History of Photography Overview

Summary

Highlights

• The inception of photography can be traced back to the camera obscura, a simple yet magical concept 🌍.
• Nigel Farage discovered asphalt's light sensitivity, crafting the earliest known photo in the 1820s 📸.
• Daguerre's innovation in 1839 made photography more widespread with the daguerreotype 📜.
• Fox Talbot's calotype process introduced the negative-positive method, revolutionizing image replication 🖨️.
• The mass production of photographs began with wet collodion and albumen prints, reshaping public consumption 🖼️.
• Kodak's introduction of affordable cameras democratized photography, placing cameras in every household 🏠.
• Digital photography, pioneered by the CCD sensor, revamped our image capturing and sharing methods 📱.

Key Takeaways

• Photography has revolutionized storytelling, enabling us to capture and remember our lives in vivid detail 🎥.
• The journey from camera obscura to digital cameras illustrates profound technological progress 💡.
• Key innovations like the daguerreotype and calotype have played crucial roles in making photography accessible 📷.
• Photography shifted from an exclusive art form to a universal necessity with the advent of Kodak cameras 👉.
• Digital photography has introduced new challenges in memory preservation with its ephemeral nature 🌐.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction to Photography The chapter "Introduction to Photography" explores the evolution of photography, emphasizing that it wasn't a single discovery but a series of developments. It highlights the complex history of photography, marked by significant milestones and advancements that have altered the way we perceive and understand the world.
• 01:30 - 03:30: Camera Obscura and Early Experiments The chapter discusses the concept and history of the camera obscura, an early optical device that led to the development of photography. The term 'camera obscura' translates to 'dark room,' highlighting its fundamental function as a darkened space where external light enters through a small hole or lens to project an image on the opposite wall. This principle laid the groundwork for future photographic innovations.
• 03:30 - 06:30: The Invention of Photography The chapter titled 'The Invention of Photography' begins by explaining a basic principle of photography. It describes a dark room with a small hole that lets in light from the outside, projecting an upside-down, turned around, but colorful and moving image on the opposite wall. This phenomenon has been known for thousands of years and is often the first experiment taught in photography classes.
• 06:30 - 11:00: Daguerrotype vs. Calotype The chapter titled 'Daguerrotype vs. Calotype' begins by explaining the simplicity and evolution of the camera. It notes how early improvements to the camera obscura included the addition of a lens to focus light for a brighter and clearer image. The chapter emphasizes that, for photography, the basic concept of the camera is that of a box. It hints at the ongoing exploration by early photography experimenters who were driven to capture images within this box framework, setting the stage for the invention of photography.
• 11:00 - 14:00: The Wet Plate Process The chapter titled 'The Wet Plate Process' delves into the evolution of photography through various experimental processes. Specifically, it mentions Johann Heinrich Schultz, a German professor, and his experiment involving a glass jar filled with chalk, nitric acid, and silver. This mixture is described as having a limited sensitivity to light. The setup includes a barrier surrounding the jar, and the process involves light interacting with a stencil. This reflects an early step in the development of photographic techniques.
• 14:00 - 18:00: The Rise of Photographic Culture Schultza's contribution to photography involved an experiment proving that the darkening of chalk inside a jar was the result of light exposure, not heat. This discovery marked a significant step in the evolution of photography. The initial impact of photographs on people was immense, as they provided 'mirrors with a memory' that accurately captured and recorded visuals akin to what the human eye perceives.
• 18:00 - 23:00: Pictorialism and Artistic Photography The chapter explores the impact of photography on societal perceptions of time, emphasizing how it allowed people to see their ancestors for the first time, even if they had passed away before their birth. The advent of photography is portrayed as a transformative force in ordinary people's lives. Additionally, the chapter mentions an early discovery in the field of photography by a man named Nicéphore Niépce, around 1814-1815, who worked with asphalt to advance photographic techniques.
• 23:00 - 31:00: The Gelatin Silver Process The chapter discusses the gelatin silver process, starting with a description of how an early photographic technique was sensitive to light. The process involved painting a solution onto a piece of glass, placing an engraving on a piece of paper on top, and exposing it to light. Where the light affected the asphalt, it hardened, allowing areas of the glass to be selectively removed with a solvent. This method was the precursor to photography as we know it today. The earliest known photograph using this technique, created by Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s, was on a piece of pewter and depicted a view from a window.
• 31:00 - 39:00: Color Photography Innovations The chapter entitled 'Color Photography Innovations' discusses the historical advancements in the field of color photography. It highlights the key figures involved in its development, such as Niepce and Louis Daguerre. It also focuses on Daguerre's background as a showman, known for running a 75-foot diorama, and his desire to create images using a camera obscura. Despite Niepce's financial difficulties, the chapter underscores the partnership between Niepce and Daguerre, leading to the pivotal 1839 announcement of the daguerreotype.
• 39:00 - 52:00: Digital Photography Emergence The chapter titled 'Digital Photography Emergence' explores the significant contributions and experiments leading to the advancement of photography technology, focusing on the development and perfection of daguerreotype by Louis Daguerre after the death of his partner, Joseph Niépce. The detailed process involved in creating daguerreotypes, such as polishing a copper plate coated with silver and fuming it with iodine, is described, indicating the technological progression during that period.

History of Photography Overview Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] the invention of photography was not one discovery that led to what we understand as photography today there are winners and losers in the evolution of photography it's so fascinating at every different point in its history the way that we familiarize ourselves with the world around us just fundamentally
• 00:30 - 01:00 changed with photography [Music] camera obscura means dark room it's all it is so it's a room with no light in it and if you have a
• 01:00 - 01:30 room with no light and you poke a little hole in the side of that room and you let light in from the outside by miracle you'll have an image projected upside down turned around but in color and moving on the other side of the wall it's a phenomenon that people have been aware of for thousands and thousands of years it's easy to do it's very often a the first project that is taught in photography classes just as a way to get people to
• 01:30 - 02:00 understand the simplicity of what the camera is later improvements of the camera obscura included putting a lens in the hole so that the light could be focused so that you would have a brighter and more focused image that would be projected on the wall but for photography the camera is essentially a box the early experimenters with photography all knew that they wanted to make images in that box the story of the invention of
• 02:00 - 02:30 photography builds on experiments after experiment johann heinrich schultza is a german professor and in the case of schultz's experiment what you have is a glass jar and it's filled with chalk there's some nitric acid and there's some silver it's sparingly sensitive to light so you have this jar with a barrier around the outside and when light goes through the stencil
• 02:30 - 03:00 it then darkens the chalk that is facing the glass on the inside of the jar this is where schultza contributes to the evolution of photography is that he's proving that this is done by light and not by heat i think it's impossible for us today to imagine what a revelation the first photographs would have been to people these mirrors with a memory to record things that looked just like what we saw
• 03:00 - 03:30 people's ideas of time changed completely for the first time you would know what your grandparents looked like even if they died before you were born to see this process make its place in the lives of ordinary people is to me the most exciting thing about it it changed everything in 1814 1815 you have a man named naysay fournier and what he discovered was that asphalt
• 03:30 - 04:00 was sensitive to light he paint the solution on a piece of glass and put an engraving on a piece of paper on top of that and where the light shined through and exposed that asphalt it hardened if you put that piece of glass with the asphalt into a solvent it will remove the areas that weren't hardened the earliest photograph we know is on a piece of pewter made by nacifornieps it's a view from a window it's from the 1820s and this image made
• 04:00 - 04:30 by asphalt still exists so that's that's the invention of photography niepz knows that he's onto something and he takes louis de garan as a partner dier was well known in paris in the 1820s you know well before the 1839 announcement of the daguerreotype he was a showman he ran this 75-foot diorama daguerre himself wants to make images he understands how a camera obscura works the apps didn't have the money he
• 04:30 - 05:00 didn't have the youth he didn't have the health he really kick-started daguerre when nyeps died daguerre continued his experiments on his own by 1839 daguerre has a system that is fully realized it's perfect it's a piece of copper coated with silver and you have to polish it very well to the point where you have a polish that when you turn the plate towards a darkened room it looks black and it's fumed with iodine and when you
• 05:00 - 05:30 take it out of the box it's yellow that's silver iodide plate is then put into a camera obscura or we would say camera now but a camera obscura given enough time it's exposed when you take it out of the camera in a darkened room there's nothing to see on the plate completely invisible same yellow coating but when you put it in another box with a little container of mercury and heat the mercury the fumes of the mercury dance upon the plate
• 05:30 - 06:00 and when you withdraw that from the box you have an image you still have to fix the image and fixing is a strange term it basically means that you're preventing the plate from changing anymore as light strikes the plate and you place it into a solution that fixes it something that we now all call hypo daguerreotype is placed into a special case it's designed to keep air away from the plane because air is what makes silver tarnish
• 06:00 - 06:30 daguerre would give the process to the government the government then would allow anyone in the world to do the daguerreotype except england and so if you wanted to make daguerreotypes in england you had to pay a fee [Music] this is the rudiger type camera would be the world's first commercially manufactured insole cameras it's the camera but it's also the system that goes with it that you need to process sensitize and process the image it's
• 06:30 - 07:00 essentially an american phenomenon it was the americans that embraced it that used it it was americans that were leaving home and striking out further and further west so that people could have something to think about and to reflect on and to remember people by daguerre is in france making images with silver iodide on metal plates and talbot is working in england making images with silver chloride on paper working simultaneously in two
• 07:00 - 07:30 different countries not quite knowing about the other but that changes when you start to have articles in the the press now it's public and so a rivalry begins william henry fox talbot is a gentleman scholar in england living in an old abbey in the village of laycock he was a member of the house of lords he was a wealthy individual who had many many
• 07:30 - 08:00 interests [Music] talbot is on his honeymoon in lake como in italy and he's trying to make drawings with a camera lucida he's trying to do pencil sketches and realize that he has no skill whatsoever in drawing he wants to make pictures within a camera obscura all he has to do is find the material that he can put into the back of the camera to to record the image finally when he returns home to laycock abbey he starts doing experiments and he is
• 08:00 - 08:30 able to produce a photographic image talbot is making images by using silver chloride in the production of making what he called photogenic drawings which are essentially just coating paper with salt coating paper with silver nitrate and place a fern or objects on top of the paper put a piece of glass on top of that and lay it in the sunlight it will darken up to that point it's not so much different than what wedgewood did but nieps and wedgwood could not figure
• 08:30 - 09:00 out a way to keep the drawings what talbot discovers is that if he takes that image and puts it into a stronger solution of salt water all the areas that were not exposed to light all the areas that didn't turn to metallic silver become less sensitive they are not removed completely but he can show them to people in the house you can see them by candlelight this is the type of camera that talbot
• 09:00 - 09:30 used in his earliest experiments with photogenic drawing many of them are still around and you can see them as long as you don't bring them out into too much light usually when you see them they're sort of under a piece of velvet so it feels like this intimate experience of looking at a photograph in its first days now photography's so ubiquitous that we probably don't think about how special and magical that experience was
• 09:30 - 10:00 talbot improves the photogenic drawing process by switching from silver chloride to silver iodide the same silver halide that daguerre uses in his process the latent image calotype process that he invents in 1840 allows him to make a little bit of an exposure and then he develops out the invisible image to a visible image using gallic acid and so now he can put this into a camera and actually do pictures of living human
• 10:00 - 10:30 beings he can then make photographic negatives and after those negatives are fixed with hypo he can then place those on top of a second sheet of sensitive paper expose that to light and now he makes a positive proof so he has negative and positive he essentially introduces the negative positive potential for photography that becomes the standard of photography until the
• 10:30 - 11:00 the invention of digital photography the rivalry between daguerre and talbot continues today there are champions of talbot and the champions of daguerre both camps feel that their man invented photography in fact it's all photography just a different type up until photography only the very wealthy who could afford to have portraits painted had any notion of what their ancestors looked like photography was used primarily for
• 11:00 - 11:30 portraits because people is what we are primarily interested in we see it as a very popular way to do what we've always wanted to do which is to record the features of people we love [Music] i'm going to show you a collodion negative on glass very carefully
• 11:30 - 12:00 this process was invented in 1851 by frederick scott archer in the 1850s you had the daguerreotype you had the kala type paper negative the daguerreotype was a commercial success the plate that they hand the customer is the same plate that was in the camera there's no negative what you got with the calotype was a negative and it was a negative that could be reproduced very easily you could print
• 12:00 - 12:30 dozens even hundreds of positive prints from that negative but it made a very soft photograph was much less sensitive than the daguerreotype you couldn't do portraits easily with that process the desire was to have the reproducibility of a positive negative process with the precision and detail of the daguerreotype but in 1851 frederick scott archer
• 12:30 - 13:00 invented a process called the wet collodion process the wet plate process can give you a negative to make paper prints it can give you a direct positive plate called an ambrotype and another direct positive plate called a tin type when you do the wet plate process you make a glass negative and that glass negative can then be contact printed onto various printing processes and make thousands and thousands of
• 13:00 - 13:30 prints [Music] by the time you get to the late 1850s really replaces the daguerreotype the positive negative process won out in part because it was more economically viable it does require some advanced planning when you're taking it on the road you have to have a portable dark room you pour the collodion on the plate you dip it in the silver bath and while it's dripping wet with silver nitrate you take the picture come back and
• 13:30 - 14:00 develop it and you have to do all of that before the plate dries and so the people that made landscape images they had to carry a wagon with all of their chemicals it was a challenge photography shaped the way we remember things it's a really important cultural change no longer through ballads and poems and stories but through looking at a likeness is the way we remember what happened and who was
• 14:00 - 14:30 this is when we see the rise of the great industrial photographic houses producing popular photographs of tourist sites even then we're beginning to think if you don't have a photograph of it you didn't really experience it it was the beginning of really aggressive mass marketing and mass production of photographs for general consumption and
• 14:30 - 15:00 this was the predominant printing paper from 1850 to about 1890. [Music] we begin to see how really as early as the 1870s and 80s the photograph becomes a really important not just conveyor of knowledge and information but a shaper of knowledge and information and it's the album and print that made that possible because it was precise it was detailed it was cheap and it
• 15:00 - 15:30 could be mass produced and distributed easily one of the major themes in photography is this desire to have a more permanent image you have the woodbury type you have the platinum print very stable very long lasting processes then you also have the pigment family of processes the gum bichromate process and the carbon print process pictorialists really established photography as a fine art form so they used things
• 15:30 - 16:00 like the gum bichromate process or platinum prints that involved a lot of hand work and craftsmanship so you really had a sense of the photographic object as something that was made by somebody alfred stieglitz is the person who is most associated with what was called the photo secession he and edward steichen actually co-founded the movement and they promoted this idea through
• 16:00 - 16:30 a publication called camera work stieglitz had a gallery called 291 in new york that showed photography as an art form this is a camera that was used by alfred stieglitz it was given to the museum by giorgio o'keefe in the 1950s the opening of that lens determines the sharpness of the picture if you open it up quite a ways you get an image that's kind of soft on the edges and he was interested in what we call pictorialist
• 16:30 - 17:00 photography and this is a lens that was designed to do that stieglitz and steichen and kaiser beer wanted people to take photography seriously as an art form not just an automatic activity that produced images without anybody's intervention i think what the argument was really about was where is the creative input of the artist in photography and that's a theme that goes back to the invention of the medium
• 17:00 - 17:30 with gelatin silver materials you start to get manufactured photographic paper manufactured film once it became sort of cheap and ubiquitous it changed our relationship to photography fundamentally everybody not only had been the subject of a photograph but had made photographs themselves [Music] in the middle of the 19th century nearly
• 17:30 - 18:00 all processes that involve the use of silver nitrate were made in a two-step process having a one-step process would be infinitely easier and so unlike say the wet collodion process where you pour collodion onto a plate and it has a bromide and then you take that plate and dip it into silver nitrate emulsion photography puts the bromide and the silver into the same solution it was a
• 18:00 - 18:30 combination of experiments done by several different people but for the most part it's an english invention gelatin emulsions are made by taking gelatin like the the jell-o that you buy in the store today and putting the gelatin into a container of water the gelatin is allowed to swell the swollen gelatin is melted you then pour in the bromide pour in the silver nitrate and stir the solution and so now you
• 18:30 - 19:00 have silver bromide in hot gelatin this is an emulsion now in the early 1880s most of the gelatin dry plates the glass plates were coated by pouring the hot gelatin onto a hot glass plate very much in the way that a collodion plate would be coated by hand once you have a dry plate now you don't have to take a dark room into the field you don't have to develop the plate before it dries you can take a package of plates and you
• 19:00 - 19:30 can go on a trip expose the plates and then weeks later come back to the comfort of your own dark room and develop the plate and that's an important discovery the same emulsion was applied to paper these are examples of gelatin silver prints the gelatin silver print was first introduced in the late 1800s gelatin silver print is a developing out process rather than a printing out process
• 19:30 - 20:00 printing out is when light strikes an object and you actually see it visibly change developing out on the other hand is a latent image and what that means is that you just need a little bit of light exposing this material but you don't see a visible change until you put that material into another chemical which brings out the invisible image you would start with a much smaller negative than with a contact printing method
• 20:00 - 20:30 so at the beginning of photography a negative has to be the same size as the print you want to make it and that's because they're contact printed the negative is actually touching the paper that's becoming the final print as photography progresses we become able to enlarge a negative you can put it in an enlarger and make a bigger print it's no longer contact printed in 1888 george eastman came out with the kodak camera you no longer had to be a professional
• 20:30 - 21:00 and know the chemistry you could actually do it yourself it sounds really simple you know well just send it to us you know you press the button we do the rest and suddenly you know it invents an entire new industry this is the oldest known kodak camera it's called the kodak it's a serial number six meaning it was the sixth one made after all 100 exposures have been made the camera will be shipped back to rochester
• 21:00 - 21:30 for processing and reloading shutter release is on the side still works not bad for a camera made in 1888 because the camera was smaller and easy to carry now people took their cameras everywhere it opened up a field of photography for the general public for anyone to capture all the different moments of their life [Music] basic aesthetic of a gelatin silver print is
• 21:30 - 22:00 a smooth surface because the gelatin sits on top of the paper and the gelatin is what holds the image material in it as opposed to say the salted paper print where the image material was sinking into the fibers of the paper [Music] the gelatin silver process was the dominant photographic process of the 20th century the vast majority of the analog photographs that we are familiar with were made with this process the clarity and sharpness of the black and white gelatin silver print became
• 22:00 - 22:30 the norm for photojournalism it was the standard way that information from far away was produced and sent to be published in newspapers and magazines the process became forever linked with the documentary style of photography that was established by photographers like lewis hein and fsa photographers such as dorothea lang and walker evans silver gelatin allows you to make black and white images it is responsible for all the movies you've ever seen that that's all silver gelatin when george
• 22:30 - 23:00 eastman came out with the kodak they started making flexible transparent film about 1889 once you have a flexible medium motion pictures becomes possible gelatin silver is also responsible for color photography during development the silver releases die and during fixing you get rid of the silver but the dyes remain but all of the color photographs you've ever made everything in the 20th century that was
• 23:00 - 23:30 color had silver and had gelatin in that emulsion and that's really what's becoming obsolete by the digital process the shift from analog to digital photography has been going on a long time 2004 was the high watermark year for film production after 2004 you really start to see the the sales of digital cameras taking over over film cameras i teach public workshops in photographic processes here at george
• 23:30 - 24:00 eastman house and we've just recently declared that silver gelatin emulsion is a historic process so now we're teaching people how to make dry plates and their own photographic paper from scratch when color photography comes out people think of it as being very artificial at first serious sincere sort of authentic images were in black and white after world war ii film for making color prints became available people's associations
• 24:00 - 24:30 with photography began to transform into color [Music] all silver based photographic processes started out as blue sensitive blue and white photographed as the same value so when you look at 19th century landscape photographs and you wonder why didn't they have any clouds in those days it's because the white of the sky and the blue of the sky photograph as
• 24:30 - 25:00 the same value in order to have color film you must have black and white film that will record all colors the sensitizing of emulsions was done by actually adding dyes to the liquid emulsion so it's called dye sensitizing frederic ives was instrumental in understanding that black and white film had to be dye sensitized in order to get a record from which you could make color images
• 25:00 - 25:30 it's really complicated chromogenic color photography was was invented in the 1930s and the the process that really ushered in this this entire movement of color was the kodachrome process really begins with the work of manz and godowski at the kodak research labs chromogenic color prints are are made with a gelatin emulsion it's based on silver and there are many layers when
• 25:30 - 26:00 the film or the paper is being developed each layer releases the dye that it needs on the cyan the yellow or magenta layer during the processing the silver is actually removed leaving only the color behind and so you end up with a full color picture that was made with light going into the paper or onto the film simultaneously it is rocket science and so the
• 26:00 - 26:30 the chromogenic color process becomes predominant process used throughout the 20th century and it's still being used today but those wheels are starting to slow down once chromogenic color is gone we will never ever ever see it happen again because it requires an incredible infrastructure once it's gone it's gone the technology has been shifting constantly since 1839 and we can only expect that
• 26:30 - 27:00 it will continue to shift everyone's photographer now everyone carries a camera in their purse or pocket we make photographs in a different way from the way we used to but we make them for the same reasons i mean i would argue that a a 19th century victorian family album has exactly the same purpose as the 200 pictures of your kid that you carry on your phone
• 27:00 - 27:30 [Music] i was working in the apparatus division research laboratories my supervisor came to me one day and said look at a new type of imager that had just become
• 27:30 - 28:00 available called charge couple device imager and that was the fairchild device was called the ccd 201 i thought if i could build it some sort of device that would capture an image well let's call the camera [Music] i called it my baby because it made me cry a lot i always say that what i was dealing with was something that could convert a light pattern to a charge pattern but i had to get that charge pattern off of the device really quickly and store it somewhere so i was going to try to make a digital conversion device and then store it
• 28:00 - 28:30 in ram and so i said i needed a form of permanent storage that didn't require battery that was easy actually because magnetic tape on cassettes were being used for all kinds of reasons at the early days of computers they were storing digital information people always talk about building the camera well half this effort probably more than half the effort was building the playback unit make it suitable for a television signal because that was the only way to electronically look at an image this was all digital right from the output of that ccd all
• 28:30 - 29:00 the way through to right to the output to the tv set that was digital everywhere in between i'll give you kind of a timeline of digital photography we got steve sasson in 1975 building the first truly digital camera a 1986 eastman kodak company comes out with a megapixel sensor uh 1987-88 jim mcgarvey builds tactical camera which evolves into the 1991 kodak dcs came in a rather hefty suitcase that contained the camera and the
• 29:00 - 29:30 and the storage device the next year they're able to actually combine all of those parts into one smaller body the dcs-200 in 1994 the apple quick take 100 is the consumer camera the first megapixel consumer camera is the kodak dc210 1999. it's a very short timeline here when you get into it maybe 20 years or so and of course now everybody has either a smartphone or a tablet with a camera built in first digital camera ever saw you had to load a floppy disk in and i was just my
• 29:30 - 30:00 mind was blown when i saw that i was like i was like how does you know what is this you could put you know a picture on a computer now there's generations of kids now that are alive that'll never know you know what film is like and what you know leaping through a shoebox full of you know four by sixes from moto photo you know things like that it's just that that's gone that's tall the man who invented the negative digital made the negative obsolete and this is the way we see images it can be deleted by accident it's not a physical thing we used to
• 30:00 - 30:30 have the possibility that you might run across a photograph of your grandmother when she was 18 years old in the back of a drawer that nobody remembered or knew about and suddenly you've got this picture that can be found later and interpreted and when you have a digital image what is the thing that you have you have code or something rarely do people print out their photographs anymore when we're seeing things sort of
• 30:30 - 31:00 ephemerally on a screen it becomes very much like everything else we see on a screen our relationship to memory with regard to the photographic image is changing and it'll be really interesting to see where that goes it's surprising to most people when when i tell them i love digital i mean i i just love the technology of digital and and they'll look at me and think it's heresy but artists have come to a point where many of them are saying i feel like the machine is in control
• 31:00 - 31:30 and i want to have my hands in this object when the finished product is something other than a computer screen it harkens back to the day when when photography was a craft it's not just about the image although the image is king it's about the object itself and you made that object
• 31:30 - 32:00 [Music] you