History of Photography

An overview by Julián Monge-Nájera, Professor of Scientific Photogrpahy, University of Costa Rica
As a teacher of scientific photography at the University of Costa Rica I was not satisfied with any specific book about the history of photography and decided to make my own anthology with what I believed were the best chapters of every book.
This website is a brief summary of that teaching material. It offers a relatively extended timeline (from the year 350 BC to the year 2012) and covers the history of "color", "black and white" and "digital" photography.
A selection of historically important photographs to illustrate the history of photography is also included.

Introduction

As a teacher of scientific photography at the University of Costa Rica I noticed that books about the history of photography varied greatly in their coverage. I was not satisfied with any specific book and decided to make my own anthology with what I believed were the very best chapters of each. I used this material as the basis for my classes.
This website is a very brief summary of that teaching material. It offers a relatively extended timeline (from the year 350 BC to the year 2004) and covers the history of "color", "black and white" and "digital" photography. It includes a selection of historically important photographs to illustrate the history of photography.

The "prehistory" of photography
(350 BC to the 18th century)

Decades ago I read in a book published by the prestigious Mexican Autonomous University (UNAM) that the Iraqi physicist Abu Ali Al-Hasan (965-1038 DC) made the first impressions with light on a chemically treated surface during the Middle Ages, when Europe was a stronghold of obscurantism. This statement deserves serious attention, yet all textbooks I have seen present a French inventor as the creator of photography (see below).
Before we continue, I must declare that all history books available to me ignore the contributions and developments of Asian, African and Latin American photographers and inventors, so I could not include them although I know that, for example, the Japanese passion with photography started in the mid 19th century and that scientists such as Clodomiro Picado in Costa Rica used it in the late 19th century to document cryptic coloration in a study of Darwinian evolution (Latin American photography began in the 1840's, at the time of Talbot). Please bear in mind this chauvinistic nature of history books, which tend to overstate the accomplishments of people from the area where the books are written, and vice versa.
The German artist Albrecht Dürer, among many other "classical" painters such as Van Meer, is thought to have used a camara obscura. The device, refined by Geovanni della Porta (1538-1615), was later adapted to produce photographs. Even the most advanced digital camera of today is based on the same principle.

A camara obscura (1646).

However, for a fair treatment, I most mention the theoretical pioneers that are ignored by many history books. Aristotle (384-322 BC) suggested the idea of photography more than a millennium ago, and several other workers invented components that were necessary to produce photographs:
Albertus Magnus (1139-1238) silver nitrate, Georges Fabricius (1516-1571) silver chloride, Girolamo Cardan (1501-1576) the objective and Daniel Barbaro (1568) the diaphragm. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction bookGiphantie (by the French Thiphaigne de La Roche, 1729-1774) described photography unequivocally.

History of black and white
photography (1800-1900)

Thomas Wedwood (1760-1805) used light to produce an image on paper but was unable to fix it: his photographs became totally dark in seconds. Thus, the way was paved to some extent for the French inventor J.N. Niepce, who thought of an automatic drawing technique when his son and illustrator Isidore left for military service. In 1816 Niepce adapted a camara obscura and obtained a negative image on paper but could not fix it, like all his predecessors. In 1822 he was able to keep

J.N. Niepce (1765-1833).

the images long enough for transference to a metallic plate: he invented photogravure, the basis of commercial printing for more than a century. In 1824 he was finally able to stop the photochemical process by adding another substance, and, in this way fixed the photographs.
Niepce made this photograph, dated 1827, that appears to be the oldest surviving photograph. If it were auctioned, the price would be astronomical:

View through a window in Gras. Niepce, 1827 (exposure time: 8 hours).

After hearing about Niepce's work, French painter Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1799-1851) entered the field and finally both became partners. After that, the history of photography centers in commercial applications and its social implications. Both Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) in England made little fortunes with the invention.

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1844) / William Henry Fox Talbot (1860)

Practically anything we can imagine in photography has been done before, including camera-less photography, which was used by Talbot. Even today, photography students follow his procedure by placing objects directly on sensitive paper and turning on the line for a brief time: translucent objects such as onion layers produce beautiful impressions.

Photographic drawing of feathers and lace. W.H. Fox Talbot, 1839.

Camera that created daguerrotypes

Daguerrotype showing the first picture of a living person (highlighted in green). Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement. Circa 1838.

The Oracle gateway, Gun Street and Minster Street, Reading, circa 1845, by William Henry Fox Talbot

Calle del Observatorio, Bogotá, Colombia, a daguerrotype made by Jean Baptiste Louis Gros, circa 1842

The nude is an excellent example of how subjects and approaches that many believe to be "the latest" are not so: the oldest surviving photograph that represents a human being is a female nude (with two angel heads) from Daguerre, 1837. A living model was not feasible because the early technology required long exposure times (several hours). A bass-relief was used instead.

Nude with angels. / Daguerre, 1837.

Nevertheless, soon the artists were producing images of the beautiful human body. Below is one of the oldest known photographic nudes, which shows how the "official weight" for beauties is greatly a matter of fashion:

Nudes. / Photographer unknown, circa 1850.

Many more photographers and photographs would follow throughout the years, in a continuous effort to explore options that are new to the photographer or to the model in particular.
Further improvements were the production of positives from the original negative (Talbot, 1835), the invention of the word photography by Charles Wheastone (1839), brief exposure times (minutes) by Talbot (1840) and Frederick S. Archer (1851), and the nitrocellulose negative by G. Eastman (1889). Mass photo finishing service began in 1888 with the Kodak camera (G. Eastman, USA).

he oldest known photograph of living humans is this street view by Daguerre: ironically this valuable document summarizes the inequalities of society because only the standing man and the boy that was shining his shoes stayed long enough to leave a clear image in those days of long exposures (they are in the center of the lower left square if you divide this photograph in four equal squares).

Boulevard du temple. / Daguerre, 1838.

The whole range of scientific applications was invented in this period, from the extremely small (microphotography was invented by the French physician Alfred Donné in 1840) to the extremely large (astronomic photography was initiated in 1840 by Draper in the USA and developed in France by Fizeau and Foucault after 1844, and by Bond and de la Rue after 1857).Around 1839 the painter Paul de la Roche declared that photography meant the death of painting. He was not completely wrong in the sense that photography replaced painting as the main medium for portraits, but of course painting is still alive and well. The non-sensical opinion that there had to be a conflict between photography and painting was soon abandoned by many and today they exist independently or converge in mixed techniques according to the artist's desire.
In France, Gaspar-Félix Tournacho, "Nadar" (1820-1910) not only invented aerial photography but also applied the same esthetical principles of painting to photography in the mid 19th century and obtained results that are not less beautiful than anything we make today.

Self-portrait on board of Le Géant hot-air ballon. / Nadar, 1856.

Humans are selfish animals and of course the most photographed subject in the history of photography is the human animal, specially the section that concentrates environmental receptors, that is, the head.
Around 1880, portraits became cheaper and thus a central part of the photography business. Although Julia Cameron and Nadar are usually presented as the pioneers of artistic portraiture, no doubt there were many other excellent photographers that have been forgotten.

Day of Summer. / Julia Margaret Cameron, circa 1856.

South American family, circa 1855.

Technical applications of photography are relatively old:

• 1853 wildlife photography by Bisson and Manté
• 1854 use of photography in court in Lausanne, France
• 1861 use to measure the land and buildings by Laussedat

An image form the first botany book illustrated
with photographs / Anna Atkins, circa 1853

Mechanical-electrical (not electronic) television was invented by Paul Nipkow in Germany in 1884, but the image quality produced by this system was too poor and did not evolve into modern digital photography or television, although theoretically it could be used for both purposes.

Bad weather! Carbon imprint. / Léonard Missone, 1904.

Motorized film advance was invented in 1900 (Le Pascal, France) and the film cartridge shortly after that (Expo Co., 1905). The popular Browniecamera was launched in 1900, the same year that focusing was added to cameras (both by Eastman).

History of the search for
color photography (1810-1961)

Color photography also had an early start when Seebeck found in 1810 that wet silver chloride temporarily acquires the colors of light (a phenomenon that was "rediscovered" by Daguerre in 1827 and by Saint Victor near 1851).
Levi L. Hill is mentioned as having accidentally produced a color photograph in 1850 in the USA but no evidence survives and he declared that he was unable to reproduce the accident, so the oldest surviving color photograph is this 1861 transparency by the British physicist James Clerck Maxwell:

Oldest surviving color photography: a transparency by Maxwell (1861).

Maxwell's procedure was not used afterwards, so practical color photography was independently invented by Charles Cros and Louis Ducos du Hauron in France in 1867 and 1869 respectively.

Left, Louis Ducos du Hauron, circa 1870. Right, Charles Cros, circa 1869.

Possibly the oldest color scenery that survives: View of Angouléme, France.
Louis Ducos du Hauron, 1877.

Further improvements included precise color rendition (Grabriel Lippmann, France, 1891), the basis of color photoengraving (Frederic E. Ives, USA,1892), and the multiple screen (same principle of color television) in two versions that permitted production of low quality color films (John Joly, Ireland, 1893, August and Louis Lumiere, France, 1907). Russian photographer, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, produced color images of impressive quality in the early 20th century.

Color photograph obtained using three different
color negatives. / Frederic E. Ives, circa 1900.

The Bukhara Emir by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, circa 1912.

The 35 mm format camera, basis of today's professional photography, was launched by Leitz in 1925 (Germany) and modern color procedures were developed a decade later (Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr., USA, 1933, and Agfa researchers, whose names I could not find, Germany, 1935). The photometer was added to cameras in 1938 (Eastman).

Left, Leopold Mannes (1922). Right, Leopold Godowsky, Jr., (1922).

By the mid 1930's groups of British and German scientists, and the Russian Vladimir Kosma Zworykin (who worked in the USA) developed electronic image scanners that were the basis for modern television, the electron microscope and digital photography. These were originally in black and white, but soon the same principles used in photography were applied to produce experimental color television in 1940 in the USA (the electron microscope does not use color in the way we understand it: color electronic micrographs have "false" color).
The final person to mention here is Edwin H. Land (USA) who invented "self-developing" photographs in 1947 (and a color version in 1961).

History of electric photography
and digital photography (1873-2004)

It is necessary to distinguish between "electric photography" and "digital photography". In traditional photography, the image is "captured" chemically by modifying molecules. Electric photography "captures" images as electric impulses; "digital photography" is a type of electric photography in which images are coded as numbers. For example, the simplest option is when you code a black dot as a "0" and a white dot as a "1".
How to convert light in electrical impulses using "selenium" was described in 1873. Thus, in a sense, electric photography was described more than a century ago, but only in 1907 did Russian physicist Boris Rosing build the cathode ray tube that would serve as basis for practical electric photography.
An electric photography camera was built by Russian researcher Vladimir K. Sworkyn in 1934 (the basis of modern television).The image could be transmitted but not recorded, albeit the technology for recording electromagnetic signals already existed in Germany, perhaps unknown to Sworkyn.

However, a commercial digital camera was not marketed until 1991: the Kodac DCS, actually a Japanese Nikon F3 camera with 1.3 Megapixel sensor. Soon the Japanese dominated the market and the 21st century has seen an expansion in brands, a great reduction in price and an increase rate of one Megapixel per year in the decade after the firts camera entered the market. The main qualitative developments in the early 21st century are: Intelligent cameras that can identify human faces and shoot when they smile, High Dynamic Range (HDR) cameras that produce better images of very light and very dark areas and the convergence of still photography and High Definition Video (HDV) in a single camera.
The final goal might be a camera that can reproduce the full range and detail that the human eye has. Recent developments in photography also include the Imago and Lytro cameras. The Imago 1:1 is a walk-in camera that produces an extremely detailed portrait directly on paper. The Lytro is a camera that captures additional information on light and produces the equivalent of an image with many layers that can be focussed individually after the image is taken.
No one knows how common these new approaches will actually become, but clearly, the early 21st century is characterized by cameras mounted in cell phones and by the daily production of an immense number of photographs.