The official date of which the first permanent image was produced is debatable, but it is believed to be between the years of 1825-1827. The exposure lasted many hours and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura in order to obtain the image which was entitled View from Window at Gras. The world of photography was born from this event and began to evolve for more practical uses. The mechanics and the chemistry behind photography were constantly changing as people were discovering newer ways to produce images. Photographers were also working hard on making photography more practical for their own purposes, as well as the publics purposes. Photography, from its beginning, has been a constant progression through chemistry, mechanics and technology, and through its meaning, importance, and impact on society from the 1820s to the 1920s.
The camera obscura originated as an entire room with a lens out a window, projecting the view onto the back wall of the room. With its original design it needed to be large enough for a full grown adult to stand erect in the room. The projections were very large and allowed people to view exterior scenes from interior vantage points. It was soon noted that the lens could be replaced for a pinhole and that allowed for the room to be smaller. Closets were being turned into obscuras, not to capture photographs, but for painters to sketch proper prospectives. The issue of portability raised some concern so in an effort to take the obscura away from the comfort of the artist’s home, in the late seventeenth century artists were travelling around with large tent like rooms that used a pinhole rather than a lens. The pinhole allowed for brighter and sharper projections that were easier to transfer. The tents were still difficult to manage on the go and the issue of gaining a better sense of prospective hadn’t fully been resolved. In the 1700s the obscura went from being the size of a closet, to a twenty-four inch rectangular box. This was far easier to travel around with and portrayed an accurate projection of proportion. The portable obscura consisted of a lens allowing light to enter the dark rectangular box, a mirror that reflected the image and then cast the image onto the glass. “Philosophers were describing the images produced through use of the camera obscura as a perfect duplicate of life itself” and artists were very pleased with such results.
As mentioned before, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was the first to stabilize the camera obscura’s image. In the mid 1820s, Niépce coated a metal plate in chemicals and allowed the the projection from the obscura to be captured on this plate. He waited several hours for the image to be exposed on the plate. He entitled this his discovery “heliography”, meaning sun writing. Niépce had successfully developed and fixed and image using light and bitumen emulsion. There were flaws in his discovery, however his discoveries were significantly important to the evolution of photography. Deguerre had heard of Niépce’s experimental discoveries and the two began collaborating on methods of permanently capturing images. Deguerre stole the project and thus resulted in Deguerreotype prints in 1839. Deguerreotype printing was complex and but required far less exposure time than the process used by Niépce. The Deguerreotype process requires a copper sheet, plated with silver, and exposed to iodine vapours, producing a light sensitive emulsion, scientifically referred to as silver iodide. The now light sensitive plate then gets exposed to light from the obscura. In order to develop the image, the plate then gets exposed to mercury vapours. Finally, to “fix” the image, or make it last, the plate needs to be soaked in a bath of hyposulfite of soda. The world reacted pleasantly to his discovery and were also left in awe. The judgement of his discovery was universal, “extraordinary result!” the people exclaimed.
There were, however, some who hadn’t heard of Deguerre’s discoveries and had been working on their own methods. William Henry Fox Tablot had been working on his own way to permanently capture images on paper. He coated the paper with chemicals such as sodium chloride and silver nitrate. The chemicals reacted together to form a light sensitive material, silver chloride. Tablot then placed objects on the paper and exposed them to natural sunlight. The places in which the objects had not been covering the paper darkened in the sunlight and the protected areas remained light, consequently resulting in silhouettes.
In 1850 photography became more accessible to amateur photographers. Albumen prints were less expensive, easy to produce in mass quantities, and they required a relatively short exposure time. The paper had to be exposed to a negative image, but no developer is needed for the image to appear. It is a print in which table salt, egg whites, and silver nitrate is used in making the paper, then instead of embedding the image into the fibers, it is suspended on the paper and after a few minutes to a few hours, the image appears on the exposed albumen paper. Louis-Desiré Blanquart-Evrard is the mastermind behind this style of prints. His discovery is so influential on the history of photography because albumen prints go from negative to positive rather than a direct positive exposures. Albumen prints also became the first commercially used style of printing in the nineteenth century.
Following after albumen prints, dry and wet plates became another common way to print. The wet plate process was discovered by Fredrick Scott Archer. He realized that collodion, a liquid used to seal wounds in war hospitals, was ideal to adhere light sensitive material to glass plates. The entire process of sensitizing, exposing, and developing all had to be done while the plate was wet; hence its name, the wet plate process. Inventor R.L. Maddox sought to develop a more efficient way than the wet plate. He experimented with silver bromide and gelatin to produce a light sensitive dry plate. The plate could be exposed to light then sit for a while before being developed. This process being more forgiving opened even more possibilities for amateur photographers.
With the advancements of the printing process, the world of photography opened up to a much wider crowd of people. Photography became a way to document history, the way life was being lived around the world. The original process of capturing images was too difficult and time demanding for amateurs. Inventors of the nineteenth and twentieth were so driven to make photography more accessible to amateurs, so they experimented until they got closer to methods that worked. These progressions continued and the basis of the processes are still used today in modern photography.
Works Cited
Davenport, Alma. The history of photography: an overview. Albuquqerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Print.
"National Geographic Image Collection Book: Preview the New Photo Book."Photography and Photos of the Day - National Geographic. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2011.
Newhall, Beaumont. The history of photography: from 1839 to the present. Completely rev. and enl. ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art ;, 1982. Print.
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