction to that, Weston, Ansel Adams, and others formed the Group f/64 to advocate straight photography, the photograph as a sharply focused thing in itself and not an imitation of something else. The aesthetics of photography is a matter that continues to be discussed regularly, especially in artistic circles. Many artists argued that photography was the mechanical reproduction of an image. If photography is authentically art, then photography in the context of art would need redefinition, such as determining what component of a photograph makes it beautiful to the viewer. The controversy began with the earliest images written with light, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and others among the very earliest photographers were met with acclaim, but some questioned if their work met the definitions and purposes of art. On the 7th of February 2007, Sotheby's London sold the 2001 photograph 99 Cent II Diptychon for an unprecedented $3,346,456 to an anonymous bidder, making it the most expensive at the time. The art of photography has evolved from a scientific curiosity to a respected and valuable form of artistic expression, one that continues to challenge our understanding of what constitutes art.
The Camera as Witness
The camera has a long and distinguished history as a means of recording scientific phenomena from the first use by Daguerre and Fox-Talbot, such as astronomical events, small creatures and plants when the camera was attached to the eyepiece of microscopes, and for macro photography of larger specimens. The camera also proved useful in recording crime scenes and the scenes of accidents, such as the Wootton bridge collapse in 1861. The methods used in analyzing photographs for use in legal cases are collectively known as forensic photography. In 1845, Francis Ronalds, the Honorary Director of the Kew Observatory, invented the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of meteorological and geomagnetic parameters. Different machines produced 12- or 24-hour photographic traces of the minute-by-minute variations of atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, atmospheric electricity, and the three components of geomagnetic forces. The cameras were supplied to numerous observatories around the world and some remained in use until well into the 20th century. Science regularly uses image technology that has derived from the design of the pinhole camera to avoid distortions that can be caused by lenses. X-ray machines are similar in design to pinhole cameras, with high-grade filters and laser radiation. Photography has become universal in recording events and data in science and engineering, and at crime scenes or accident scenes. The first photographed atom was discovered in 2012 by physicists at Griffith University, Australia, using an electric field to trap an Ion of the element Ytterbium, with the image recorded on a CCD, an electronic photographic film. The camera has become an indispensable tool for scientific inquiry, one that allows us to see the world in ways that were previously impossible.
The Social Mirror
There are many ongoing questions about different aspects of photography, including its effect on society. In her On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag dismisses the objectivity of photography, arguing that to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, meaning putting one's self into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge, and therefore like power. Photographers decide what to take a photo of, what elements to exclude and what angle to frame the photo, and these factors may reflect a particular socio-historical context. Modern photography has raised a number of concerns on its effect on society, with Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) presenting the camera as promoting voyeurism. The camera doesn't rape or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate, all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment. Digital imaging has raised ethical concerns because of the ease of manipulating digital photographs in post-processing, with many photojournalists declaring they will not crop their pictures or are forbidden from combining elements of multiple photos to make photomontages, passing them as real photographs. Today's technology has made image editing relatively simple for even the novice photographer, yet recent changes of in-camera processing allow digital fingerprinting of photos to detect tampering for purposes of forensic photography. Photography is one of the new media forms that changes perception and changes the structure of society, raising questions about desensitization, censorship, and the power of the image to shape our understanding of the world.