History of photography

Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) invented the camera obscurapinhole camera, Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate, and Georges Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie (by the French Thiphaigne de La Roche, 1729-1774) described what can be interpreted as photography.



Photography as a usable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the FrenchNicéphore Niépce. However, the picture took eight hours to expose, so he went about trying to find a new process. Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the development of the daguerreotype in 1839. inventor

Meanwhile, Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention, Talbot refined his process so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people. By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process, which creates negative images. John Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the cyanotype process, now familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". He discovered sodium thiosulphate solution to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it could be used to "fix" pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.


In March of 1851, Frederick Scott Archer published his findings in "The Chemist" on the wet plate collodion process. This became the most widely used process between 1852 and the late 1880s when the dry plate was introduced. There are three subsets to the Collodion process; the Ambrotype (positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (positive image on metal) and the negative which was printed on Albumen or Salt paper.


Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made in through the nineteenth century. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.

Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph, c. 1826. This image required an eight-hour exposure, which resulted in sunlight being visible on both sides of the buildings.

Timeline

• ancient times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole
• 16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens
• 17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs
• 1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.
• 1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.
• 1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper
• 1826: Niépce creates a permanent image
• 1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper.
• 1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process.
• 1841: Talbot patents his process under the name "calotype".
• 1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.
• 1853: Nadar (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris
• 1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade.
• 1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era
• 1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.
• 1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the "color separation" method.
• 1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives
• 1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography.
• 1870: Center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.
• 1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the "dry plate" process.
• 1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse.
• 1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.
• 1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.
• 1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
• 1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
• 1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of tenament life in New york City
• 1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.
• 1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City
• 1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.
• 1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
• 1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working mills.
• 1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz, develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film.
• 1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.
• 1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris
• 1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.
• 1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he begins an 11-year project photographing street life
• 1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful, close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects; Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6 cm image on rollfilm.; Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature
• 1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT
• 1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman, aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and shoots himself.
• 1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit
• 1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition to film.
• 1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next six years. Roman Vishniac begins his project of the soon-to-be-killed-by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.
• 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
• World War II:

1. Development of multi-layer color negative films
2. Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine.

• 1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
• 1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and white film
• 1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
• 1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art
• 1959: Nikon F introduced.
• 1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City.
• 1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
• 1970: William Wegman begins photographing his Weimaraner, Man Ray.
• 1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame
• 1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22
• 1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the first working CCD-based digital still camera
• 1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William Eggleston's Guide
• 1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed in 1980; Jan Groover begins exploring kitchen utensils
• 1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins work on seascapes.
• 1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid.
• 1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera
• 1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera)
• 1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US); In the American West by Richard Avedon
• 1988: Sally Mann begins publishing nude photos of her children
• 1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new all-electronic lens mount
• 1990: Adobe Photoshop released.
• 1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3
• 1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD
• 1993: Founding of photo.net (this Web site), an early Internet online community; Sebastiao Salgado publishes Workers; Mary Ellen Mark publishes book documenting life in an Indian circus.
• 1995: Material World, by Peter Menzel published.
• 1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics
• 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a leading manufacturer.
• 2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone
• 2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt
• 2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with the Olympus E-1; Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000
• 2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras
• 2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR, with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000; Portraits by Rineke Dijkstra.