Photography History: Origins, Inventions and Techniques PDF

Okay, here's the conversion of the document into a structured Markdown format: ### PART ONE # Photography's Double Invention **Chapter One** The Origins of Photography (to 1839) **Chapter Two** The Second Invention of Photography (1839-1854) *Philosophy and Practice* *A Threat to Art?* Photogr...

Okay, here's the conversion of the document into a structured Markdown format: ### PART ONE # Photography's Double Invention **Chapter One** The Origins of Photography (to 1839) **Chapter Two** The Second Invention of Photography (1839-1854) *Philosophy and Practice* *A Threat to Art?* Photography was invented twice. First from the turn of the eighteenth century to 1839 and then again in the decades after it's disclosure, when it would be ceaselessly reinvented by social uses to which it was put and the cultural dialogue surrounding it. The invention of photography or photographies did not depend directly on the impetus of a particular visual tradition, or even on a demonstrable social need. Instead, the climate of congenial attitudes toward material progress, encouraged its conception. Around 1800, Western European countries began to define government's role as fostering economic development through the expansion of industry and commerce. Social progress was understood to flow from the freedom of individuals seeking to solve scientific problems that would lead to practical applications. Those with the most to gain include the educated classes, as well as entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and enlightened landlords - people making up a growing middle class whose status was based on their achievements and earnings. The primary elements of the photographic process began to come together and were experimented with when practical, commercially feasible applications of scientific experiments were encouraged by national policy and cultural values. Independent entrepreneurs and business people started to believe that investments in research might be rewarded. Much of the history of early experiments in photography shows cultural attitudes prompting resourceful individuals to resolve practical problems and technical puzzles. In 1839, when the medium was disclosed, the industrializing world eagerly began to explore how it might be applied to portraiture, record-keeping, political persuasion, academic investigation, and travel accounts. the photographic subjects and applications began a swift proliferation that constituted a second invention, based partially on the inclinations of individual photographers, but also on the needs of society. The market for portraits expanded, historical events began to be photographed, science and social science took up the medium, and artists used the camera for personal expression and aesthetic exploration. *** ### CHAPTER ONE # The Origins of Photography (to 1839) Since ancient times, devices have been used to aid the eye and hand in reproducing the appearance of optical reality. Eventually, photography was invented by individuals working independently from each other, in a relatively short period during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Their inventions sparked other discoveries, and created a broad social discourse about the meaning of the new medium. Photography was presented to the world on August 19, 1839, at a joint meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. Claiming a sore throat, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), the specified inventor, did not make the initial presentation. He left the demonstration and technical discussion to François Arago (1786-1853). For his accomplishment, Daguerre was awarded a lifelong pension from the French government. The only requirement placed upon him was that he fully reveal his method. **Historique et description du procédé du Daguerréotype et due Diorama (History and Description of the Process of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama) (1839)**. The test was translated into many languages and published around the world. Tradition still casts Daguerre as the originator of photography, a consensus initiated by François Arago almost two centuries ago. Yet the history of the development of photography is a more complicated tale, involving partial successes, missed opportunities, good fortune, and false starts. The basic ingredients of photography-a light-tight box, lenses, and light-sensitive substances-had been known for hundreds of years before they were combined. Indeed, all but the light-sensitive material was present in a technique for astronomical observation that used some European cathedrals like cameras. Beginning in the sixteenth century used churches such as Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy, and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France, were punctured with a small hole in the roof, which worked like a lens to focus an image of the sun on the floor below. Ironically, these gauges verified Galileo's proof of Copernicus's theory that the sun, not the earth, is the center of our universe. With the cathedral serving as a camera, a light-sensitive material might have been found in silver. Silversmithing was an advanced art in the Renaissance, and the perception that silver darkens when exposed to light was an ancient commonplace. Before the end of the eighteenth century, imagining the photographic process seems to have been difficult. |Figure| Caption| |--------------------------------------|:------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |1.1 JOHANN KASPAR LAVATER, Silhouette Machine, c. 1780.| Engraving from Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin| * * * American essayist and medical doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) remarked that "in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable wonder... No Century of Inventions includes this among it's possibilities." It seems that the invention of photography should be related to the start of the Industrial Revolution, the technical, social, and political changes that accompanied the mechanization of production during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe is not easy to establish. The desire for reliable visual reproductions has been linked to the needs of expanding commerce and industry, and the wish of the emerging middle class for realistic portraits. Describing the late eighteenth century, historian Eric Hobsbawm persuasively depicted a world that was largely rural, in which there was no urban, mass culture pressing for realistic, multiple images. Even in Britain, where industrialism was most advanced, the stream of reports, novels, and documents describing the Industrial Revolution did not begin to appear until the 1830s and 1840s While the British artist John Constable (1776-1837) struggled to render his observations of the changing light effects of sun and clouds in the rural landscape, his successful contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) produced fantastical medleys of color unfettered by mere depiction. Similarly, during the 1820s, French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was fascinated with expressionistic color and theatrical lighting effects, and was less interested in realism. By the mid-1830s photographers had been invented by several people. *** ### Technological and Artistic Forebears Because our culture places great value on imaginative art, it is sometimes forgotten that one of the most common uses for visual depictions in the centuries before photography was to copy the observable world and to communicate visual information in an uninflected manner. Similarly, engravers and etchers were expected faithfully to copy historic monuments, machines and devices, animals and botanical specimens, and even works of art. French printmaker Abraham Bosse (1602-1676), showed how artists could achieve greater fidelity by employing a screen with equally spaced squares. This simple device was particularly useful in foreshortening. The PANTOGRAPH helped artists copy, enlarge, or reduce drawings. French engraver Gilles-Louis Chrétien adapted the pantograph to engraving in 1786, calling his invention the PHYSIONOTRACE. The physionotrace mechanized a technique for making profiles that can be traced back to the time of Louis XIV (1638-1715; r. 1643-1715). Not only did the physionotrace permit users to make multiple copies, but it also allowed color to be applied. SILHOUETTES, or shadow portraits, were part entertainment and part artistic venture. The public acceptance of the silhouette, usually a single image, and the physionotrace, which produced multiple, engraved images, accompanied the growth of the middle classes in eighteenth-century Europe, and their taste for likenesses rendered without the idealization and ornament flaunted in aristocratic portraits. As they evolved, mechanical aids to drawing became more exact, emphasizing outlines and contours rather than shading, |Figure| Caption| |--------------------------------------|:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 1.2 **ABRAHAM BOSSE**, Engraving Depicting Artist at Work, c. 1737| | |1.3 **Vision I proces se dang dia in** **Fans de quel lyrat me machine Dane atte** **ARTIST UNKNOWN**, Gilles-Louis Chrétien's Physionotrace, c. 1786.| Drawing. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.| |1.4 **Gilbert Motier Marquis de** **LA FAYETTE**. **ARTIST UNKNOWN**, Gilbert Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, 1895|Aquatint, colored, after physionotrace drawing. Marquis de Lafayette Print Collection. David Bishop Skillman Library. Lafayette College Library, Easton, Pennsylvania.| |1.5 **ARTIST UNKNOWN**, Bernie. Silhouette portrait, 1790s.| Ink on paper mounted on 53 x 4 in. (13.5 x 10.6 cm) paper. Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Collection, New York.| *** The drawing aid with the most direct effect on photography was the CAMERA OBSCURA, literally, a "dark room." Actually, the camera obscura was originally a darkened, room-size chamber, in which a tiny opening in one wall acted like a lens, focusing an upside-down image of the scene outside on to the opposite wall. Over time, the room-size chamber was made smaller and portable. It was equipped with lenses, and constructed with an internal mirror so that the upside-down image was righted and could be traced on a piece of paper placed on a translucent glass plate installed in the top of the device. Like other machines to aid drawing, the camera obscura did not encourage imagination or personal style, and usually produced stiff, formal images. An even more transportable and lightweight aid to drawing was patented in 1806 by British scientist William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828). Simple, if somewhat awkward to use, the CAMERA LUCIDA, or light room, consisted of a rod to which was affixed a glass prism having two silvered sides that reflected the scene at which it was aimed. A person wishing to draw a scene would attach the camera lucida to a drawing table and adjust the prism so as to reflect an image directly into the eye. The camera lucida was useful to travelers who wanted to record topographic or architectural views. |Figure| Caption| |--------------------------------------|:------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 1.6 **GEORG BRANDER**, Table Camera Obscura, 1769.| Engraving. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.| |1.7 **THOMAS SANDBY**, Windsor from the Goswells, 1770. |Camera obscura drawing. The Royal Collection. 2002 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.| |1.8 Drawn by C. Varley for G. Dolland, with the Camera Luvide **CORNELIUS VARLEY**, Artist Sketching with a Wollaston Camera Lucida, 1830.| Engraving. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.| *** ### The Invention of "Photographies" The history of the first photographs has been made to fit into the conventional notion that invention is regular and progressive, with each experiment building in an orderly, successful way on the achievements of the past. However, none of photography's pioneer's reported making headway in that fashion. #### Antoine Florence and the Question of Simultaneous Invention French artist and cartographer Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence (1804-1879) with German naturalist Baron Georg von Lansdorff (1774-1852) to record the area's peoples and natural settings. With the aid of the local druggist, Florence experimented with the camera obscura to see if he could make its images permanent. Unsuccessful, he investigated the printmaking potential of glass plates that were covered with a dark mixture of gum arabic and soot. In 1832, he began using the term photographie for his process, deriving it from the Greek words for light and writing. He used his photographic technique to produce diplomas, tags, and labels, but appears not to have fared well in reproducing camera images. When Daguerre's photography was announced in 1839, Florence realized that his humble efforts could not compete. The notion of simultaneous invention - that two or more people can develop the same concept at about the same time-was mentioned by Florence and by another of