Photography

• 1. Drawing With Light

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  On a busy Paris boulevard in 1838, a man stopped to have his boots polished. He held still for several minutes. That stillness made him the earliest confirmed person ever captured in a photograph. Every other figure on that crowded street, the pedestrians and the horse-drawn traffic, moved too fast to register. The boulevard appears deserted. The word itself was assembled from Greek roots, phos for light and graphe for drawing, together meaning drawing with light. But who first drew with it? The answer is contested across at least three countries and a dozen names. A French painter in Brazil, a British gentleman in an abbey, a chemist in a darkroom each have a claim. This is the story of how humans learned to fix a fleeting image in place, and what happened once the image could be copied, colored, censored, and carried in every pocket.

• 2. The Dark Chamber

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  Aristotle and Euclid, the Greek mathematicians, independently described a dark chamber in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. This was the camera obscura, Latin for dark chamber, a box with a small hole that projects an inverted image of a scene onto a screen. Its discovery traces back to ancient China, and in the 6th century CE the Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a version in his experiments.

  The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham, known as Alhazen and living from 965 to 1040, gave the first correct analysis of how the device worked. He produced the first geometrical and quantitative descriptions of the phenomenon, invented the first true pinhole camera, and understood the relationship between the focal point and the pinhole. His experiments with afterimages laid groundwork others would build on centuries later.

  Leonardo da Vinci noticed natural versions of the effect in dark caves at the edge of sunlit valleys. A hole in a cave wall, he saw, acts as a pinhole and casts a reversed, upside-down image. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura for the optical rendering of color that came to dominate Western art. The remaining problem was simple to state and hard to solve. How do you keep the image once the light moves on?

• 3. Chasing The Latent Image

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  Albertus Magnus, who lived from 1193 to 1280, discovered silver nitrate, and Georg Fabricius, from 1516 to 1571, discovered silver chloride. These light-sensitive salts would become the chemical heart of photography. Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze used a light-sensitive slurry to capture images of cut-out letters on a bottle, and many German sources credit him as the inventor for it.

  In June 1802, the British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture a camera obscura image with a light-sensitive substance. He treated paper or white leather with silver nitrate. He succeeded in capturing the shadows of objects placed in direct sunlight, and even made shadow copies of paintings on glass. But it was reported that year that the camera images were too faint to leave any effect on the silver. His shadow images eventually darkened all over and vanished.

  Nicephore Niepce, the French inventor, made the first permanent photoetching in 1822, though it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints. He succeeded again in 1825. In 1826 he produced the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature. His camera required an exposure of at least eight hours and probably several days. To shorten it, he partnered with a man whose name would soon eclipse his own.

• 4. Three Rival Claims

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  Niepce died in 1833. His partner, Louis Daguerre, redirected the work toward silver halides, the very chemicals Niepce had abandoned for being impossible to fix. Daguerre's process used a silver-plated surface sensitized by iodine vapor, developed by mercury vapor, and fixed with hot saturated salt water. By 1837 the essential elements were in place, and exposure time dropped from hours to minutes. The existence of the daguerreotype was announced, without details, on the 7th of January 1839, creating an international sensation. France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension in exchange for presenting the invention to the world as a gift, and complete instructions were unveiled on the 19th of August 1839.

  In Brazil, Hercules Florence had begun a silver-salt paper process in 1832, later naming it photographia. By 1834 his notebooks indicate he had succeeded in creating light-fast, durable images, at least four years before the English word was coined. Because he never adequately published his work and lived in a remote province, Florence died unrecognized internationally during his lifetime. A Brazilian historian dates his private use of the French word photographie to 1834, and Boris Kossoy's research in 1980 made that first use widely known.

  William Fox Talbot, the British inventor, had made crude but light-fast silver images on paper as early as 1834 and kept them secret. After reading of Daguerre in January 1839, he published his method to the Royal Society. In 1840 he created the calotype, whose chemical development of a latent image cut exposure times sharply. Talbot's process produced a translucent negative that could print multiple positives, the basis of most modern chemical photography. Daguerreotypes, by contrast, could only be copied by rephotographing them. His tiny paper negative of the Oriel window at Lacock Abbey, made in the summer of 1835, may be the oldest camera negative in existence.

• 5. Fixing And Naming

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  John Herschel, the British chemist, was the first to use the terms photography, negative, and positive. He had discovered in 1819 that sodium thiosulphate dissolves silver halides. In 1839 he told Talbot, and indirectly Daguerre, that it could fix silver-halide photographs and make them completely light-fast. He invented the cyanotype process, later known as the blueprint, and made the first glass negative in late 1839.

  Franz von Kobell, in March 1837, used silver chloride and a cardboard camera to photograph the Frauenkirche and other Munich buildings as negatives, then rephotographed each negative to get a positive. In 1839, working with Carl August von Steinheil, he reported the experiments to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Their round pictures measured 4 centimeters across, and the technique was later called the Steinheil method. Meanwhile Hippolyte Bayard in France invented his own direct positive paper process and claimed to have invented photography before either Daguerre or Talbot.

  Frederick Scott Archer published his wet plate collodion process in the March 1851 issue of The Chemist. It became the most widely used medium until the gelatin dry plate arrived in the 1870s. The collodion process had three subsets: the ambrotype, a positive image on glass; the ferrotype or tintype, a positive on metal; and the glass negative. Gabriel Lippmann introduced a natural-color process based on the interference of light waves in 1891, an elegant but impractical invention that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908.

• 6. From Glass To Film

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  Hurter and Driffield began pioneering work on the light sensitivity of photographic emulsions in 1876, enabling the first quantitative measure of film speed. Glass plates were the medium for most camera photography from the late 1850s until flexible plastic films arrived in the 1890s. Because glass holds its dimensions so reliably, plates stayed in use for astrophotography into the 1990s and for laser holography into the 21st century.

  George Eastman, founder of Kodak, marketed the first flexible photographic roll film in 1885, though that original film was really a coating on a paper base that had to be stripped away. The first transparent plastic roll film followed in 1889, made from highly flammable nitrocellulose known as nitrate film. Early films were more expensive and of lower optical quality than glass, and until the late 1910s came in no large formats, so they did not immediately replace the old medium.

  Kodak introduced cellulose acetate safety film in 1908, but nitrate held advantages of toughness, transparency, and price. The changeover for X-ray films was not completed until 1933. Nitrate remained standard for theatrical 35 millimeter motion pictures until it was finally discontinued in 1951. Film stayed dominant until the early 21st century, when digital drew consumers away, though enthusiasts and professionals still prize its distinctive look.

• 7. The Long Road To Color

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  Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published the three-color-separation principle in 1855, and in 1861 it produced the first permanent color photograph. His idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green, and blue filters, giving the three channels needed to recreate a color image. Louis Ducos du Hauron pioneered a subtractive print method in the late 1860s by superimposing carbon prints in complementary colors.

  Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, the Russian photographer, made extensive use of color separation with a special camera that exposed three filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate. Because the exposures were not simultaneous, moving subjects appeared as brightly colored ghosts or showed color fringes. Early materials limited everyone, being sensitive mostly to blue and virtually blind to red, until photochemist Hermann Vogel discovered dye sensitization in 1873 and added sensitivity to green, yellow, and red.

  The Lumiere brothers introduced Autochrome, the first commercially successful color process, in 1907. Its plates used a mosaic filter of dyed potato starch grains that recorded color as adjacent microscopic fragments. Kodak introduced Kodachrome, the first modern integral tripack color film, in 1935, capturing three color components in a multi-layer emulsion. Agfa's Agfacolor Neu followed in 1936, building color couplers into the emulsion during manufacture to simplify processing. Polaroid introduced instant color film in 1963, yielding a finished print a minute or two after exposure. After a transition centered on 1995 to 2005, inexpensive multi-megapixel digital cameras pushed color film into a niche market.

• 8. The Camera That Sees And Society Watching Back

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  Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a charge-coupled device in 1981, the Sony Mavica, which saved images to disk and displayed them on television but was not fully digital. Fujifilm created the first camera to record and save images in a digital format, the Fujix DS-1P, in 1988. Kodak unveiled the DCS 100 in 1991, the first commercially available digital single-lens reflex camera, whose high cost limited it to photojournalism and professional work. Today more than 99 percent of photographs taken worldwide come from digital cameras, increasingly through smartphones. In 2012, physicists at Griffith University in Australia recorded the first photographed atom, trapping an ion of ytterbium with an electric field and capturing it on a CCD.

  In her 1977 book On Photography, Susan Sontag dismissed the objectivity of the medium. To photograph, she wrote, is to appropriate the thing photographed, putting oneself into a relation to the world that feels like knowledge and therefore like power. Photographers choose what to include, what to exclude, and what angle to frame, and Sontag warned that the power to censor lets the photographer construct reality. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window from 1954, the camera is presented as promoting voyeurism, an observation station that does more than passively observe.

  The ease of manipulating digital photographs has sharpened these concerns. Many photojournalists have declared they will not crop their pictures or combine elements of multiple photos into photomontages passed off as real. To counter tampering, recent in-camera processing allows digital fingerprinting of photos for forensic use. The law draws its own lines. In the United States, photography is protected as a First Amendment right, and anyone may photograph what is in plain view in public spaces. In the United Kingdom, the Counter-Terrorism Act of 2008 expanded police power to stop even press photographers from taking pictures in public places.