The invention of
photography was received in Europe by a frenzy of enthusiasm, even a surprising
amount. Why? Perhaps because it was an idea that people were primed and ready
for. We have in photography a combination of science and art to produce a
perfect, as they thought then, a perfect rendition of a scene or person.
We can understand
why people of the age were so taken with the with this idea when we reflect
that in the 1840s the machine age was already in full swing. Science was
leading to new and better inventions, and the machine was thought to be the
great answer to all the world's problems. Western people worshiped science,
and photography was a product of scientific experiment or, if you will,
chemical and optical experiment.
In the world of
art, at this time too, the great goal of most artists was realism. That is,
artists were trying their best to paint pictures as close in detail to reality
as they could.
Photography
offered a solution based in science.
The mechanism of
the camera for photography, however, was actually very old. A device called a camera obscura
(latin for dark room) widely employed by artists and amateur drawers alike. In
fact, such a devices are still used today. They rely on a lens or, in the case
of a large box, a pinhole, to transmit a view of the scene in front of it. This
view is reflected off a mirror onto a white surface or ground glass. Artists
may place a piece of tracing paper on the surface, and rough out the drawing in
two-dimensional format. By this method they only have to spend a little time in
the field or with a live subject to get the general proportions. Then they can
return to the studio to finish. For early nineteenth century travelers, who
wanted to draw things they saw, as was the fashion, a camera obscure could be
particularly useful, for those who could not draw very well from nature. The
machine was able to get the three-dimensional perspective right, because it reduced
reality to contours that could be traced. If you've tried to draw from nature,
you know how hard it really is to reduce a three-dimensional shape to a
two-dimensional line.
The first people
who contemplated possibilities of photography, then, were artists. Or in the
case of some, not very good artists, such as Nicéphore
Niépce. The idea was, why not try to
find some way to save or "fix" that image on a piece of paper.
Then it could be returned to the study and consulted for copying. The key was,
how to make the image stay? Since the 1700s chemists were aware of various
substances which turned black or dark when light hit them. Curious, but no one
thought it was worth much. Of course, the darkness would fade or be gone with
the shaking of the solution.
The first person
to successfully make a darkened chemical image permanent was Niépce, the
not-so-great French artist. Actually, Niépce was more interested in engravings
or etchings than in photography for art purposes. His idea was to record an
image on a metal plate, and then etch it for printing. In 1826-27, he took a
camera obscura, pointed it at a courtyard, and managed to make a permanent
exposure of it. It took eight hours. He called it a heliograph, the first
recorded picture using light-sensitive materials.
Unfortunately,
Niépce was a man in his 60s, poor, and in ill health. He heard of experiments
that another Frenchman was doing in photography, Louis Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. He wrote a cautious letter to Daguerre, wanting to
know about the process, and finally, they decided to form a partnership in
1829. Daguerre's process differed from Niépce's. He used vapor of mercury and
salt. In 1833 Niépce died, and his son carried on the partnership, although
Daguerre mostly was the active participant. After eleven more years of
experimenting, Daguerre perfected his process: a sheet of copper was coated
with a thin layer of silver. The silver was made sensitive to light with iodine
vapor. It was exposed in a camera, then vapor of mercury was used to bring out
an image. Finally that image was fixed with a salt solution, common table salt.
The process was
radically different from the chemically based photo process used until digital
techniques began in the late 1990s, its chemicals highly toxic and dangerous.
But it worked, and worked very well, offering exquisite detail matching the
best of what we can produce even a century and a half later. In early 1838
Daguerre tried to attract investors to his process, but could find few.
However, he did attract the attention of a famous French scientist of the time,
François Arago, who persuaded the French government to give a pension to
Daguerre and the younger Niépce to work on the process. Daguerre, however, had
to promise not to patent the process in France, and he eventually did.
In 1839 Arago and
Daguerre announced the process to the world. Arago's public relations efforts
and Daguerre's energetic promotion helped the daguerreotype, as it was called,
to take the world by storm. Everyone was talking about it within days.
Exposures, at first nearly 20 minutes, were in 1840 reduced to 30 seconds with
the use of bromide, and faster lenses, able to gather more light. Those first
20 minute exposures were so long that subjects might get sunburned--direct
sunlight only was bright enough to expose the plates. And sitting perfectly
still that long was a terrible ordeal, sometimes requiring head braces. But it
was okay to blink--exposure was so slow that it didn't register. And people
didn't mind sitting through it--after all, a photograph was like a kind of
immortality! And, for the first time, people could really record how they
looked at a certain age, giving society a new appreciation for the unsettling
differences between our visage at 20 and 60.
Daguerreotypes
immediately became the rage in Paris. Everyone wanted their photo taken. But
some people wore worried, too--artists. At first, when photography was
announced, artists were somewhat optimistic. Finally they had a way to fix an
image of the camera obscure to bring it back to the study for painting.
Daguerre himself had been an artist, and most of the original inventors of
photography had intended it as an artists' tool--not as an artistic medium in
its own right. However, as photography caught on, artists began to realize that
it was going to prove to be a real menace to their livelihood as portrait
painters. Particularly painters of miniatures, a business that dropped to zero
almost overnight as daguerreotypists were able to hand-color their photographs.
More unsettling,
artists had lost the centuries-old battle for more and more detail, more and
more realism. And lost it to a machine that could produce detail far beyond any
artist. Artists realized that photography was not going to stay in the role
that they had hoped, merely a copying aid. Everyone who was anyone wanted his
portrait on a daguerreotype, and the little plate was much cheaper than a painting.
Artists, nevertheless, used photographs as aids to their own painting, often
photographing a scene or a face to save time, and returned to the studio to
paint it. No one would call photography an "art," however. Many
artists declared that the upstart was vulgar and mechanical, and some would not
admit to using it at all. Photographers, on the other hand, more and more
argued that photography was an art. That debate raged well into the
twentieth century and indeed still sometimes greets photographers today. More
than once, when I was more actively entering photographs in juried art shows,
the rules would state "no photography."
Nevertheless, in
the next 30 years, painters either consciously or unconsciously were strongly
influenced in their use of lighting, in composition, in depiction of movement,
by photography. Photography brought the philosophy of art to crisis, which
ended with artists turning away from the centuries-old quest for realism--which
photographers had won--toward a new goal, to paint feelings, interpretations,
abstractions, and not necessarily what was there. Photography motivated the
beginnings of the twentieth century's non-representational and abstract art.
After Daguerre and
Arago announced the new process, a man in England became worried. His name, William Henry Fox Talbot, a
wealthy gent with much time for experimenting and, like Daguerre, an
accomplished artist. Talbot too was looking for a w ay to make permanent his
images in the camera obscura. He was aware that artists before, in the 1820s,
ha managed to make permanent an image, not on metal, but on paper. The problem,
though, was that the process was not very workable, and anyway, the image
produced was a negative. What use was that?
Talbot
experimented with the same paper process, trying to find a better way to make
the image permanent. His too was a negative image, but he had an idea no one
had thought of before, apparently. By putting the negative image against a
second sensitized sheet, and shining light through it, he could produce a
positive image. Talbot, therefore, invented the first negative/positive photo
process, unlike the daguerreotype, in which every image was on metal, and
unique.
When Daguerre announced
his process, Talbot was concerned that it was the same process as his. So he
quickly published an account of his own method. In succeeding months of 1839 it
became obvious that Talbot's process was totally different from Daguerre's.
Talbot dipped paper in salt, and when dry, in silver nitrate, forming a
light-sensitive chemical, silver chloride. He pointed the sensitized paper in a
camera obscura at an object, waited until the image turned dark enough to be
seen with the naked eye, about 30 minutes, then fixed the image with a strong
salt solution, or potassium iodide. In 1840 Sir John Herschel suggested that
hyposulfite of soda would more effectively fix the image, and remove the unused
silver particles, so that they wouldn't turn dark over time. Herschel is
credited with inventing the fixing method we basically still use today in our
"wet" darkrooms, called "hypo" for short.
Talbot soon
realized that he really wouldn't have to wait until the image was actually
visible, such a long exposure. With a shorter exposure, a hidden, or latent
image would be formed, which could then be brought out by developing in gallic
acid. So now we have a negative, development, fix, a process basically
unchanged until the invention of digital imaging. Talbot also waxed the paper,
making it more transparent, and called his process the "calotype,"
Greek for "beautiful picture."
Unlike Daguerre,
however, Talbot patented his process. He gave licenses to few. For a dozen
years the process hardly grew at all under the stranglehold of the patents. It
was not, however, patented in Scotland, allowing pioneer photographers David
Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in the 1840s to produced an important
collection of calotypes. W.F. Langenheim in the United States received a
license, the only calotype producer in the country.
Meanwhile in
France, witnessing the early 1839 announcement was an American, Samuel
F.B. Morse. Morse himself had been
dabbling in photography, and when he heard Daguerre's announcement he wrote
about it right away for his audiences in America. More returned to New York
City and taught the new process to several students, including Mathew Brady. In
1840 the world's first portrait studio was opened in New York City. We can
credit Morse for bringing photography to America--along with his famous
invention, the telegraph.
Daguerreotypes
stayed popular in America and
Europe for about a decade. Everyone had to have one. All the famous people had
to have their faced daguerreotypes. The calotype was not nearly as popular,
partly because of Talbot's controlling patents. But Talbot did contribute to
the history of photography the first photo-illustrated book, his Pencil of
Nature. In it he described his process, and illustrated it with actual
photos attached to the book, charming domestic scenes and descriptions. But his
calotypes were thought of as inferior to daguerreotypes, because they lacked
the fine details of the metal-plate-based process. True enough; a daguerreotype
is exquisitely detailed, even by modern standards. The calotype involved
printing through a paper negative and, inevitably, the grain of paper fibers
also were transferred to the image. This produced soft, almost luminous images.
Today we think they truly are beautiful, but given the 1840s emphasis on detail
and realism, they were fuzzy. So calotypes never caught on like daguerreotypes,
which were produced by the millions. In fact, today collections can obtain
daguerreotypes for a fairly reasonable price. Thousands still exist, in their small leather cases and behind class, to
protect the fragile surface.
However, just
about the time that Talbot finally decided to cede his patents to his calotype
method, technology moved to replace both it and the daguerreotype. The big
problem with the calotype was its loss of detail through the appear; if only an
emulsion could be spread on glass, this problem and the fragile calotype
negative could be eliminated. Many experimenters tried sticky things like
raspberry jam or honey to keep the silver nitrate suspended on a glass plate.
Nothing worked. Then in 1848, Niépce de St. victor, a cousin of Nicéphore,
tried albumen, or egg white. It worked all right on glass plates, but soon it
was left for another method which proved more sensitive to light. In 1851 Scott
Archer, British, combined guncotton, ether and alcohol into a solution called
collodion. The collodion was flowed onto a glass plate, dipped in silver
nitrate, and exposed in the camera. The beauty of this method was that it only
required a two to three second exposure, much faster than previous methods. The
drawback was that the wet plate process demanded that photographers make
exposures before the plate dried and lost its sensitivity to light, about one
minute. Photographers, therefore, had to carry portable darkrooms everywhere
they wanted to take a picture.
Nevertheless the
wet plate process rapidly became the new standard, totally eliminating the
daguerreotype by 1858. An era in photography--that of the unique, one of a kind
photograph--had ended. Glass negatives could produce as many prints as needed.
The albumen method invented by the Niépce cousin, however, was used extensively
for some 30 years for the paper on which the prints were made. In fact,
millions of egg whites were separated, their yokes sold to bakeries or hog
farms.
Wet plates made
possible extensive photography outside the studio, because of their superior
sensitivity, and despite their darkroom drawback. This is not to say that no
photography was done outside a studio before 1851. In 1842, Carl Stelzner made
a daguerreotype photo of the Hamburg fire--the first spot news photo. But the
wet-plate process was far superior for outdoor photography, and after 1851 we
find the first extensive use of photography to chronicle events and scenery. In
1855 Roger Fenton brought his camera to the Crimean War, the first war
photographer. A Chicago photographer named Alexander
Hesler is especially important to
people around here. In the 1850s he photographed Minnesota, including views of
St. Anthony Falls, Fort Snelling, and Minnehaha Falls. He was considered one of
the great Midwestern American photographers of the period.
Photographers
brought wet-plate darkrooms on their backs or pulled by mules to remote places
around the world, from the arctic to the hot dusty sands of Egypt. Considering
the fragile technology in those difficult conditions and climate extremes, it
is astounding what photographs they did get. And they were very good. Probably
the most famous of these early on-location photographers is
Mathew Brady. Brady was trained by
Morse in 1840, and soon opened his own studio in new York. Although ironically
and tragically troubled by weak eyesight--blind in his later years--Brady built
with partner Alexander Gardner an extremely successful portrait studio in New
York, and later in Washington D.C. Most of the famous statesmen for 30 years
were photographed by Brady or his staff, including every president from John
Quincy Adams to William McKinley.
Most important,
however, were the many portraits Brady made of Abraham Lincoln, beginning
before Abe became president. Brady became acquaintances with Lincoln, and when
the Civil War began (1861-65), he conceived of a new idea: to photograph the
war as a complete chronicle from beginning to end. Brady secured permission
from Lincoln in one letter reading "Pass Brady," but no money. At
that point he needed none. He had acquired $100,000 from his portrait business,
a fortune at the time. But by the end of the war Brady had spent it all, and owed
more. He financed 20 teams of photographers to cover al the major battle sites.
The technology of the time was not fast enough to photograph actual battles,
but his haunting photos of battle aftermath perhaps forever changed the picture
of war for ordinary civilians.
After the war
Brady tried to sell some of his war photos, but they didn't sell well. Most
people wanted to forget the war. He gave much of his collection to the U.S. War
Department which, in turn, paid some of his bills. Unfortunately the department
did not take careful care of the fragile collection, and much was lost. You can
still acquire Brady photos through the Library of Congress web site.
Other well-known
and important pioneer photographers include the Paris photographer Nadar, and
the British portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron. Nadar, whose real name was
Gaspard Felix Tounachon, set up shop in the mid-1850s and photographed the
Paris greats and scene until about 1880. He was well known for his sensitive
portraits. He also took the first aerial photos, from a balloon. Indeed, he
actually had his portable darkroom in the balloon's gondola, and developed as
the balloon swayed back and forth. Can you imagine!
Cameron is also
known for her portraits, especially those of famous people. She was an extremely
pushy lady--an early papparazzi?--who would usually not take no for an answer,
but her portraits show an unusual sensitivity to the character of the person
taken. Also significant at this time was the development of the so-called carte-de-visite,
around 1854. These were small photos of about three and one fourth by two and
one eighth inches which were collected and traded somewhat like sports cards
are today. It was the rage to have your family and a variety of famous people
in your carte-de-visite album.
In 1859 the
stereoscope was invented to view photographs. The idea was a bit like what we
might call the Viewmaster
toy today--two photographs taken at slightly different angles were mounted on a
card. The card was placed in the viewer, and like binoculars the two images
would blend together to make what appeared to be a three-dimensional image.
Stereo cards and
viewers waxed and waned in popularity throughout the Victorian age, and into
the twentieth century. Millions were made, some funny, some risqué, and in the
latter part of the century almost every home had its stereo viewer and
cards--almost like the slide programs of today. You can still find the cards
and viewers at a flea market for pretty cheap.
The 1870s marked
the big years in the United States for landscape photography in the west.
Falls, geysers, canyons, buffalo, Indians, all came under the eye of the
western photographers. Many of the best know had been part of Mathew Brady's
team, just as many of the cowboys had been in service for the Rebel cause. Tim
O'Sullivan is one of the best remembered of these photographers. But perhaps
the photographer who is most significant for changing the way people viewed the
world was Eadward Muybridge.
Muybridge was
British by nationality, but spent many years in the U.S. In 1872 he tried to
finally, once and for all, settle the famous old debate among artists and horse
riders: Is there a time when all four legs of a galloping horse are off the
ground? No one really knew, because no one could see that fast. Muybridge tried
to take action photos of horses, but the technology was not advanced enough to
stop the action. In 1878 he tried again. He painted or covered everything,
including the track, so it would be white, reflecting as much light as
possible, on a sunny day. He rigged up twelve cameras, each to trip its shutter
by a black thread broken by the horse.
The series was
successful. And they showed that, yes, a horse does have its legs off the
ground. They also showed that the way artists had drawn horses running, with
legs outstretched, hobby-horse style, was inaccurate. Horses didn't run that
way. In doing these "locomotion studies" of animals and people,
Muybridge changed the way artists viewed motion. It was fond that the camera
could see things that people could not, and it changed the way people viewed
reality.
The late 1870s was
seeing a third revolution in photography technology. From the daguerreotype and
calotype, to the wet plate, now chemists experimented with ways to avoid the
cumbersome web procedures, by finding a way to make dry plates. In 1871 gelatin
was substituted for collodion, and the first dry glass plate was made. It was
slower than a wet plate, however. But by 1880, dry plates became as fast as wet
plates, and the cumbersome wet plate died out.
As wet plate
technology was being superceded by dry plates, in popular taste other portrait
styles gained. Among people who had limited funds, a photograph printed on
emulsion placed on metal sold extensively--called a tintype. Tintypes were
extremely cheap, almost like a photo machine of today, and were made from the
1870s all the way into the 1930s. Also popular were cabinet cards, photos of a
size of about four inches by six inches. These are the photos we all probably
have in our shoeboxes, inherited from our grandparents--and probably a few
tintypes as well, taken by itinerant photographers.
Among the
manufacturers of dry plates was one by the name of George Eastman. Eastman did
a fair business selling them, but for him it wasn't enough. If only one could
make the dry emulsion on a flexible back using gelatin. Eastman finally
patented his solution, and introduced, in 1888, the first roll film. He
marketed the film in his own camera, called a Kodak, with the slogan, "You
push the button and we do the rest!" The camera came with 100 exposures,
and after you'd shoot them, you returned the entire thing to Eastman for
processing. The pictures that came back were circular. And the technology was
so good that, for the first time, you actually could make a decent photo
without a tripod.
Of course, this
meant that no anyone who could push a button and wind a crank could be a
photographer. It revolutionized the industry. For the first time any ole
amateur could take a photo of any old thing, and cheaply too. The
democratization of the image was complete, and what happened to Eastman's
company everybody knows.
TRACE THE PROBLEM OF PHOTOJOURNALIST IN THE EARLY
DAYS AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM.
(1)
At
some point most photojournalist take a picture that doesn’t come out exactly as
they expected, it’s either too dark or much lighter than they want it to be.
This might be because of a mistake with the metering, they’ve made an exposure
error or because the camera setting are wrong.
(2)
White
subject made grey: Camera metering system generally expect the brightness of a
scene to average out as a mudstone. It can be solved by the use of exposure
compensation control to increase the exposure above the value suggested by the
camera.
(3)
Camera
in the wrong exposure mode: This is a classic error that is a most likely to
happen. If your camera has a mode dial without a lock, These can be resolved by
getting into the habit of checking the mode before you start shooting.