THE
NAME: We owe the name “Photography”
to Sir John Herschel, who first used the term in 1939,
the year the photographic process became public. The
word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
Prior to the stages that led to the development that
led to the development of Photography, there was a strange
prediction a man called de la Roche (1729-1774) made
in a work called “Giphantie”. In this imaginary
story, it was possible to capture images from nature,
on a canvas, which was coated with sticky substance.
This surface according to the story, would only provide
a mirror image
on the sticky canvas, which never the less would remain
on it. After the image has been allowed to dry in the
dark the image would remain permanent. The author never
knew his prediction which was just an imaginary tale
at that time would actually come through just few decades
after his death.
WHAT MAKES PHOTOGRAPHY POSSIBLE: Photography is made
up of two scientific processes which are:- Ø
The first was Optical
Ø The second was Chemical
THE OPTICAL PROCESS: The Camera
Obscura also known as the dark room had been existing
for close to four hundred years. There is a drawing,
dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci;
about this same period its use as an aid to drawing
was being advocated.
THE CHEMICAL PROCESS: The second
process was chemical. Centuries before photography
was invented, people had been aware, for example,
that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they
had made little distinction between heat, air and
light.
Ø Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the
Royal Society reported that silver chloride turned
dark under exposure, but he appeared to believe that
it was coursed by exposure to the air rather than
exposure to light.
Angelo Sala, in the early seventh century, noticed
that powdered nitrate of silver is blackened by the
sun.
In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that
certain liquids change colour when exposed to light.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Thomas
Wedgwood was conducting experiment; he had successfully
captured images, but his silhouettes could not survive,
as there was no known method of making the image permanent.
The first successful picture was produced in June/July
1827 Niépce, using material that hardened on
exposure to light. This picture required an exposure
of eight hours.
On 4 January 1829 Niépce agreed to go into
partnership with Louis Daguerre. Niépce died
only four years later, but Daguerre continued to experiment.
Soon he had discovered a way of developing photographic
plates, a process which greatly reduced the exposure
time from eight hours to half an hour. He also discovered
that an image could be made permanent by immersing
it in salt.
Following a report on this invention Paul Delaroche,
a leading scholar of the French government bought
the rights to it in July 1839. Details of the process
were made public on 19 August 1839, and Daguerre named
it the Daguerreotype.
The announcement that the Daguerreotype “requires
no knowledge of drawing” and that
“anyone may succeed and perform as well as the
author of the invention” was greeted with enormous
interest, and Daguerreomania” became a craze
overnight. A writer called Gaudin, who was present
the day that the announcement was made gives an interesting
account of these days.
However, not all people welcomed this invention; some
pundits viewed in quite sinister terms. A newspaper
report in the Leipzig City Advertiser stated:
“The wish to capture evanescent reflections
is not only impossible desire alone, the will to do
so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own image,
and no man made machine may fix the image of God.
Is it possible that God should have abandoned His
eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman…
to give to the world an invention of the Devil?
At that time some artists saw in photography a threat
to their livelihood and some even prophesied that
painting would cease to exist.
The Daguerreotype process, though good, was expensive,
and each picture was a once only affair. That, to
many, would not have been regarded as a disadvantage;
it meant that the owner of the portrait could be certain
that he had a piece of art that could not be duplicated.
If however two copies were required, the only way
of coping with this was to use two cameras side by
side. There was, therefore, a growing need for a means
of coping pictures, which daguerreotypes could never
satisfy.
Different, and in a sense a rival to Daguerreotype,
was calotype invented by William Henry Fox Talbot,
which was to provide the answer to that problem. His
paper to the Royal Society of London, dated 31 January
1839, actually precedes the paper by Daguerre; it
was entitled “some account of the Art of Photogenic
drawing, or the process by which natural objects may
be made to delineate themselves without the aid of
artist’s pencil” He wrote:
"How charming it would be if it were possible
to cause these natural images to imprint themselves
durably and remain fixed on the paper!"
The earliest paper negative we know of was produced
in August 1835; it depicts the now famous window at
Lacock Abbey, his home. The negative is small (1 ‘‘square),
and poor in quality, compared with the striking images
produced by the Daguerreotypes process. By 1840, however,
Talbot had made some significant improvements, and
by 1844 he was able to bring out a photographically
illustrated book entitled “The pencil of nature”.
Compared with Daguerreotypes the quality of early
Calotypes was somewhat inferior. However, the great
advantage of Talbot’s method was that an unlimited
number of positive prints could be made. Infact, today’s
photography is based on the same principle, whereas
by comparison the Daguerreotype, for all its quality,
was a blind alley.
The mushrooming of photographic establishments reflects
photography’s growing popularity; from a mere
handful in the mid 1840s the number had grown to 66
in 1855, and to 147 two years later. In London, a
favourite venue was Regent Street where, in the peek
of the mid-sixties there were no less than forty-two
photographic establishments! In America the growth
was just as dramatic; in 1850 there were 77 galleries
in New York alone. The demand for photographs was
such that Charles Baudelaire (1826-1867), a well known
poet of the period and a critic of the medium, commented:
"Our squalid society has rushed, Narcissus to
a man, to gloat at its trivial image on a scrap of
metal."
Talbot’s photography was on paper, and inevitably
the imperfections of the paper were printed alongside
with the image, when a positive was made. Several
experimented with glass as a basic for negatives,
but the problem was the silver solution stick to the
shinny surface of the glass. In 1848 a cousin of Nicephore
Niépce, Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor,
perfected a process of coating a glass plate with
white eggs sensitised with potassium iodide, and washed
with an acid solution of silver nitrate. This new
(albumen) process made for very fine detail and made
for very fine detail and much higher quality. However,
it was very slow, hence the fact that photographs
produced on this substance were architecture and landscape;
portraiture was simply not possible.
Progress in this new art was slow in England, Compared
with other countries. Both Dauguerre and Fox Talbot
were partly responsible, the former for having rather
slyly placed a placed patent on his invention whilst
the French government had made it freely available
to the world, the latter for his law-suits in connection
with his patents. In 1851 a new era in photography
was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer, who introduced
the Collodion rocess. This process was much faster
than conventional methods, reducing exposure times
to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons
in photography.
Prices for daguerreotypes varied, but in general would
cost about a guinea (£1.05), which would be
the weekly wage for many workers. The collodion process,
however, was much cheaper; prints could be made for
as little as one shilling (5p).
A further impetus was given to photography for the
masses by the introduction of Carte de visite photographs
by Andre Disdéri, This developed into a mania,
though it was relatively short-lived.
The collodion process required that the coating, exposure
and development of the image should be done whilst
the plate was still wet. Another process developed
by Archer was named the Ambrotype, which was a direct
positive.
The wet collodion process, though in its time a great
step forward, required a considerable amount of equipment
on location. There were various attempts to preserve
exposed plates in wet collodion, for development at
a more convenient time and place, but these preservatives
lessened the sensitivity of the material. It was clear,
then, that a dry method was required. It is likely
that the difficulties of the process hastened the
search for instantaneous photography. Skaife, in a
pamphlet, aptly commented (1860):
"Speaking in general, instantaneous photography
is as elastic a term as the expression 'long and short.'"
The next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr.
Richard Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin (which
had been discovered only a few years before) instead
of glass as a basis for the photographic plate. This
led to the development of the dry plate process. Dry
plates could be developed much more quickly than with
any previous technique. Initially it was very insensitive
compared with existing processes, but it was refined
to the extent that the idea of factory-made photographic
material was now becoming possible.
The introduction of the dry-plate process marked a
turning point. No longer did one need the cumbersome
wet-plates, no longer was a darkroom tent needed.
One was very near the day that pictures could be taken
without the photographer needing any specialised knowledge.
Celluloid had been invented in the early eighteen-sixties,
and John Carbutt persuaded a manufacturer to produce
very thin celluloid as a backing for sensitive material.
George Eastman is particularly remembered for introducing
flexible film in 1884. Four years later he introduced
the box camera, and photography could now reach a
much greater number of people.
Other names of significance include, Herman Vogel,
who developed a means whereby film could become sensitive
to green light, and Eadweard Muybridge who paved the
way for motion picture photography.
Popular in the Victorian times was , which reproduced
images in three dimensions. It is a process whose
popularity waxed and waned - as it does now - reaching
its heights in the mid-Victorian era.
(*1) Well, actually, not quite. Whilst Herschel
used the term first in a lecture before the Royal
Society on March 14, 1839, he was in fact beaten
to the post by an anonymous writer with the initials
"J.M." a few weeks earlier, on February
25. Eventually a scholar was able to determine that
this anonymous writer was in fact Johann von Maedler
(1794-1874), who was an astronomer in Berlin. However,
Hershel was undoubtedly the person who, with his
fame and position, made the word "photography"
known to the world.
Called from the works of Robert Leggat
© Robert Leggat, 2000
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