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Samantha Hinds
Ms. Bennett
12th Lit/Comp
7 October 2011
History of Photography
“I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that
sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually
observed” -Galen Rowell, nature photographer. Throughout almost two centuries, photography
has become one of the most popular forms of visual arts. The art of photography has progressed
dramatically, such as the camera size, the quality of pictures, and even the way the pictures are
developed; but even with all these changes, the art of photography and the development of raw
pictures; however the process may be, is still there.
Something that many people do not know is that photography,or better, the idea of
photography,has been around for many centuries. It was first thought of by the ancient Greeks;
they discovered that images could be produced or projected by making a very small hole in the
wall of a dark room. Though they had no way of making the images permanent mechanically,
they would have people come in and trace the images on the wall. How the images turned out in
the end depended on the artistic level of the person tracing.This idea or method was called
camera obscura. (Lewis 3057)
In the 1820s, Joseph Niépce discovered a method of producing images using a glass plate
coated in a solution called bitumen. Bitumen was light-sensitive, and was coated on a glass plate

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and set in the sun. Niépce combined Bitumen with the camera obscura, and some of the ideas of
lithography, a method of printing an image by applying patterned layers of color to paper with a
series of etched metal or stone plates (Lewotsky2352); his process became known as
Heliography (“sun drawing”). With that process he produced the first known successful picture,
which was the courtyard of his family estate, taken from a window on the upper level of the
house. Niépce had the plate with the bitumen solution sitting in the sun for almost eight hours,
and by exposing the plate that long, he captured light from all angles so the light was not coming
from a single place. A few years later, Louis Daguerre, a stage set designer from Paris, contacted
Niépce after hearing he had found a way to get an image to become permanent. The two formed
a partnership and later altered Niépce‟s method; instead of using a glass plate, they used copper
and the bitumen was replaced by a photosensitive silver iodine solution.Daguerre also invented a
new lens that produced sharper images.
After Niépce‟s death in 1833, Daguerre sustained contact with Niépce‟s son, but went on
to continue his research on his own. He continued to improve the method that he and Niépce
came up with; he discovered the idea of treating the exposed silver iodine solution with mercury
vapor, and by doing that, it no longer took hours to produce an image, but instead only minutes.
He gave credit to Niépce for the original invention, but took credit himself for perfecting the
process. He later went on to name the process “daguerreotype” in 1838. The Académie des
Sciences was so highly impressed by Daguerre‟s work that the French government offered to
purchase his invention. Daguerre and Niépce‟s son Isidore published the technical details of the
daguerreotype and the original research, and supporters of Daguerre pushed the French
government to give them both pension for their publication. In later years a company was created
to produce the equipment to make the daguerreotypes, with the profits being split between the

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manufacturer, Daguerre, and Isidore Niépce. Throughout the following years the daguerreotypes
became more and more popular around the world, and by 1841 improvements had been made
and the exposure time was shortened to around forty seconds (Evans 582).
In the meantime in the 1830s, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot created the first
light sensitive paper. He discovered by soaking paper in a salt solution, and then coating it with
silver nitrate, the images would remain permanent on the paper. The image that Talbot captured
was a "negative"—that is, the light objects appeared dark on the paper, and vice versa. He
realized that by placing this negative on top of a second sheet of paper and exposing both to
sunlight, the process would repeat itself, forming a "positive” or true image (Watson
425).Despite this great discovery, Talbot‟s method, along with Daguerre‟s,was inconvenient,
because the exposure took up to sixty minutes in some cases. So because the exposure took so
long, moving objects could not be photographed, and as a result portraits could not be taken. In
1840 Talbot went back and drastically altered and improved his process. He found that a very
short camera exposure (about 1/60 of that required to give a visible image) left an invisible
"latent" image on the sensitized paper. The latent image was then "developed" into a visible
image by treatment with a solution of gallic acid and silver nitrate (Jolly 250). Talbot‟s method
was so superior that the process for developing film in modern day is almost the same. The main
difference between Talbot's process and modern photographic practice is that now the silver
halide, in the form of approximately micron-sized crystals or "grains," is suspended in gelatin.
The gelatin mixture is coated as a thin film on glass plates or flexible sheets of plastic or paper
(Jolly 250). This process was known as calotype.

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Alexander Wolcott opened the world‟s first photography studio in 1840 in New York
City, known as a “Daguerrean Parlor”. Also during this time, József Petzval and Friedrich
Voigtländer were in the process of creating a better, more efficient camera and lens design.
While experimenting, Petzval produced an achromatic portrait lens; a lens that had a double lens,
and ultimately captured images about twenty times faster than the lens on Daguerre‟s
daguerreotype. Meanwhile, Voigtländer improved Daguerre‟s clumsy little box into a box that
would be more convenient for a traveler. Later in the 1840s the United States had daguerrean
artists in every city, and there were traveling photographers who transformed the back of wagons
into studios (“photography, history of”).
From around the 1850s and into the early twentieth century stereographs became one of
the more popular forms of photography. The process involved taking two pictures of the same
subject from two different lenses, then usually putting both pictures on a flat surface side by side.
Stereographs were designed to make images appear to be three dimensional. At the same time, in
the 1850s photography was revolutionized by the invention of the wet collodion process, which
made glass negatives. This process was discovered by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and was
about twenty times faster than all other process before it. The process had one major flaw: the
photographer had to prepare the plate almost immediately before exposure and expose it and
process it while the coating was wet. Collodion is a solution of nitrocellulose (guncotton) in
alcohol and ether; when the solvents evaporate, a clear plastic-like film is formed. Since it is then
waterproof, the chemicals used for developing the exposed silver halides and removing the
unexposed salts cannot penetrate the coating to act upon them. The wet collodion process was
quickly adopted around the world because it concentrated detail with great precision that rivaled
that of the daguerreotype. It was the most popular form of photography for more than 30 years

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and greatly increased the popularity of photography worldwide, despite the fact that it was
unequally sensitive to different colors of the color spectrum (“photography, history of”).
In the 1870s there were many attempts to replace the wet collodion process with dry
plates, so the plates could be prepared beforehand and developed after long exposure. By making
that change, there would be no need for a portable dark room. In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox,
an English physician, came up with the idea of suspending silver bromide in a gelatin emulsion,
an idea that led to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatin containing
silver salts in 1878. This event was the beginning of the modern era of photography
(“photography, history of”). These gelatin plates were about sixty times more sensitive than the
collodion plates. This discovery led to the invention of a variety of hand- held cameras being
invented; the most popular of all was the Kodak camera in 1888, which was invented by George
Eastman. Most of the Kodak advertising was pointed towards women, and soon after, the
popularity of amateur photography increased dramatically. Kodak was described by Eastman
as,“You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” (“photography, history of”), and Eastman stuck by
that motto. Since the camera had a roll of flexible negative material,later adapted into modern
film, that could hold around one hundred 2.5 centimeter in diameter pictures, after the final
image was exposed the material was sent to the Kodak factories, then processed, printed and
returned. In the beginning, Eastman‟s so-called “American film” was used in the camera; this
film was paper- based, and the gelatin layer containing the image was stripped away after
development and fixing and moved to a transparent support. In 1889 the “American film”
processess was replaced by film on a transparent plastic base of nitrocellulose that had been
invented in 1887 (“photography, history of”).

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After the turn of the twentieth century, many photographers strived for their images to
look more like photographs instead of looking like paintings and started to value the qualities
found only in photography. Another common type of photography around this time was
documentary photography. Lewis W. Hine was one of the big names in documentary
photography; he started a photographic documentary of immigrants coming into Ellis Island. He
later went on to become a full time social photographer (as he liked to call himself) and worked
for the National Child Labor Committee. He concentrated most on getting images of children at
work, most often in factories. He ended up with thousands of images of underage child
workersworking in textile mills, mines, canning establishments, glass factories, and in street
trades throughout the United States. Hine‟s work had a large impact on the passing of child labor
laws. During the Great Depression, the federal government undertook a documentary project.
The project comprised more than 270,000 images produced by eleven photographers working in
different places at different times. All worked to show the effects that the economic downturn,
the lack of rain, and the wasting of agriculture in the South and the Midwest had on agriculture
displacement throughout the entire United States. In this project, the documentation the
photographers got did double duty. There were two main tasks the photographers had to
complete; one task was to record conditions both on nonfunctioning farms and in new
homesteads created by federal legislation. The other was to stimulate compassion so that
problems addressed by legislative action would win support (“photography, history of”).
Another one of the more common growing forms of photography around the turn of the
century was photojournalism. More and more magazines were being produced and published,
and with cameras becoming lighter and easier to carry, photos in magazines grew to be in high
demand. In 1924 and 1925, two revolutionary miniature camerasErmanox in 1924 and the

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Leicain 1925, changed the world of photographic journalism forever. With wide lenses, the
cameras were able to capture images within seconds when outdoors, and even indoors if there
was enough light. (“photography, history of”)
The auto chrome process was first introduced in 1907 and was one of the first attempts at
color photography. In 1935,Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, who were working
with the Kodak Research Laboratories, established the modern era of color photography with
their invention of Kodachrome film. With this reversal (slide) film, color transparencies could be
obtained that were suitable both for projection and for reproduction. In 1942 Kodak introduced
the Kodacolor negative-positive film that twenty years later—after many improvements in
quality and speed and a great reduction in price—would become the most popular film used for
amateur photography (“photography, history of”).
With the discovery of color film, more photographers became interested in the
possibilities the color film could hold. After World War II, photographers started to back away
from photojournalism and documentaries and started to look more into abstract photography, and
how to make images look more like paintings again. Unknown at the time, but these abstract
styles of colors, and interpretations of average items led to the introduction of graffiti. Street
photography started to become really popular. Photographers would walk around with a
cameraand would photography how life really was, not like in the great depression, but using
candid photos of anything that caught their eye (“photography, history”).
As time passed into the 1970s some of the pictures became a little more controversial
about alternate lifestyles, including pictures of drug addiction and many other controversial
„lifestyles‟ that in the past would not have been deemed appropriate. Color photography started

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to be used as a way to show how life really was, to capture all the feelings and emotions of life.
Throughout the remainder of the century, photographs were set aside more for video and other
forms of media. Photography was no longer the dominant form of media in the world
(“photography, history of”).
At the turn of the twenty-first century, began the digital era; film was replaced with
digital cameras, almost always in color. With the development of digital photography came ways
to digitally edit pictures in ways that did not exist when developing by hand. The new
phenomenon became Adobe‟s Photoshop. Many photographers realized that they could
manipulate photos in more ways than ever before, and in some cases changing the picture all
together. There are very few pictures today in magazines, or on television, or anywhere else that
have not been digitally edited in some way (Rich 6)
Photography has changed and adapted over the past hundred years or so. It has been
through possibly thousands of trial and errors. Now it is probably the oldest form of media have
today, and at the end of the day no matter how the photo was taken or processed, the raw picture
is still one of the purest forms of art there is in this world. Whether amateur photographers or
professional photographers, it does not matter who is behind the lens; it is what is seen by people
that matters most.