The Inventions of Photography
Lecture one discussed photography as a recent invention of history that is still inspiring and impacting us artistically and culturally. This lecture covered the history of drawing with light, commercial art, the democratic medium and the different types of photography performed. Wednesday’s lecture also covered the idea of a doubtful image that is capable of invention, construction, fiction and falsehood.
Drawing with Light
This section explores the beginnings of photography and the concern of ‘fixing the shadow’ in images. Photographers such as Thomas Wedgewood, Humphry Davey, Joseph Niepce, Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot, were all dedicated to perfecting and improving the technology and appearance of photographs. From the invention of substrate methods to autochrome photography, these progressions have created a distinctive narrative in the history of photography.
A Timeline of Photography
1800- Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy created images by sensitizing paper or leather with silver nitrate, by placing a flat object on to the paper and placing the object to light. However, Wedgewood couldn’t discover a way of ‘fixing’ the image on paper, but his idea of being able to copy images was important to the discovery of photography. The photogram of a leaf was an example of Wedgewood’s work.
1826- Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, created the first ever permanent photograph, which was called ‘View the window at Le Gras. Between eight to ten hours was spent in the creation of the photograph, by using the exposure of a bitumen coated plate. The result of the image, produced a negative image, which meant that he had reversed the photograph; he named this process ‘heliography’.
1835- William Henry Fox Talbot, created the ‘photographic negative’. The process involved a short exposure that chemically developed negative images. This process was called ‘calotype’.
1838- William Henry Fox Talbot, created the photograph ‘Leaves’, which was made with sensitised paper and light sensitive salt.
1839- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, followed the same process of fixing an image as Niepce, while creating what is known as the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype is a highly polished silver surface, which uses a copper plate. The plate contains a ‘latent’ image at the end of exposure that is then fixed and developed. An example of Daguerre’s work was named the ‘Boulevard du Temple Paris’, which was the first photograph to include an image of a person. Daguerre demonstrated his work on 19th August 1839 at a meeting, which was held at the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. His success during the meeting meant that ‘photography’ had been invented.
1851- By 1851, Frederick Scott Archer introduced glass negative process called Collodion, which is also known a ‘Wet plate’.
1888- The first Kodak camera is produced with a 20-foot roll of paper. This camera could produce 100 2.5- inch diameter circular pictures.
1907- First commercial colour film was produced with the use of the autochrome plate by Lumiere brothers in France.
Commercial Art
The Daguerreotype became a success in the history of photography, as it was supported by good marketing and the ease and simplicity of using it. The concept of The Daguerreotype quickly became more associated with photography a more people were using it.
‘The Pencil of Nature’ was a publication created by Fox-Talbot, which outlined the importance between the printed word and the photograph. Beaumont Newhall, called ‘The Pencil of Nature’ “an advertisement” and an “aesthetic achievement”. This allowed the photograph to be linked with the printed word, which resulted in the new relationship between the new technology and the evolving mass media.
A Democratic Medium
Due to the rising success of the Daguerreotype and the affordability, more people could become involved in the invention. The concept allowed people to get a likeness of them, which allowed the portrait to become an affordable item.
‘Visiting cards’, soon became a popular item as different images were produced, it meant that people wanted to treat the cards as collectable items. People also began exchanging the cards on a wider scale, which meant that the images became detached from their purpose and became free items of value and exchange. This new medium of photography, allowed wealthier women to show their artistic and technical minds, that some activities such as painting and sculpting that women were unable to take on due to women’s rights.
An All-seeing Eye
Photography soon became accessible over a wide range of fields as it was used to document places and events in science, medicine and anthropology. This allowed work to be scrutinised and recorded. For example, Francis Frith photographed ‘The Rameseum of El-Kurneh’ in 1858, which is an example of the way photography can be used to inform people of historical and topographical sights, that people were unable to see. Photography also became useful for illustrating medical procedures. An early operation was photographed in 1847 by Josiah Johnson Hawes and Albert Sands Southworth in a general hospital.
The Doubtful Image
Bayard’s portrait of ‘a drowned man’ in 1840, demonstrated that photographs can be constructed to form a falsehood, meaning that images didn’t always tell the truth. He created the portrait as a protest against the dismissal of his ‘direct positive’ photographic process by the French authorities. The image shows himself laying convincingly unconscious and highlights the impression of his rotting hands and facial features, of which he painted to show the “rotting” of his body.
Photography in Terms of Context
This lecture concludes that it is somewhat difficult to discuss photography in general terms as photography is so universal. There is not one thing that defines ‘photography’, instead it is a context. For example, the places images are produced, the purpose of creating the image in the first place and the why and who gets to use and see the photographs.
