History Of Photography

Timeline

• In the 10th-century Alhazen scholar Described the effect in detail and told how to view an eclipse of the sun in a camera obscura (literally meaning Dark Chamber), a darkened room with a pinhole opening to the outside.
• The Darkening of certain silver compounds had been observed as early as 17th century, but the unsolved issue was how to halt these silver compounds from continuing to darken.
• Thomas Wedgwood was the first photographer to try to make a picture stay permanent. By the early 19th Century he did silhouettes being the first to use a lens on the camera obscura.
• 1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes
• 1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper .
• In 1826 one of Niepce experiments (on the right) a heliograph, this picture was still not perfected until much later .
• Another frenchman interested in preserving images wrote Niepce asking to ex-change information but instead the became partners in 1829.
• 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
• 1841: Talbot patents his process under the name
• 1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade
• 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
• 1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives
• 1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the
• 1888: first Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
• 1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.
• 1907: first commercial color film, the Auto chrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
• 1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.
• 1921: Man Ray begins making photograms (
• 1928: Albert Ranger-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 roll film.
• 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
• 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.
• 1936: development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
• 1963: first color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos

Resources

Joel Peter Witkins Book
Gallery of images
Interviews with Famous Photographers

BY: Jody Garcia For: The 2003 ARTiculation Project Service Learning Piece Title: History Of Photography Essential Question: What is the History of Photography and how does it effect American society?