History of Photography

History of Photography

What does the word, Photography, actually mean?

Photography: • We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became publicly known and used. • The word is derived from the Greek words, light and writing.

The Science of Photography • There were two scientific processes that existed, and until they were combined photography did not exist. • Camera Obscura • The Camera Obscura had been in existence for at least four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated. • Chemical Inventions • For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colors are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light.

Does anyone know what the camera obscura is??? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LutIudRhm10

Camera Obscura “Room” “Dark” • A dark room/box with a hole on one end. • If the hole was small enough, an inverted image would be seen on the opposite wall. • Used by artists to quickly draw subject • Light travels in a straight line and when some of the rays reflected from a bright subject pass through a small hole in thin material they do not scatter but cross and reform as an upside down image on a flat surface held parallel to the hole.

Early Chemical Discoveries • In the sixteen hundreds Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society, had reported that silver chloride turned dark under exposure, but he appeared to believe that it was caused by exposure to the air, rather than to light. • Angelo Sala, in the early seventeenth century, noticed that powdered nitrate of silver is blackened by the sun. • In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that certain liquids change color when exposed to light. • At the beginning of the nineteenth century Thomas Wedgwood was conducting experiments; he had successfully captured images, but his silhouettes could not survive, as there was no known method of making the image permanent.

Silver Nitrate in Photography • A very high purity of Silver Nitrate is the starting material for all chemical based photography. • It's not the Silver Nitrate that is light sensitive, it's the Silver Halides that matter. • Film contains a carefully formulated coating of Silver Chloride, Silver Bromide and Silver Iodide. The particles are ground to extremely fine particles, then mixed with a gelatin. The gelatin is then rolled onto a clear acetate backing (the film base).This process, in it's entirety, is performed in complete darkness.

THE FIRST PHOTO! • The first successful picture was produced in June/July 1827 by Niépce, using material that hardened on exposure to light. This picture required an exposure of eight hours. • On 4 January 1829 Niépce agreed to go into partnership with Louis Daguerre . Niépce died only four years later, but Daguerre continued to experiment. Soon he had discovered a way of developing photographic plates, a process which greatly reduced the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. He also discovered that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt. Niepce’s 1st Photo

Daguerreotype • The announcement that the Daguerreotype "requires no knowledge of drawing...." and that "anyone may succeed.... and perform as well as the author of the invention" was greeted with enormous interest, and "Daguerreomania" became a craze overnight. • At that time some artists saw in photography a threat to their livelihood, and some even prophesied that painting would cease to exist. • The Daguerreotype process, though good, was expensive, and each picture was a once-only affair. • There was, therefore, a growing need for a means of copying pictures which daguerreotypes could never satisfy.

Calotype • Was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot • Compared with Daguerreotypes the quality of the early Calotypes was somewhat inferior. However, the great advantage of Talbot's method was that an unlimited number of positive prints could be made. • The earliest paper negative we know of was produced in August 1835; it depicts the now famous window at Leacock Abbey, his home. The negative is small (1" square), and poor in quality, compared with the striking images produced by the Daguerreotype process. • By 1840, however, Talbot had made some significant improvements, and by 1844 he was able to bring out a photographically illustrated book entitled "The Pencil of nature." What is the difference between a photo negative and a photo positive??

Collodian Process • In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer , who introduced the Collodionprocess. • This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in photography. • The collodionprocess was much cheaper and created cheaper prints than the daguerreotype process prints.

Collodian Process Continued… • The collodion process required that the coating, exposure and development of the image should be done while the plate was still wet. • The wet collodion process, required a considerable amount of equipment on location. There were various attempts to preserve exposed plates in wet collodion, for development at a more convenient time and place, but these preservatives lessened the sensitivity of the material. It was clear, then, that a dry method was required.

Gelatin led to Dry Plate Process • The next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin instead of glass as a basis for the photographic plate. This led to the development of the dry plate process. • Dry plates could be developed much more quickly than with any previous technique. • The introduction of the dry-plate process marked a turning point. No longer did one need the cumbersome wet-plates, no longer was a darkroom tent needed. One was very near the day that pictures could be taken without the photographer needing any specialized knowledge.

Famous Photographers

Ansel Adams • Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984 • The most important result of Adams's somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. • The Sierra Club was vital to Adams's early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club's 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club's San Francisco headquarters. • He was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. • With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system. • Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images.

Richard Avedon • May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004 • He started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present • In 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. • In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper's Bazaar. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action. • In addition to his fashion work, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and later the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this period, Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles. • Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8x10 view camera. • His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th century portrait photography.

Dorothea Lange • May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965 • She was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). • Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. • With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). • After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she recorded the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). • She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans and their internment in relocation camps, highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps.

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph: • I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

Diane Arbus • March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971 • She was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal. • In 1946, after the war, the Arbuses began a commercial photography business called "Diane & Allan Arbus," with Diane as art director and Allan as the photographer. They contributed to Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and other magazines even though "they both hated the fashion world.“ • During the 1960s, she taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design. • Using softer light than in her previous photography, she took a series of photographs in her later years of people with intellectual disability showing a range of emotions.At first, Arbus considered these photographs to be "lyric and tender and pretty," but by June 1971 she expressed her dislike for them • Among other photographers and artists she befriended during her career, she was close to photographer Richard Avedon; he was approximately the same age, his family had also run a Fifth Avenue department store, and many of his photographs were also characterized as detailed frontal poses.

Irving Penn • June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009 • He was an American photographer known for his portraiture and fashion photography • As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography. • Penn photographed still life objects and found objects in unusual arrangements with great detail and clarity. • While his prints are always clean and clear, Penn's subjects varied widely. Many times his photographs were so ahead of their time that they only came to be appreciated as important works in the modernist canon years after their creation. • His still life compositions are skillfully arranged assemblages of food or objects; at once spare and highly organized, the objects articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume.

Elements of art and principles of design

What textures are present in this photo? Are these pictures balanced?

Positive and Negative space in photography

What elements and principles do you think are important to include when creating photography? Are they necessary for good composition?

Sources • http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/ • http://home.earthlink.net/~michaelbriggs/dags/dags.html • http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01585/photographers.html • http://www.afterimagegallery.com/bresson.htm • Power Point provided by Rachael King • Power Point improvised by Susan Hawkins

History of Photography