THE BEGINNINGS
OF PHOTOGRAPHY
First,
the name. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John
Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic
process became public. (*1) The word is derived
from the Greek words for light and writing. Before
mentioning the stages that led to the development of photography, there is
one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man called de la Roche (1729-
1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was possible to
capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky
substance. This surface, so the tale goes, would not only provide a mirror
image on the sticky canvas, but would remain on it. After it had been dried
in the dark the image would remain permanent. The author would not have known
how prophetic this tale would be, only a few decades after his death. There
are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography
possible. It is somewhat surprising that photography was not invented earlier
than the 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time.
It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together
that photography came into being. The
first of these processes was optical. The Camera
Obscura (dark room) 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. The
second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was
invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached
in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light.
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. Following
a report on this invention by Paul
Delaroche , a leading scholar of the day, the French government bought
the rights to it in July 1839. Details of the process were made public on 19
August 1839, and Daguerre named it the 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. An interesting account
of these days is given by a writer called Gaudin ,
who was present the day that the announcement was made. However,
not all people welcomed this exciting invention; some pundits viewed in quite
sinister terms. A newspaper report in the Leipzig City Advertiser stated: "The wish
to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible... but the mere
desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own
image, and no man- made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that
God should have abandoned His eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman...
to give to the world an invention of the Devil?" At
that time some artists saw in photography a threat to their livelihood (see Artists and
Photography ), 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. That, to many, would not have been regarded as a disadvantage; it
meant that the owner of the portrait could be certain that he had a piece of
art that could not be duplicated. If however two copies were required, the
only way of coping with this was to use two cameras side by side. There was,
therefore, a growing need for a means of copying pictures which
daguerreotypes could never satisfy. Different,
and in a sense a rival to the Daguerreotype, was the Calotype invented
by William
Henry Fox Talbot , which was to provide the answer to that problem. His
paper to the Royal Society of London, dated 31 January 1839, actually
precedes the paper by Daguerre; it was entitled "Some account of the Art
of Photogenic drawing, or the process by which natural objects may be made to
delineate themselves without the aid of the artist's pencil." He wrote: "How
charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to
imprint themselves durably and remain fixed on the paper!" The
earliest paper negative we know of was produced in August 1835; it depicts
the now famous window at Lacock 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."
(See note HERE). Compared
with Daguerreotypes the quality of the early Calotypes was somewhat inferior.
(See comments on Claudet).
However, the great advantage of Talbot's method was that an unlimited number
of positive prints could be made (see also Brewster ).
In fact, today's photography is based on the same principle, whereas by
comparison the Daguerreotype, for all its quality, was a blind alley. The
mushrooming of photographic establishments reflects photography's growing
popularity; from a mere handful in the mid 1840s the number had grown to 66
in 1855, and to 147 two years later. In London, a favourite venue was Regent
Street where, in the peak in the mid 'sixties there were no less than
forty-two photographic establishments! In America the growth was just as
dramatic: in 1850 there were 77 photographic galleries in New York alone. The
demand for photographs was such that Charles Baudelaire (1826-1867), a well
known poet of the period and a critic of the medium, commented: "our
squalid society has rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gloat at its trivial image
on a scrap of metal." Talbot's photography
was on paper, and inevitably the imperfections of the paper were printed
alongside with the image, when a positive was made. Several experimented with
glass as a basis for negatives, but the problem was to make the silver
solution stick to the shiny surface of the glass. In 1848 a cousin of
Nicephore Niépce, Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor, perfected a process of coating
a glass plate with white of egg sensitised with potassium iodide, and washed
with an acid solution of silver nitrate. This new ( albumen )
process made for very fine detail and much higher quality. However, it was
very slow, hence the fact that photographs produced on this substance were
architecture and landscapes; portraiture was simply not possible. Progress
in this new art was slow in England, compared with other countries. Both Daguerre and
Fox Talbot were
partly responsible, the former for having rather slyly placed a patent on his
invention whilst the French government had made it freely available to the
world, the latter for his law-suits in connection with his patents. In
1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick Scott
Archer , who introduced the Collodion process.
This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure
times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in photography. Prices
for daguerreotypes varied, but in general would cost about a guinea (£1.05),
which would be the weekly wage for many workers. The collodion process,
however, was much cheaper; prints could be made for as little as one shilling
(5p). A
further impetus was given to photography for the masses by the introduction
of carte-de-visite
photographs by Andre Disdéri .
This developed into a mania, though it was relatively short-lived. The
collodion process required that the coating, exposure and development of the
image should be done whilst the plate was still wet. Another process
developed by Archer
was named the Ambrotype ,
which was a direct positive. The
wet collodion process, though in its time a great step forward, 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. The
next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard
Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin (which
had been discovered only a few years before) 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. Initially it was very insensitive compared with existing
processes, but it was refined to the extent that the idea of factory-made
photographic material was now becoming possible. 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 specialised knowledge. Celluloid
had been invented in the early eighteen-sixties, and John Carbutt persuaded a
manufacturer to produce very thin celluloid as a backing for sensitive
material. George Eastman is
particularly remembered for introducing flexible film in 1884.
Four years later he introduced the box camera, and photography could now
reach a much greater number of people. Other
names of significance include Herman Vogel ,
who developed a means whereby film could become sensitive to green light, and
Eadweard
Muybridge who paved the way for motion picture photography. Popular
in the Victorian times was stereoscopic
photography , which reproduced images in three dimensions. It is a
process whose popularity waxed and waned - as it does now - reaching its
heights in the mid-Victorian era. |