History Of Photography

Invention of Photography:

In 1822, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor, invented heliography. Around 1826-27, he improved on the process and obtained for the first time a fixed image of a landscape using the camera Obscura. However, it required an extremely long exposure time, in broad daylight, for few days.

In 1828, he found a new method that led to superior quality images with half-tones. Using polished silver as a base and letting iodine vapors interact with the bitumen image, he obtained genuine photographs in black and white on a metal plate. The preciseness of these images was amazing for the time. The exposure time was still many days in broad sunlight.

Niépce met Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French artist and photographer, in 1827. They partnered to work on the improvement of heliography. The official contract was signed in December 1829.Physautotype, invented in 1832, was a joint venture of Daguerre and Niépce. The physautotype was produced using lavender dissolved in alcohol.The emulsion was then applied to a silver plate and exposed in a camera Obscura.

Niépce died in 1833, leaving Daguerre to work on the improvement alone. He continued to experiment with copper plates coated with silver iodide to produce direct positive pictures. Daguerre discovered that the latent image on an exposed plate could be brought out or “developed” with the fumes from warmed mercury. The use of mercury vapour meant that photographic images could be produced in twenty to thirty minutes rather than hours. In 1837, Daguerre found a way of “fixing” the photographic images with a solution of common salt. Two years later he adopted thiosulphate of soda as the fixing agent.Daguerre began making successful pictures using his improved process from 1837.On 19th August,1839, at a meeting in Paris, the Daguerreotype Process was revealed to the world.

`"Antique woodcut, showing a schematic view of a daguerreotype camera. Illustration from a book in Physics from 1883.A: brass tube with an achromatic condensing lens; B: groove; C: wooden case; D: milled head; E: ground-glass plate for composing the scene; then replaced with the sensitised photographic plate."`

In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman’sKodak camera went on the market with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest”. Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.

The first durable color photograph was a set of three black-and-white photographs taken through RGB color filters and shown superimposed by using three projectors with similar filters. It was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861. The photographic emulsions then in use were insensitive to most of the spectrum, so the result was very imperfect.

The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, a process inventors and brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière began working on in the 1890s and commercially introduced in 1907.It was based on the following idea: instead of taking three separate photographs through color filters, take one through a mosaic of tiny color filters overlaid on the emulsion and view the results through an identical mosaic.

In 1957, a team led by Russell A.Kirsch at the National Institute of Standards and Technology developed a binary digital version of an existing technology, the wirephoto drum scanner, so that alphanumeric characters, diagrams, photographs and other graphics could be transferred into digital computer memory.

Earlier digital cameras used Charged Couple Device(CCD) as an image capturing optoelectronic component. Modern DSLRs and mirrorless cameras use Charged Metal Oxide Semiconductor(CMOS) as the image capturing component. It was true that CCDs were better performers than CMOS sensors. In 2000, Canon produced the first CMOS-powered DSLR, the EOS D30, which produced photos with measurably less noise than the CCD-based cameras of the era. Thus digital cameras with CMOS sensors, which produced good quality images at cheap price, began dominating the market.

Some eminent photographers of the 20^th century:

Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984):

He is known as the founder of West Coast style of photography. Alongwith Edward Weston and Imogin Cunningham, he founded ‘Group f.64’that shunned pictorialism. Later, he also invented the Zone System alongwith Fred Archer.

Nowadays, digital cameras use 12% gray. Gray areas reflect 1/5^th(which is approx. 18%) of the light falling on them. Thus, the sweet spot is considered as Zone 5. The zone cards helped us control the amount of light entering the camera.

Famous works of Ansel Adams are Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Clearing Winter Storm, etc.

Steve McCurry (1950 – present):

An American photographer and photojournalist, he concentrates on the toll that war takes on humans. He has covered conflicts like Iran-Iraq War, Lebanon Civil war, Cambodian Civil War, Afghan War, etc.

His most famous work is ‘Afghan Girl’.

The story of the picture :“The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture.”

He is an active contributor to Nat Geo and Magnum Photos. His work is curated and released into a book : “A Life in Pictures”, by his sister, Bonnie McCurry.

W Eugene Smith (1918 – 1978):

An American photojournalist, who is known as the ‘singlemost important American photographer in the development of editorial photo essay’. His major photo essays include : “The dedication of an American country doctor and a nurse midwife”, “The clinic of Dr.Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa”, “The city of Pittsburgh” and “The pollution which damaged the health of the residents of Minamata in Japan”.

Imogen Cunningham (1883 – 1976):

An American photographer, known for her botanical photography, nudes and industrial landscapes. She was also a member of ‘Group f.64’. She worked for Edward Curtis on his project of documenting the American tribes, titled, “North American Tribes”. She won acclaim for portraiture and pictorial work. In her later career, she turned to documentary street photography.

Her famous works include Magnolia Blossom, Triangles, etc.

Henri Cartier Bresson (1908 – 2004):

French humanist photographer, who is considered as the master of candid photography.

“The three boys at Lake Tanganyika” inspired Cartier Bresson to capture a photo and term it as a ‘decisive moment’.

Other notable photographers include Vivian Maier, Annie Leibovitz, Shomei Tomatsu, Raghu Rai, Ed Kashi etc.

In the later part of the nineteenth century, artists began to see, though all photographs may seem the same, there are many different factors that can be adjusted to create unique images.

Pictorialists believed that for a photograph to be considered as art, the scene and the development process needed to mimic painting.’Soft focus’ became all the rage as a way to negate photo’s sharp depictions.Unfortunately, they went too far. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Group f.64 was born and Alfred Steiglitz and Paul Strand ushered a new era in American photography.

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