the history of

photography

photographs..preserve personal memories

inform us of public events

views of far-off places on Earth

and in space

as well as microscopic scenes from inside and outside the human body

they provide a means of identification…

and of glamorization..

But 20th-century critics have argued whether photography is indeed a direct

trace of experience, like the mark of a footprint in the sand, or instead a

reflection of the photographer’s particular point of view.

To mid-19th-century observers, photography seemed capable of capturing the world whole rather than describing and interpreting it as drawing did. They called it the “mirror with a memory.”

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes who coined the phrase ‘Mirror with a Memory’

Many specialized commercial categories, including fashion, product, and architectural photography, also fit under the broad umbrella that defines photography’s function in the world today….

Photography’s role in the visual arts is also a matter of debate. From the start, the photographer’s camera was seen as a challenger to the painter’s brush. Its ability to effortlessly render tones, detail, and perspective effectively put an end to the practice of certain forms of painting, such as portrait miniatures.

It is believed today that photography created an impetus for painters to forsake straightforward description in favor of more interpretive or abstract styles, such as impressionism, cubism, and abstract expressionism.

Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled, 1989.

What is PHOTOGRAPHY?

• Photography is a science and an art.

• It combines the science of physics and chemistry with the craftsmanship of

printmaking.

• Photography freezes time and allows you to see how other people view the world. d.

The three building blocks of photography are

LIGHT, TIME, SUBJECT.

Camera’s were inventedbefore photography.

hundreds of years

Explain this.

First we have to think about what a camera really is.

A camera is a lightproof box with an opening to admit light and a device that focuses the light onto a light-

sensitive material to record and image.

and

The first camera was called a CAMERA OBSCURA. (click for

video)It was built around the

phenomenon of pinholes. A small pinhole of light allows an image to be viewed. The mirror refracts the image to

the top. In the picture to the right you see an artist

drawing the refracted image. The first cameras

were used as drawing aids.

The principle of the camera obscura can be demonstrated with a rudimentary type, just a box with a hole in one side.

the camera obscura is based on a simple principle. If you go into a dark room (thus the name, the Latin camera, "room", and obscura, "dark") and punch a small hole in the wall, the image outside will be projected inside.

Light from only one part of a scene will pass through

the hole and strike a specific part of the back

wall. The projection is made on paper on which an artist can then copy the image if

desired.

the camera obscura developed out of the simple, lens-less 'pinhole camera' which was used, perhaps a 1,000 years ago, to project an image of the sun and safely view eclipses. The incorporation of a lens in the seventeenth century (or maybe even earlier) produced a much brighter image and the camera obscura, as we know it today, was born.

camera obscura

During the Victorian era many seaside resorts had a camera obscura which

was usually set up in a small octagonal building near the beach or on the pier.

Inside, the visitor could watch a moving color picture of the view outside.

Photography as a useable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. However, the picture took eight hours to expose, so he went about trying to find a new process.

Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph, c. 1826. This image required an eight-

hour exposure, which resulted in sunlight being visible on both

sides of the buildings.

Joseph Neicephore Niepce, View from a window of Niepce’s house, 1826; 8 hour exposure time

The first successful permanent photograph. This image was printed using a printing press and a metal plate. Ink was applied to exposed plate and printed using a printing press.

An artist using printing press. (click for video of a plate being printed)Here he is pulling a printed image off a metal plate.

Metal Plate

Printed image

Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light.

Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the

development of the daguerreotype in 1839, reducing the exposure time down to half an hour.

First daguerreotype

Daguerreotypes

DAGUERROTYPE (click for video)Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1839.

Within a few years, daguerreotype studios appeared in United States cities and the popularity of the medium grew through The 1850s.

The daguerreotype was an early photograph produced on a silver or a silver-covered copper plate. Unlike the first photograph produced, the daguerreotype image was exposed onto the plate itself and did not require the use of a press to transfer to

paper.

The daguerreotype plate was made by brazing or coating a copper

plate with silver - silver being the photographic emulsion. 

The image was able to capture a very fine, rich detail – superb even by today's standards. The technique is still reproduced by devotees today.

DAGUERROTYPE STUDIOIn 1839 the daguerreotype plate took 15-20 minutes to expose.

That’s quite a long time to sit still and the device below made it

easier for people to sit in position long enough to expose the

image.

Louis Jaques Mande Daguree, Boulevard du Temple, 1839

Abraham Lincoln taken with a daguerreotype in 1846

The low-cost daguerreotype became so popular that, by the end of 1839, Paris newspapers were referring to a new disease called Daguerreotypomania.

People were by far the most common photographic subject of the 19th century. Photographic portraits were much less expensive than painted ones, took less of the sitter’s time, and described individual faces with uncanny accuracy. So great was the sense of presence in these pictures that photographers were often called on to take portraits of the recently deceased, a genre now known as postmortem portraits.

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 copying pictures which daguerreotypes could never satisfy.

Different, and in a sense a rival to the Daguerreotype, was the Calotype invented by William Henry Fox Talbot, which was to provide the answer to that problem.

the calotype negative provided the first practical method of producing prints on paper from a camera exposure

Calotype image. Circa 1839

The Civil War in the United States (1861-1865) was the first war to be thoroughly recorded by photography

Matthew Brady

George Eastman with his

KODAK camera, 1889.

As photography celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1889, the average person was familiar with what

photographs looked like and probably kept some at home, but

few people took photographs themselves. In addition, most

photographs existed as unique originals, because copies were

still difficult to make.

All this soon changed as a result of two important introductions: the simple-to-use Kodak camera and the halftone printing process.

As for the word Kodak, which has become one of the most recognizable brand names ever, there is no special meaning

attached to it. Eastman explained its origin:

"I devised the name myself. The letter 'K' had been a favorite with me -- it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a

question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with 'K.' The word

'Kodak' is the result.“

www.wired.com 2007

The snapshot expanded photography’s territory to include

casual family scenes, candid views of everyday life, and instantaneous

images that stopped motion in midair.

The photographs of Frenchman Jacques Henri

Lartigue, who began taking snapshots at the age of six,

best exemplify this. In this snapshot, taken when he

was ten, his teenage cousin appears suspended over a

flight of stairs, miraculously posing for the camera in the

middle of her flying leap.

The Snapshot

Originally a hunting term for shooting from the hip

In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.

The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer.

The Kodak came pre-loaded with enough film for 100

exposures and needed to be sent back to the factory for

processing and reloading when the roll was finished.

35mmAs early as 1905, Oscar Barnack had the idea of reducing the format of negatives and then enlarging the photographs after they had been exposed. As development manager at Leica, he was able to put his theory into practice. He took an instrument for taking exposure samples for cinema film and turned it into the world's first 35 mm camera: the 'Ur-Leica'.

As the technology for reproducing photographs improved in the first decade of the 20th century, a new world of images began to make the world seem smaller and its manufactured goods more desirable. Along with motion pictures, which the Lumière brothers of France introduced to the world in 1895, photographs in reproduction led to new concepts of celebrity, culture, advertising, and entertainment, all of which depended on the availability of a mass audience…..

One example of the new visual culture provided by

photomechanical reproduction is the birth of

picture magazines, so called because their contents were

defined as much by photographs as by text.

National Geographic magazine became hugely popular because of it’s exotic

photographs from around the world. It was one of the first publications to use

colour photography.

traditional butter making in the Palestine, from March 1914 National Geographic

Fashion photography developed along with the new picture magazines. Confined

at first to studio portraits of society women in their finery,

it turned to professional models and professional photographers to enliven

images and entice the reader.

Cecil Beaton

The new approach to photography in the editorial content of magazines was matched by an increasingly sophisticated use of photography in advertisements.

Steichen. Steinway & Sons piano advertisement [Mother & son]

How do these images differ from today’s color photos?

Auto chrome- used glass plate color transparencies of red, green and blue grains of dyed starch.

Photography played a significant part in dada and surrealism, art

movements that encompassed literature and theater as well as

painting and sculpture. Dada artists in Germany, such as John Heartfield,

developed a form of nonsensical photo collage around 1920, using it

to express dissatisfaction with social conventions and to satirize

government institutions.

Hurrah, the Butter is All Gone!John Heartfield, 1935

This image is another example of how photomontage has been used to make sharp, and

often satirical political points. John Heartfield, a German, produced this picture in response to a

comment by Herman Goring during the food shortages in Nazi Germany. Goring said: "Iron has always made a country strong, butter and

lard only make people fat." By picturing a family under the Nazi regime eating an iron bicycle,

Heartfield satirizes and shows the foolishness of Goring's comment, and in general the Nazi

regime's disregard for the basic needs of its people.

Digital camera technology is directly related to and evolved from the same technology that recorded television images.

Digital Photography

In 1986, Kodak scientists invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print.

APPLE QUICK TAKE 100 .1994.  The first mass-market color digital camera.  640 x 480 pixel CCD.  Up to eight 640 x 480 resolution images could be stored in internal memory

In Paris, surrealists such as American expatriate Man Ray saw photography as

an avenue into the subconscious or into a world beyond reality.

Doctoring photographs has been around almost as long as photography itself, but as digital imaging hardware and software has both advanced and come down in price, the practice of digital image manipulation has become much more commonplace and faked photos are becoming harder to detect. In fact, digital photo manipulation -- commonly referred to as 'photoshopping' -- has recently become a popular pastime, and many consider this photographic fakery to be a new art form.

Digital Manipulation of Images

Today, the technology is massively advanced, with high res cameras even incorporated as commonplace in mobile phones

But when it works its way into photojournalism and the media, the issue of ethics comes to the forefront. How far can we take digital image manipulation and still maintain photographic integrity?

PHOTOGRAPHY EXPLAINED

LENS: a group of shaped glass elements held together in a plastic or metal tube

EXPOSURE: The amount of light an the duration of time that light is allowed to expose film or a digital imaging

sensor.

SHUTTER: a mechanical door that opens and closes to let light in

DIGITAL IMAGES are transferred from the camera to computer where they are “processed” in software

programs.

Today photography remains a vital and inextricable part of contemporary art, as well as retaining its commercial and more

everyday uses. The invention of various digital means of making, altering, and transmitting images has thus far failed to curtail

interest in traditional methods of picture making. Nor has such technology lessened the faith most people have in the

documentary truth of photographs.

Cindy Sherman

PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY

-What are some careers in photography today? LIST THEM ON YOUR PAPER

-With the person sitting beside you BRAINSTORM what skills those specializations might require

LYNN JOHNSON

A SINGLE LENS REFLEX allows you to look through the same lens

that takes the picture.

A point and shoot allows you to look through the a viewfinder. A mirror

projects the image from the lens to the viewfinder.

A NORMAL LENS most closely matches

the view of a human eye.

A wide-angle lens includes more of the scene and makes objects

look farther away than a normal lens.

A zoom lens has variable focal lengths and is good

for most situations.

A telephoto lens includes less of the scene and

makes objects look closer.

NORMAL LENS

WIDE ANGLE LENS

TELEPHOTO LENS

Christopher Burkett, Young Red Maple, Kentucky,1993

You should shoot in color when it is an important element in the scene and when it adds contrast and

emotion.

Shoot in black and white when you want to emphasize textures and shapes and when color would distract from

the mood.

How does color change this image? Which photo do you

prefer? Why?

Which photo do you prefer?

Why?

This photo shows image noise. There was not enough light for the picture to expose properly. Image noise is the visual equivalent to white

noise (the sound made when your TV goes out).However in this image the noise actually adds to the picture.

How does the gritty effect make this a more successful photograph?(Hint: This picture documents an event- it’s photojournalism)

Fine Art

Snap Shot

Fine Art snapshot

BY TUESDAY: Think about what it means for a photo to

be "good“

Take 3 good photos of ANYTHING

WHY are these photos GOOD?

Bring in objects FRIDAY!!