23. A History of Photography
How the technology progressed:
⦁ Photography was made possible by the combination of different technologies: a camera obscura, light-sensitive chemicals, and film.
⦁ A camera obscura is a darkened room, or box, with light only coming in through one tiny pinhole on one side. When light enters the pinhole, it creates a faint, reverse, upside-down image of whatever’s happening outside. This image can be seen inside the box on the opposite wall:
⦁ The physics that allows this depends on how light reflects off of surfaces. Light bounces off of almost everything. With the camera obscura, the pinhole is so small that just one ray of light bounces off an object in the right direction to go through the hole, so it goes automatically to its corresponding mirror position on the opposing wall. When each ray of light is limited like this, it cuts out all the noise (extra light) that would otherwise hide the image. Every camera ever made is a miniature camera obscura:
It’s worth noting, your eyes also work as a camera obscura, as do all eyes in the animal kingdom. The irises in your eyes control the size, or aperture, of the hole – a larger hole lets in more light, but creates a fuzzier image. This is necessary when it’s dark out, and explains why your vision is blurrier at night. The retina serves as the inner wall with the reverse image, which your brain then flips again, to make it right-side up. This is why we say that you see, not simply with your eyes, but your mind.
⦁ The phenomenon of the camera obscura was first discovered and used in ancient China, from 1000-770 BC, where it was used to measure the position and intensity of sunlight. Aristotle also discussed questions regarding this discovery in the 4th century BC.
⦁ Scientists started seriously experimenting with photography around 1800. One of the first was Thomas Wedgewood, who used silver nitrate on white paper to create an image. Unfortunately, he found the result was only temporary. The picture continued to react to light after the picture was taken, so the whole sheet soon turned black.
⦁ Nicéphore Niépce, in France, was able to etch a photo on a glass window with bitumen in 1822. Unfortunately, the process took many hours or even days, so the resulting picture was very blurry, and there was no way to reproduce it.
⦁ Niépce died in 1833, but he had been working with Louis Daguerre who then developed a superior process involving exposure, development, and fixing on a polished silver plate. He called the resulting photograph a Daguerreotype and made it public in 1839. This was the first practical, popular photographic process, and it quickly caught on around the world, as people bought licenses to set up their own photo studios. A process was also developed to transfer Daguerreotypes to paper via lithography, for printing books and newspapers.
⦁ Daguerreotypes were still not ideal. They usually produced a mirror image, opposite to reality. While the quality of these photos was excellent, lithographic reproductions were not. Meanwhile, it still took around 40 minutes of exposure time. If you wanted a good portrait, you’d have to sit perfectly still the whole time.
⦁ Luckily, a British inventor named William Fox Talbot had already created a better process back in 1834. He’d kept his work secret until reading about Daguerre, and then feared his method would be ignored. Talbot’s process was superior because it dropped the exposure time to a split-second, and created a negative-positive process on paper. This meant, with one negative, you could make an endless number of positive copies.
⦁ Funny enough, Talbot’s superior process wasn’t popular at first. People preferred Daguerreotypes for the simple reason that he never patented it, so anyone could use it for free. Talbot held his patent till 1853 after which it eventually replaced Daguerreotypes, becoming the dominant photographic process up until digitization in the 1980’s.
⦁ There were other chemists who improved Talbot’s process. Frederick Scott Archer developed a wet collodian plate process in 1851. This was improved with the dry gelatin process around 1870.
⦁ James Maxwell created the first colour photograph in 1855. It was actually a composite of three monochrome photos, with filters for green, red, and blue. These photos were then printed one after the other on the same piece of paper.
⦁ Hermann Vogell found ways to improve the sensitivity of the paper to different colours, such as red and yellow, to improve the colours in the final image.
⦁ All these methods involved using a glass plate for the negative. George Eastman created the first flexible film roll in 1885, although it was highly flammable. Kodak introduced the safer cellulose acetate film in 1908.
⦁ The Lumiere brothers in France developed the first practical, and commercially successful colour photo process, called Autochrome in 1907.
⦁ This was further improved by the Kodachrome process in 1935 which was a 3-layer film roll, each layer sensitive to different colours.
⦁ The most popular size for film rolls was 35mm, although some cameras were built for “medium format” 62mm film, and some special large-format cameras held individual “sheet film” that was much larger.
⦁ Polaroid developed a process of instant colour film in 1963 which required no processing.
⦁ Sony produced and sold the first digital camera in 1981, the Sony Mavica. Photos were stored on a floppy disk, which could hold 50 pictures at a resolution of 570 x 490 pixels. The same technology was also used for digital video cameras. Due to the high price, these didn’t become widely available or popular with the public until around 1998.
⦁ Digital photography has made the process of taking and storing photos incredibly cheap. It’s estimated that people take over a trillion photos a year now (starting around 2017), especially now that the technology has been placed into smart phones.
Parts, terms, and functions of a camera:
Cameras have a lot of the same parts as a human eye. Instead of an iris they have a shutter, which remains closed until you want to take a shot. You can control the shutter speed and aperture. A fast shutter speed allows for a clear, crisp photo, even if your subject is moving quickly. This allows us to capture photos of speeding bullets, explosions, and other phenomena that happen faster than our human eyes can see. But, the faster the shutter speed, the less light gets into the camera and the darker it gets. You can fix this by enlarging the aperture, or size of the hole. But then, you narrow the depth of field – basically, the larger the aperture, the harder it is to keep everything in focus. The background will be blurrier. Cameras have all kinds of functions and filters, meant to better control the colours, contrast, and balance of your photos.
The Flash – helps you increase the amount of light needed to see a subject, in dark places. It also provides new compositional and aesthetic possibilities.
Red-Eye-Reduction – is another flash that goes off right before the camera takes a shot. It shrinks the pupils in the eyes of people in your photos, so they don’t look like demons.
The Lens – an SLR camera allows you to change lenses, with different abilities to zoom and widen or narrow the frame. Telephoto lenses can see details from very far away, while fish-eye lenses can take in a very wide frame of view.
How did photography change art? Did it change the purpose of painting?
The development of photography created a debate on the nature and meaning of art. Photography was not originally seen as art, although some early practitioners had been educated as artists and painters.
The idea that a machine could produce art independent of man was counter to art’s definition as original, personal expression. Instead, photography was viewed as a science, an opinion that still carries weight today. Many scientists continue to use photographs to document the processes and results of their experiments. If a photo was a product of science, then it was the antithesis of art. Art was everything that a photo was not. You can see how this attitude led to the swift demise of Realist painting. Impressionism was the perfect response to photography. It could claim superiority for its use of colour and dismissal of detailed rendering, even as it borrowed compositional ideas from photos – cropping figures and objects, showing only small bits of larger buildings, etc. Art’s further progression towards abstraction in the 20th century can be seen as a direct response to photography. I even remember an art professor at the University of Pennsylvania asking me, “What’s the point of copying a photo, if the camera can do it just as well, and faster?” So, the changing nature, goals, and definitions of art can all be seen as a quest to remain relevant as photography began to supplant many of art’s original goals: to document history, to create accurate portraits, to tell the news and illustrate stories, etc.
Pictorialism (1880-1920)
This negative attitude toward art photography was an obstacle for those few artists brave enough to try it. So, their first instinct was to try to make photos that didn’t look like photos. They intentionally blurred their images, softening them just enough to more closely resemble Impressionist drawing and painting. Art historians then bunched these photographer-artists together under the label Pictorialists.
Straight Photography (1920-the present)
Also called Pure photography, this was a reaction against Pictorialism. Instead of intentionally blurring, these photographers tried to focus as clearly as possible, to fill their works with detail. Basically, they were photographers and proud of it. They weren’t going to try to imitate any other art form. The most famous of these ‘Straight’ photographers were Ansel Adams, Alfred Steiglitz, and Edward Weston.
Conceptual photography (1960-the present)
Some conceptual artists use photography to document or illustrate their work. The photographs aren’t the art – the idea or concept is. The photo is more like a journalistic documentation of the idea. This was popular with artists who didn’t like the idea of making art objects for money, but who wanted to help educate viewers by introducing philosophical ideas.
Objectivity versus Subjectivity, Art versus Journalism
Part of the debate over whether photography is art has to do with the idea of it being honest and unbiased. When a camera takes a photo it makes no judgements as to what matters and what doesn’t. It doesn’t know what it’s looking at, it doesn’t care what it’s looking at. Whether or not the resulting image looks good has as much to do with luck as the skill of the photographer – who is lucky to be in the right place at the right time. That’s what we assume about any photograph we see, because it looks honest, it looks untouched, and it looks so damned accurate, it has to be the truth, right?
Well, not really. Photos have been doctored since the technology began. Photo manipulation has only gotten better and more sophisticated with time, especially with the advent of computers and Photoshop. Every tool in Photoshop is based on a real-world tool originally used in dark rooms. But, even before a photo is doctored, it’s still subjective to a degree, because the photographer chooses what to take a picture of, from what angle to look, what to include and exclude, what to focus on and what not to. Photos copy reality, but not all of it, only what the person behind the camera cares about, or is capable of experiencing.
This idea of crafting a photo, of imbuing it with meaning and making it special through the careful application of dark room techniques and manipulation has been the standard argument for labelling a photo a work of art, and demanding high prices, for the last century. Under this definition, a photo is only an artwork if the photographer produces the image herself in a dark room, using the highest level of quality techniques and tricks to get it exactly how she wants, and then giving it her stamp of approval by signing it. So, taking the photo isn’t enough. You can’t just send it off to a lab.
Photography & Ethics
When you paint a picture, you immediately have the opportunity to change what you see, to make it more ideal, less ideal, more or less realistic, to capture a likeness or to ignore the likeness, and on and on. Photos don’t do that, at least not automatically. They copy reality in precise detail. This raises ethical issues, especially when the subject is a person. As the philosopher Susan Sontag wrote in her essay, On Photography, a photo may “. . . presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that . . . can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” So, before taking a photo, and before making it public, you should consider if others want their picture taken, whether you’re invading their privacy, whether it could hurt their reputations, careers, or family lives, etc, or whether you’re simply trying to profit off of someone else’s misery.
Another issue has to do with desensitization. When people get used to violent, graphic, or otherwise disturbing imagery, there is a fear it could change them, making them less caring, more indifferent, and it could change their expectations. On a societal level this can all lead to a crisis in depression, crime, and so on.
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