What are the origins of photography?
Photography has grown in popularity as it can capture human feeling and emotions, almost like no other medium. But where did it all start?
The origins of the first-ever camera can be dated back to the year 945 when an Arab scholar, Ibn Al-Haytham, created the 'camera obscura'. It was the first time a lens had been attached to a box-like structure to capture the light. However, he was unable to capture the image seen as there was no film to obtain it.
It would take another nine hundred years before images captured on paper became possible. Louis Daguerre, a French painter and physicist, invented the process in 1826. The first photograph took eight hours of exposure, and the quality of the image was quite poor. Louis would refine the 'daguerreotype' process over the next few decades. The updated 'heliographic' process he developed with collaboration with Nicéphore Niépce reduced the processing time to half an hour. The process would involve exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera which could capture the latent image on a plate developed by exposure to mercury fumes which were made permanent by solution in salt.
By the end of 1839, the 'daguerreotype' process would spread rapidly across Europe and North America. Travellers were beginning to capture famous monuments in Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Spain. A downside to using the lengthy exposures meant that moving objects were not capturable, and thus portraiture would be impossible.
The earliest known photography studio belonged to Alexander Wolcott in 1840. The 'Daguerrean Parlor' allowed individuals to have tiny portraits taken of themselves. In the meantime, work continued improving the capturing process. József Petzval working alongside Friedrich Voigtländer in Vienna, Austria would create an achromatic lens (removing the colours of light separated during the capture process). Voigtländer would make strides in making photography more practical. He reduced the size of the wooden box to a more easily transportable size.
By purchasing the rights to the American mirror camera and later Daguerre's, Beard employed John Frederick Goddard to accelerate the exposure process. Goddard would be successful in using silver iodide with bromine vapours to reduce the exposure time between one to three minutes. The first European studio would open soon after in London on March 23, 1841.
The ever-improving process would accelerate the growth of photography across the United States in the 1840s. By 1850 'Daguerrean artists' to be found in most towns and New York City there were already 77 known galleries. San Francisco's growth was meticulously captured and published in 1855.
The photographic movement was beginning to increase, and many different genres of photography have emerged since the early 1800s. The main styles are:
Monochrome
Pictorialism
Straight photography
Portraiture
Landscape
Street Photography
Colour
Nude
Still Life
Self-Portraiture
Abstraction
Avant-Garde
War
Propaganda
Ethnography
Photojournalism
Documentary
Humanism
Science
Art
Glamour
Pop
Society
Topography
Fashion
Advertising
Paparazzi
Conceptual
Staged
Performance
Contemporary Art
The Selfie
We will be coming back to look at each of these styles of photography over the next few months in more detail.