Photography

The process of forming stable or permanent visible images directly or indirectly by the
action of light or other forms of radiation on sensitive surfaces. Traditional photography
uses the action of light to cause changes in a film of silver halide crystals in which
development converts exposed silver halide to (nonsensitive) metallic silver. Following
exposure in a camera or other device, the film or plate is developed, fixed in a solution
that dissolves the undeveloped silver halide, washed to remove the soluble salts, and
dried. Printing from the original, if required, is done by contact or optical projection onto
a second emulsion-coated material, and a similar sequence of processing steps is
followed. Digital photography captures images directly with an electronic photosensor.
See also Photographic materials.

Photography is practiced on a professional level for portraiture and for various

commercial and industrial applications, including the preparation of photographs for
advertising, illustration, display, and record-keeping. Press photography is for newspaper
and magazine illustrations of topical events and objects. Photography is used at several
levels in the graphic arts to convert original photographs or other illustrations into
printing plates for high-quality reproduction in quantity. Industrial photography includes
the generation and reproduction of engineering drawings, high-speed photography,
schlieren photography, metallography, and many other forms of technical photography
which can aid in the development, design, and manufacture of various products. Aerial
photography is used for military reconnaissance and mapping, civilian mapping, urban
and highway planning, and surveys of material resources. Biomedical photography is
used to reveal or record biological structures, often of significance in medical research,
diagnosis, or treatment. Photography is widely applied to preparing projection slides and
other displays for teaching through visual education. See also Printing; Schlieren
photography.

Photography is one of the most important tools in scientific and technical fields. It
extends the range of vision, allowing records to be made of things or events which are
difficult or impossible to see because they are too faint, too brief, too small, or too
distant, or associated with radiation to which the eye is insensitive. Technical
photographs can be studied at leisure, measured, and stored for reference or security. The
acquisition and interpretation of images in scientific and technical photography usually
requires direct participation by the scientist or skilled technicians.

Infrared photography

Emulsions made with special sensitizing dyes can respond to radiation at wavelengths up
to 1200 nanometers, though the most common infrared films exhibit little sensitivity
beyond 900 nm. One specialized color film incorporates a layer sensitive in the 700–900-
nm region and is developed to false colors to show infrared-reflecting subjects as bright
red. See also Infrared radiation.

Photographs can thus be made of subjects which radiate in the near-infrared, such as
stars, certain lasers and light-emitting diodes, and hot objects with surface temperatures
greater than 500°F (260°C). Infrared films are more commonly used to photograph
subjects which selectively transmit or reflect near-infrared radiation, especially in a
manner different from visible radiation. Infrared photographs taken from long distances
or high altitudes usually show improved clarity of detail because atmospheric scatter
(haze) is diminished with increasing wavelength and because the contrast of ground
objects may be higher as a result of their different reflectances in the near-infrared. Grass
and foliage appear white because chlorophyll is transparent in the near-infrared, while
water is rendered black because it is an efficient absorber of infrared radiation. See also
Infrared imaging devices.

Ultraviolet photography

Two distinct classes of photography rely on ultraviolet radiation. In the first, the
recording material is exposed directly with ultraviolet radiation emitted, reflected, or
transmitted by the subject; in the other, exposure is made solely with visible radiation
resulting from the fluorescence of certain materials when irradiated in the ultraviolet. In
the direct case, the wavelength region is usually restricted by the camera lens and
filtration to 350–400 nm, which is readily detected with conventional black-and-white
films. Ultraviolet photography is accomplished at shorter wavelengths in spectrographs
and cameras fitted with ultraviolet-transmitting or reflecting optics, usually with
specialized films. In ultraviolet-fluorescence photography, ultraviolet radiation is blocked
from the film by filtration over the camera lens and the fluorescing subject is recorded
readily with conventional color or panchromatic films. Both forms of ultraviolet
photography are used in close-up photography and photomicrography by mineralogists,
museums, art galleries, and forensic photographers. See also Ultraviolet radiation.

High-speed photography

Photography at exposure durations shorter than those possible with conventional shutters
or at frequencies (frame rates) greater than those achievable with motion picture cameras
with intermittent film movements is useful in a wide range of technical applications.

The best conventional between-the-lens shutters rarely yield exposures shorter than 1/500
s. Some focal plane shutters are rated at 1/2000 or 1/4000 s but may take 1/100 s to
traverse the film format. Substantially shorter exposures are possible with magnetooptical
shutters (using the Faraday effect), with electrooptical shutters (using the Kerr effect), or
with pulsed electron image tubes. Alternatively, a capping shutter may be used in
combination with various pulsed light sources which provide intense illumination for
very short durations, including pulsed xenon arcs (electronic flash), electric arcs,
exploding wires, pulsed lasers, and argon flash bombs. Flash durations ranging from 1
millisecond to less than 1 nanosecond are possible. Similarly, high-speed radiographs
have been made by discharging a short-duration high-potential electrical pulse through
the x-ray tube. See also Faraday effect; Kerr effect; Laser; Stroboscopic photography.

The classical foundation for serial frame separation is the motion picture camera.
Intermittent movement of the film in such cameras is usually limited to 128 frames/s
(standard rates are 16 and 24). For higher rates (up to 10,000 frames/s or more)
continuous film movement is combined with optical compensation, as with a rotating
plane-parallel glass block, to avoid image smear. Pictures made at these frequencies but
projected at normal rates slow down (stretch) the motion according to the ratio of taking
and projection rates. Higher rates, up to 107 frames/s, have been achieved with a variety
of ingenious special-purpose cameras. In some, the sequence of photographs is obtained
with a rapidly rotating mirror at the center of an arcuate array of lenses, and a stationary
strip of film. In others, the optics are stationary and the film strip is moved at high speed
by mounting it around the outside or inside of a rapidly rotating cylinder. To overcome
mechanical limitations on the rotation of mirrors or cylindrical film holders at high
speeds, image dissection methods have been employed, that is, an image is split into
slender sections and rearranged to fill a narrow slit at the film. The image is unscrambled
by printing back through the dissecting optics. See also Cinematography.

Remote sensing

The art of aerial photography, in which photographs of the Earth's surface are made with
specialized roll-film cameras carried aloft on balloons, airplanes, and spacecraft, is an
important segment of a broader generic technology, remote sensing. The film is often
replaced with an electronic sensor, the sensor system may be mounted on an aircraft or
spacecraft, and the subject may be the surface of a distant planet instead of Earth. Remote
sensing is used to gather military intelligence; to provide most of the information for
plotting maps; for evaluating natural resources (minerals, petroleum, soils, crops, water)
and natural disasters; and for planning cities, highways, dams, pipelines, and airfields.
Aerial photography normally provides higher ground resolution and geometric accuracy
than the imagery obtained with electronic sensors, especially when covering small areas,
so it continues as the foundation for mapmaking, urban planning, and some other
applications. Films designed for aerial photography, both black-and-white and color, have
somewhat higher contrast than conventional products because the luminance range of the
Earth's surface as seen from altitudes of 5000 ft (1500 m) or more is roughly 100 times
lower than that of landscapes photographed horizontally. See also Aerial photograph;
Photogrammetry; Topographic surveying and mapping.

The acquisition of image information with scanning sensors mounted on spacecraft

provides an inexpensive means for gathering photographs of large areas of the Earth or
the whole Earth at regular intervals (minutes or hours for meteorological satellites, days
for Earth resources satellites) or for photographing subjects which cannot be reached with
aircraft or approached with spacecraft. Some sensors operate at wavelengths beyond
those detected by infrared films. The image information is transmitted to receiving
stations on Earth, usually processed electronically to correct for geometric and
atmospheric factors, and recorded on a variety of image recorders. Scanning sensors, as
well as film cameras, are employed in aerial reconnaissance because they can transmit
tactical information to ground stations for evaluation before the aircraft returns to base or
is shot down. Synthetic aperture radar, which maps the reflectance of microwaves from
the surface of the Earth and other planets, represents another form of remote sensing for
both military and commercial purposes in which the information is returned to Earth and
reconstructed in photographic form for study. See also Aerial photograph; Meteorological
satellites; Military satellites; Remote sensing.

Digital photography

The process of electronic acquisition, the equivalent of taking a photograph, is often

referred to as image capture.

Light intensity is detected in digital camera by an photosensor. This is normally a charge-

coupled device (CCD), although complementary metal oxide silicon (CMOS) devices are
beginning to appear in some systems. See also Charge-coupled devices.

When photons strike the sensor, they give up energy. This causes electrons to be emitted,
turning the energy of the photons into electrical energy. The number of electrons that are
emitted can be measured to determine how many photons struck the capture element, and
from this the scanner can generate a value for the intensity of light arriving from the point
on the original being analyzed.

The aim of the digitization stage is to capture all the information from an original that
will be needed in the reproduction and convert it into an array of binary numbers that a
computer can process. The human visual system actively seeks cues that will give it
information about the objects within the visual field, and a reproduction of an image that
contains a large amount of detail is almost always preferred to one in which some of the
detail has been lost. The more information that the reproduction contains about the
original scene—the objects in it, their colors, textures—the more realistic the
reproduction appears. See also Image processing.

Like conventional cameras, digital cameras come in compact, single-lens reflex, and
large-format varieties. Low-resolution compacts are useful for producing classified
advertisements and tend to have relatively simple optics, image-sensing electronics, and
controlling software. Digital cameras are often based on existing single-lens reflex
camera designs with the addition of CCD backs and storage subsystems. The capture
resolution of these cameras is ideal for news photography and other applications with
similar quality requirements. See also Camera.
World of the Body: photography
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When photography was announced to the world in 1839, almost immediately three
relationships to the body were established. The most pervasive of these was its use to
produce portraits and snapshots that have served as surrogates, even fetishistic tokens, of
the human body. As new technologies made photography progressively cheaper
throughout the nineteenth century, photographic portraiture, produced in the studios of
trained technicians, worked its way down to ever lower classes of society. Photographic
portraits made present to broad classes of people images of the bodies of family members
who had emigrated, gone off to war, died, or otherwise absented themselves, a privilege
enjoyed previously only by the rich. For the last third of the nineteenth century
photographic portraits were also collected and assembled into albums as a way for the
public to see the leading political, artistic, and literary figures of the day.

As a different kind of surrogate, photography itself extended the reach of the body's
comprehension of the world. Doing so more insistently than did other forms of mimetic
representation, photography seemed to stand in for the direct, bodily experience of the
individual, its lens becoming the roving eye of the beholder. Most obviously one sees this
in travel and expeditionary photographs of the nineteenth century, for which skilled
professionals travelled forth from Western Europe and the eastern USA to record and
bring back views of sites as various as India, the American West and the Middle East.

Finally, photography played a role in the nineteenth-century comprehension of the body

itself within the emerging sciences. Ethnographers saw in photography the potential to
prove theories of racial difference, using photographs showing faces and full (frequently
unclothed) bodies that had been produced both for the tourist trade and specifically for
ethnographic study. Early investigators of psychiatry and eugenics considered the
medium an objective tool of research, finding evidence in straightforward face shots as
well as those that had been manipulated. Studies of physiognomy and the emotions were
illustrated with photographs of faces stimulated by electrical charges, while eugenicists
sought to arrive visually at average ‘types’ by exposing a single piece of photographic
paper to multiple portrait negatives, one on top of the next, so that only the most
commonly held traits appeared in the final picture. Within criminology, photographic
‘mug’ shots fixed the identities of convicted criminals, while detailed pictures of ears and
other body parts enabled a crude method of tracking suspects, as today fingerprints and
DNA are used. Physiology was advanced by studies of motion in the 1870s and 80s,
which fixed the positions the body held through the course of a variety of activities.
Using light waves beyond the visible spectrum, the invention of the X-ray toward the end
of the century let physicians study internal body parts.

At the end of the nineteenth century, photography's relationship to the body changed with
the invention and mass marketing of George Eastman's Kodak, the first snapshot camera.
The ease of use and mobility of this hand-held camera (‘you push the button; we do the
rest, ’ boasted the ads) made it an extension of one's own body. Already a ‘point and
shoot’ camera, this early Kodak allowed individuals to take over many of the functions
previously performed by professional photographers. Ever-growing masses of people
could now make portraits and travel views of their own, with a camera handily carried
anywhere. Within the snapshot photographs that emerged, the body itself was recorded in
increasingly common and casual ways.

Also beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, mass reproduction of photographs
through new printing technologies expanded the audience for documentary and
journalistic photography, which depended for its claim to veracity upon the imagined
elision between the human eye and the mechanical camera (an idea manifested in the title
of a play based on Christopher Isherwood's life in Berlin in the 1920s, I Am A Camera).
Major examples within this genre in which the body itself figured prominently are the
documentary photographs produced for the Farm Security Administration, part of the
USAs efforts to ameliorate the ravages of the Depression of the 1930s, and the surrealist-
inspired work of photographers working in and around Paris in the 1930s, such as Hans
Bellmer.

Almost from the time of its invention, photography included the production of erotic
imagery as a covert subset of its representations of the body. In the nineteenth century as
well as the twentieth, such imagery often finessed the fine line between art and
pornography. Nineteenth-century photographers of the (usually female) nude included
among their customers both artists seeking escape from the expense and possible tedium
of working from live models and a more general public seeking this imagery for its
potential eroticism. In the first third of the twentieth century, many photographers (mostly
male) turned to the female nude body as a subject that would align their work in this new
medium with the more traditional arts.

In the decades after World War II, photography of the body within the burgeoning mass
media largely reinforced gender differences the war had momentarily eased. Fashion
magazines returned in their imagery to a level of elegance and fancy dress not seen since
the 1920s. Advertising photography, now in its heyday, constructed safely differing roles
for men and women through images in which body posture, facial expression, grooming,
and dress figured prominently. In the same postwar years, photographers working outside
the commercial realm made pictures in which the body revealed strains on social
relationships, as the dominance of straight, white males was questioned by new roles for
women, greater freedom for people of colour, and an incipient visibility for gays and
lesbians.

In the 1960s photography made evident the centrality of the body to radical changes in
society. While battlefield corpses had figured prominently in photographs from the
American Civil War, government censors successfully ruled out any large-scale
photographic representation of battle carnage until the Vietnam War, when widespread
disapproval of the war propelled photographers to defy censors. Not only did journalistic
pictures record the carnage brought to the body by the war in Southeast Asia and the
protest against it in Europe and America, but artistic pictures seemed to reflect
symbolically the psychic stress of world events on otherwise normal bodies.

In the 1970s photography and the body intersected in new ways. No longer considered a
transparent record or means of abstraction, as it had been for much of its history,
photography was now seen as marking the extent to which the world is mediated, coming
to us already as a representation. Using photography this way, artists explored the social
and cultural bases of such attributes of the body as gender, race, class, and sexual
orientation. Artists used photography to document artistic performances that used the
body in a very physical way to redefine experience. Feminist artists employed
photography as a means to record and comment upon transformations to which they
submitted their bodies.

Postmodern artists in recent decades have followed the lead of these artists of the 1970s
to make photographs of the body that are explicitly political, dealing with problematic
notions of sexuality and self identity. In these works bodies are embedded in society,
entering clearly defined social discourses at the time of their making. Photographers
show the gay male body at precisely the time that the AIDS epidemic has made
consensual invisibility no longer viable. Other photographers act out assumed or fictive
roles, refusing to seek any ‘true’ or ‘real’ self. Still others have explored the social
dimensions of race and racism by referring back to nineteenth-century photography that
sought to define racial difference, thus recycling the history of photography's
involvement with the body.

Method of recording permanent images by the action of light projected by a lens in a

camera onto a film or other light-sensitive material. It was developed in the 19th century
through the artistic aspirations of two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niepce and Louis-Jacques-
Mandé Daguerre, whose combined discoveries led to the invention of the first
commercially successful process, the daguerreotype (1837). In addition, two Englishmen,
Thomas Wedgwood and William Henry Fox Talbot, patented the negative-positive
calotype process (1839) that became the forerunner of modern photographic technique.
Photography was initially used for portraiture and landscapes. In the 1850s and '60s,
Mathew B. Brady and Roger Fenton pioneered war photography and photojournalism.
From its inception, two views of photography predominated: one approach held that the
camera and its resulting images truthfully document the real world, while the other
considered the camera simply to be a tool, much like a paintbrush, with which to create
artistic statements. The latter notion, known as Pictorialism, held sway from the late
1860s through the first decade of the 20th century, as photographers manipulated their
negatives and prints to create hazy, elaborately staged images that resembled paintings.
By the 1920s and '30s, a new, more realistic style of photography gained prominence, as
photographers such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams began to pursue
sharply focused, detailed images. The Great Depression and two world wars inspired
many photographers, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, to pursue
documentary, often socially conscious photography. Inspired by such work, many
photojournalists, including Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White, also emerged
during this period. In the second half of the 20th century, the urban social scene became a
subject of much interest to photographers, as did celebrity portraiture and fashion
photography. At the turn of the 21st century, photographers took advantage of digital
capabilities by experimenting with enormous formats and new manipulative techniques.
As technological advances improve photographic equipment, materials, and techniques,
the scope of photography continues to expand enormously. See also digital camera.

For more information on photography, visit Britannica.com.

French Literature Companion: Photography

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France was the birthplace of photography, though England (with Fox Talbot) may claim a
share in the invention. It was Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) who in the 1820s,
cooperating with Daguerre, developed the process from which modern photography
derives.

In the 19th c. the new invention was used in France as elsewhere to record aspects of
reality. It had its greatest success in portraiture [see Nadar], but also served to depict
exotic places (Du Camp left memorable images of the Egypt he visited with Flaubert) or
to record social reality closer to home. Scientists used the camera to investigate
movement—a development which contributed to the invention of the cinematograph in
France [see Cinema]. As photography became a profitable business, its status as an art
was much disputed, but it found a major role in the reproduction of existing art works.

The first half of the 20th c. saw significant new developments. The creation of
lightweight cameras made photography more accessible to all and allowed photographers
to produce spontaneous-seeming images of everyday life. The fashion industry and
advertising both contributed to the development of the art. Photo-reportage developed
rapidly, finding outlets in journals such as Vu (1928) and Regards (1931). Some of the
most familiar images of French life were produced by photographers who came to
prominence at this time, notably Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Jacques-Henri Lartigue
(1894-1986), Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), and Robert Doisneau (1912-94). Gisèle
Freund (b. 1912), an immigrant from Germany, followed Nadar's example in producing
remarkable portraits of writers (Malraux, Beauvoir, Beckett, etc.).

At the same time, photography was welcomed and exploited by the literary avant-garde,
particularly the Surrealists. Their journals featured photography and photomontage, and
Breton combined photographers' iconic images and his own text in an arresting way in
Nadja. The Surrealists appreciated (e.g. in the work of Atget) the raw ‘document’ quality
of the photographic image, but equally its ability to reveal the strangeness of familiar
reality—this was enhanced by deliberate distortion, collage, and similar techniques.
Major talents associated with this movement were the American Man Ray (1890-1976),
the Hungarian André Kertész (1894-1985), the German Germaine Krull (1897-1985), and
the Transylvanian Brassaï (1899-1984), all of whom adopted Paris as their creative home.
The continuing importance of photography in contemporary art can be seen, for example,
in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein (1928-62).

Of the French writers who have meditated on the effects of photography, the most
significant is Roland Barthes. His critical essays, in Mythologies and elsewhere, express
suspicion of the pseudo-real nature of the photographic image and its contribution to an
illusory imaginaire [see Sartre; Lacan], but he pays homage to its quasi-magical powers
in his late essay, La Chambre claire.

In the first history of photography published in New York in 1849, there is the tantalizing
story of an Indiana youth, James M. Wattles, trying unsuccessfully in 1828 to secure
survivable pictures on writing paper placed dry in a camera obscura (precursor to the
camera) after he had soaked it in potash. But, so the story goes, his parents laughed at
him and bade him attend to his studies and forget about such "moonshine" thoughts.

Only a few years later, W. H. Fox Talbot, a member of the English landed gentry, made
what he called "photogenic drawings"--images of leaves, lace, and feathers secured on
silver nitrate paper exposed in a camera obscura, the paper afterward being washed in a
strong solution of salt to fix the images. The process gave Talbot what we now call a
negative, and in a patent awarded in 1841, his improved process--calotype--called for
contact printing the negatives on silver chloride paper for positives. Talbot's calotype
process was thus the forerunner of photography's mainstream negative-positive systems
that evolved ultimately to the roll film systems we know today.

But in 1826 or 1827, a Frenchman, Joseph Niepce, had secured the world's earliest
surviving photograph (now in the Gernsheim collection at the University of Texas at
Austin) on a pewter plate sensitized with bitumen and exposed for eight hours in a
camera obscura. He called the direct positive image of a pigeon house and barn next to
his home a heliograph. From 1829 until his death in 1833, Niepce worked in partnership
with another Frenchman, Louis J. M. Daguerre, who in 1839 invented a means of taking
photographs on copper plates lightly coated with sensitized silver (similarly exposed
without a negative in a camera of new design) and "developed" over mercury fumes. That
same year, the French government purchased the rights to the new "daguerreotype"
process and donated them freely to the world. A daguerreotype, such as might be found
today among old family possessions or in antique stores, was covered with glass and
placed in a wood or leather case (usually about 3 1/2 by 4 inches in size), both to protect
it and to mimic the manner in which miniature oil portraits were packaged. Millions of
daguerreotypes (mostly portraits) were made the world over from 1840 to about 1860.
There followed cheaper methods of securing a cased image photo on glass, ambrotype,
and on iron plates, tintype, the latter process remaining popular until well into the
twentieth century at seaside resorts and amusement parks. In a sidelight to daguerreotype
history, the first U.S. camera patent was awarded in May 1840 for a more primitive
version of Daguerre's camera to New Yorker Alexander S. Wolcott, a manufacturer of
instruments and dental equipment. But his camera was not equipped with a lens. Instead,
sunlight was directed through an opening and reflected on the image plate by an internal
concave mirror, restricting picture size to 2 by 2 1/2 inches.

Photography's formative years in America followed a pattern similar to the American

experience in art. Many who took up the daguerreotype process were house, sign, or
carriage painters. Some, like their contemporaries in folk artistry, traveled the back roads
of the nation as itinerant photographers. Much credit is due the American painter and
inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who visited Daguerre in 1839 and afterward not only taught
the daguerreotype process to Mathew Brady and a host of Brady's peers but instilled in
his students an appreciation for the rudiments of traditional art techniques. Although
daguerreotype cameras were carried on several expeditions to the Canadian border, the
American West, and the Yucatan, the process was ill suited to outdoor use. In 1849,
American rights were secured to Talbot's calotype process, but by then, both a better (but
short-lived) French paper negative and three newly invented glass negative modes were
taking center stage. The process adopted after 1855 by most photographers called for
sensitizing the glass negative with collodion (ether mixed with gun cotton) and exposing
the plate in the camera while it was still wet. It is understandable that during the
subsequent thirty-year wet-plate era, photography continued to remain largely in the
hands of professionals. There is no recorded manual for amateurs, for example, prior to
one published by a wealthy Baltimorean, George B. Coale, in 1858, and it is doubtful that
even this pocket-size booklet achieved wide distribution.

Just as landscape painting in America lagged behind oil portraiture, so American

landscape photography developed slowly. The United States at mid-century lacked a
leisure class to adopt photography as a hobby, as did many amateurs in Europe. In
addition, Americans appear to have preferred scenic lithographs rather than photographs,
whereas abroad, noted photographers and publishers sold numerous editions of large
photographs of cityscapes and tourist meccas in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Public excitement with the opening of the American West probably had much to do with
the success of such photographers as Eadweard Muybridge, Carlton E. Watkins, William
H. Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Andrew J. Russell in selling large prints made with
new "mammoth-plate" cameras of scenes in the wilds of today's Yosemite, Yellowstone,
and other national parks and territories. Some of these photographs were offered in the
same galleries that handled paintings by artists of the Hudson River school.

The introduction in 1860 of portrait photographs mounted on cards--the carte de visite, or

visiting-card style upped to a larger cabinet size in 1866--ended the reign of
daguerreotype photography. It also led to the creation of the family photo album and to a
new public taste for flamboyantly posed portraits of celebrities, using dramatic lights and
period props. As the name Brady dominated the daguerreotype era, Napoleon Sarony
became the undoubted American master of the card portrait era (1860s to the turn of the
century). Nevertheless, it was a pioneer Brady carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln, widely
reproduced and distributed in the 1860 presidential campaign, that Lincoln later said
helped elect him president.
Of equal and perhaps greater significance was the concurrent proliferation of card
stereographs--double pictures mounted side by side for viewing in three dimensions in
hand-held or newly manufactured home console viewing devices. The card stereoview
format provides the world today with its most complete record of the transition from an
agrarian to an industrial and urban way of life. Card stereoviews aroused public interest
not only in views (domestic and foreign) but in fashion, genre, and news events
photographs (a stereocard series, for example, portrayed the 1871 Chicago fire). Public
viewing of card stereographs in the home is often characterized as a nineteenth-century
form of American television.

Photographers who attended their national convention in Chicago in 1880 literally

witnessed the birth of photography's modern era. A variety of reliable dry-plate glass
negatives was shown, which could be sold to the public as well as the professional,
ready-made for use at any time. A revolution in the medium and its practice was at hand.
Eight years later when George Eastman brought out the Kodak (followed shortly by the
first roll film), an estimated 84 million of the new dry plates had been sold. The
manufacture of cameras designed for the new plates further doubled during the years
1895-1900.

But like many revolutions, this one, too, became fragmented. In the early 1880s, while
photographers such as William Kurtz were specializing in taking portraits at night with
flash powder, the journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis seized on flashlight
photography as a means of better conveying the misery of slum life in New York City's
tenements. This attracted the attention of a young civil service commissioner, Theodore
Roosevelt, who as police commissioner (1895-1897) frequently took Riis with him on
unannounced nighttime checks of city enforcement of health and safety regulations. At
the turn of the century, other documentary photographers focused their cameras on the
"vanishing race" of American Indians (Edward Curtis and Joseph Dixon were two), street
life in New York (Percy Byron), Chicago (Sigmund Krausz), San Francisco's Chinatown
(Arnold Genthe), and the arrival in New York of a new generation of immigrants (Lewis
Hine). But there was little or no professional or fraternal interplay between any of these
now celebrated documentary photographers and those of an emerging new school of art
photographers. The works of the latter were individually printed and reproduced
separately from text in a new publication, Camera Notes, edited by Alfred Stieglitz. To
the Japanese-German dramatist, poet, and critic Sadakichi Hartmann, artistic
photography, Stieglitz, and the New York Camera Club were "three different names for
one and the same thing." But Hartmann also noted that the public at large never saw
Camera Notes and that "ninety-nine persons out of a hundred [were] not yet familiar with
the term 'artistic photography,' much less with its aspirations and aims."

The New York Camera Club was one of many such clubs established at the close of the
nineteenth century. On their first outing in 1890, photographers in the New England club
filled a yacht, which then "sailed down Narragansett Bay" with wealthy amateurs
carrying some thirty view cameras and fifty or more Kodaks and Hawk-Eyes. But in
launching the Photo-Secession movement in art photography a decade later, Stieglitz
broke away from the camera club element. In a new publication, Camera Work
(published from 1903 to 1917), he included the soft-focus pictorial, and more avant-garde
works of a new elite group of photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Clarence
White, Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Rudolph Eickemeyer,
and Paul Strand. It was a time, internationally, of great artistic innovation (the cubist
explosion in France, for example). Paul Strand, at age twenty-five, caught the spirit in
1915 when he produced his first abstract photographs. Stieglitz thereupon gave Strand a
one-man exhibition and devoted the final issue of Camera Work to his works. During the
1920s, Stieglitz himself abandoned exhibiting pictorial photographs in favor of works by
Picasso, Rodin, Marin, and other painters and sculptors. New York's famed Julien Levy
Gallery (1931-1949) opened with an exhibition of surrealist works by George Platt Lynes
and other photographers before mounting the works of "modern" artists such as Salvador
Dali and Jean Cocteau.

A new realism became the vogue at this time when some of the best photographers--
Strand, Steichen, Edward Weston, and later Ansel Adams--sought to make "straight"
photographs --pictures unmanipulated, unsentimental, and sharply focused. The
appearance of three new landmark cameras--the 35-mm Leica I, wide-aperture-lens
Ermanox, and twin-lens-reflex Rolleiflex--greatly enhanced the new format. In the hands
of Steichen and Irving Penn, these and other new small cameras provided appropriate
tools for yet another new vogue, fashion photography. But more important, news
photographers could abandon their bulky Graflex cameras, flash guns, and fast tank
development in the darkroom. Using the new cameras and available light, such
photographers as Eric Salomon in Europe and Albert Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-
White, and others in the United States became the pioneers of modern photojournalism.
Socially concerned photographers such as Aaron Siskind made an early record (1928) of
slum conditions in Harlem--even as his older and then unknown contemporary James Van
Der Zee recorded in his studio, and sometimes in street scenes, the last vestiges of the
black community's earlier social fabric.

Before 1900, the manufacture of cameras, emulsion-coated dry plates, photographic

paper, and so on, was conducted by small firms. But the arrival on the scene of George
Eastman and the dawn of a new era of business trusts and chain-store retail
merchandising changed all this. By the turn of the century, photography, like the horse
and buggy, was poised for a coming age of mechanization. At the outset, photography
was clearly in the lead; there were, by 1900, 100,000 Kodak cameras alone in the hands
of a new generation of amateurs, whereas only some 8,000 horseless carriages were
registered by this time. During the years 1889-1909, production of photographic
apparatus and materials grew at an annual rate of 11 percent, as against a growth rate of
only about 4.7 percent annually by U.S. industrial production in general. In the latter
years of the twentieth century, photography remained well ahead in the race, if there was
one, with the horseless carriage, reaching an annual level of 10.7 billion in the number of
photographs made by amateurs at the outset of the 1980s.

Until Kodachrome color film reached the market in 1935, no successful mode for
combining color screens in a camera to produce color photographs had been perfected,
although by the 1890s screens could be combined for three-dimensional viewing like card
stereographs and could be projected on a wall or screen by a magic lantern. Polaroid
introduced its first instant-picture camera in 1947, and the following year the
manufacture of Nikon cameras began, leading after the Korean War to Japan's "invasion"
of the U.S. camera market. The rudiments of camera automation appeared just before the
outbreak of World War II with the development of prototype exposure control and flash
synchronization systems.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art accepted its first collection of photographs (personal
photographs belonging to Stieglitz) in 1926, fourteen years before the trend-setting
department of photography was established at New York's Museum of Modern Art. When
the J. Paul Getty Museum in California mounted a year-long series of five exhibitions to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of the daguerreotype invention, the title chosen for
the series was Experimental Photography, which allowed subjective illustration of early
daguerreotype, calotype, and wet-plate-era works; photographs by painter photographers
such as Thomas Eakins and Charles Sheeler; industrial and commonplace scenes
artistically rendered by Strand, Weston, Walker Evans, and others; and a new subjectivity
from the 1940s to the 1960s when realism yielded to a new ambiguity and introspection
in photographs by André Kertesz, Harry Callahan, and W. Eugene Smith. Over the years,
other exhibitions have categorized the motivations and achievements of great American
photographers in other ways. The first comprehensive published study was completed by
Time-Life Books in the 1970s.

Several critics have contended that every decade, in effect, imposes its own aesthetic. But
one can find books of photographers' works covering the New Deal era that, on the one
hand, suggest an "unbounded belief in the potential of growth," and on the other, portray
works by Farm Security Administration photographers of the dust bowl conditions that
led to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The immediacy of repeated crime, warfare,
and other shocking scenes on television may also have dulled the public's ability to
appreciate or respond to documentary photographs as in former times. Would
photographs by Alexander Gardner of dead soldiers on the battlefield at Gettysburg today
inspire a Gettysburg address?

The development of photography in Russia during the nineteenth century followed a

history similar to that of other European countries. After Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
and William Henry Fox Talbot made public their methods for capturing images on light-
sensitized surfaces in 1839, I. Kh. Gammel, corresponding member to the Russian
Academy of Sciences, visited both inventors to learn more about their work and collected
samples of daguerreotypes and calotypes for study by Russian scientists. The Academy
subsequently commissioned Russian scientists to further investigate both processes. As
elsewhere, Russian experimenters quickly introduced a variety of refinements to the
initial processes.

Photography found immediate popular success in Russia with the establishment of

daguerreotype portrait studios in the 1840s. The similarity of the photograph to the
Orthodox icon (an image that is believed to be a direct and truthful record of a physical
being) heightened the early reception of photography and resulted in the persistence of
portraiture as a major genre in Russia. While the first generation of photographers was
largely foreign, native practitioners soon appeared. Some, such as Sergei Levitsky,
achieved international recognition for their role in the development of photography. A
personal acquaintance of Daguerre, Levitsky established studios in both France and
Russia, serving as court photographer for the Romanovs and Napoleon III. During the
later nineteenth century, Russian photography became institutionalized with the
establishment of journals, professional societies, and exhibitions.

While photography was initially largely rejected as an art, it became widely accepted
with the emergence of Realism. Russian photographers used the camera to capture the
changing social landscape that accompanied the liberation of the serfs and growing
urbanization. Simultaneously, ethnographic photography became an important genre with
the expansion of the Russian Empire and the opening of Central Asia. Numerous
photographic albums and research projects documented the peoples, customs, landscape,
and buildings of diverse parts of the Russian Empire. With the rise of Symbolism, a
younger generation of pictorialist photographers rejected the photograph as document in
pursuit of more aestheticizing manipulated images.

At the turn of the century, technological developments led to the appearance of popular
illustrated publications and the emergence of modern press photography. The Bulla
family established the first Russian photo agency; they documented such events as the
Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the 1917 Revolutions. The growing commercial
availability of inexpensive cameras and products rendered photography more pervasive in
Russia. However, with the commercialization of photography, Russian practitioners
became increasingly dependent upon foreign equipment and materials. With the outbreak
of World War I, photographers were largely cut off from their supplies, and the ensuing
crisis severely limited photographic activity until the mid-1920s.

After the October Revolution, Russian photography followed a unique path due to the
ideological imperatives of the Soviet regime. The Bolsheviks quickly recognized the
propaganda potential of photography and nationalized the photographic industry. During
the civil war, special committees collected historical photographs, documented
contemporary events, and produced photopropaganda. In the early 1920s, Russian
modernist artists, such as Alexander Rodchenko, experimented with the technique of
photomontage, the assembly of photographic fragments into larger compositions. With
the growing politicization of art, photomontage and photography soon became important
media for the creation of ideological images. The 1920s also witnessed the foundation of
the Soviet illustrated mass press. Despite a shortage of experienced photojournalists, the
development of the illustrated press cultivated a new generation of Soviet photographers.
Mikhail Koltsov, editor of the popular magazine Ogonek, laid the groundwork for modern
photojournalism in the Soviet Union by establishing national and international
mechanisms for the production, distribution, and preservation of photographic material.
Koltsov actively promoted photographic education and the further development of both
amateur and professional Soviet photography through the magazine Sovetskoye foto.
During the First Five-Year Plan, creative debates emerged between modernist
photographers and professional Soviet photojournalists. While both groups shunned
aestheticizing pictorialist approaches and were ideologically committed to the
development of uniquely Soviet photography, differences arose concerning creative
methods, especially the relative priority to be given to the form versus content of the
Soviet photograph. These debates stimulated the further development of Soviet
documentary photography. The illustrated magazine USSR in Construction (SSSR na
stroike; 1930 - 1941, 1949) was an important venue for Soviet documentary photography.
Published in Russian, English, French, and German editions, it featured the work of top
photographers and photomontage artists. Like the nineteenth-century ethnographic
albums, USSR in Construction presented the impact of Soviet industrialization and
modernization in diverse parts of the USSR in film-like photographic essays. As the
1930s progressed, official Soviet photography became increasingly lackluster and
formulaic. Published photographs were subjected to extensive retouching and
manipulation - not for creative ends, but for the falsification of reality and history. An
abrupt change took place during World War II, when Soviet photojournalists equipped
with 35-millimeter cameras produced spontaneous images that captured the terrors and
triumphs of war.

Soviet amateur photography flourished in the late 1920s with numerous worker
photography circles. Amateur activity was stimulated by the development of the Soviet
photography industry and the introduction of the first domestic camera in 1930. Later that
decade, however, government regulations increasingly restricted the activity of amateur
photographers, and the number of circles quickly diminished. The material hardships of
the war years further compounded this situation, practically bringing amateur
photographic activity to a standstill. With independent activity severely circumscribed,
Soviet photography was essentially limited to the carefully controlled area of professional
photojournalism.

During the Thaw of the late 1950s, the appearance of new amateur groups led to the
cultivation of a new generation of photographers engaged in social photography that
captured everyday life. Their activity, however, was largely underground. By the 1970s,
photography played an important role in Soviet nonconformist and conceptual art. Artists
such as Boris Mikhailov appropriated and manipulated photographic imagery in a radical
critique of photography's claims to truth. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many
photographic publications and industrial enterprises gradually disappeared. While
professional practitioners quickly adapted to the new market system and creative
photographers achieved international renown, the main area of activity was consumer
snapshot photography, which flourished in Russia with the return of foreign photographic
firms.

Early Developments

The camera itself is based on optical principles known at least since the age of Aristotle;
indeed, a filmless version was in use in the mid-1500s as a sketching device for artists.
Called the camera obscura (Lat.,=dark chamber), it consisted of a small, lightproof box
with a pinhole or lens on one side and a translucent screen on the opposite side. This
screen registered, in a manner suitable for tracing, the inverted image transmitted through
the lens. The human eye was the prototype for this device, which functioned as a
primitive extension of seeing. Most experiments in photographic technology were
directed toward perfecting the medium as a surrogate, more sophisticated eye.

The Invention of Photography

The necessary first breakthrough in photography was in a different, not eye-centered area
—that of making permanent photographic images. Employing data from the researches of
Johann Heinrich Schulze—who, in 1727, discovered that silver nitrate darkened upon
exposure to light—Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphry Davy, early in the 19th cent.,
created what we now call photograms. These were made by placing assorted objects on
paper soaked in silver nitrate and exposing them to sunlight. Those areas of the paper
covered by the objects remained white; the rest blackened after exposure to the light.
Davy and Wedgwood found no way of arresting the chemical action at this stage,
however, and their images lasted only a short time before darkening entirely.

Photography's basic principles, processes, and materials were discovered virtually

simultaneously by a diverse group of individuals of different nationalities, working for
the most part entirely independently of one another. The results of their experiments
coalesced in the first half of the 19th cent., creating a tool for communication that was to
become as powerful and significant as the printing press. Four men figure principally in
the establishment of the rudiments of photographic science.

The French physicist, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, made the first negative (on paper) in
1816 and the first known photograph (on metal; he called it a heliograph) in 1826. By the
latter date he had directed his investigations away from paper surfaces and negatives
(having invented, in the meantime, what is now called the photogravure process of
mechanical reproduction) and toward sensitized metallic surfaces. In 1827 Niepce had
also begun his association with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, a French painter who had
been experimenting along parallel lines. A partnership was formed and they collaborated
until Niepce's death in 1833, after which Daguerre continued their work for the next six
years. In 1839 he announced the invention of a method for making a direct positive image
on a silver plate—the daguerreotype.

Daguerre's announcement was a source of dismay to the English scientist William Henry
Fox Talbot, who had been experimenting independently along related lines for years.
Talbot had evolved a method for making a paper negative from which an infinite number
of paper positives could be created. He had also worked out an effective although
imperfect technique for permanently “fixing” his images. Concerned that he might lose
the rights to his own invention, the calotype process, Talbot wrote to the French Academy
of Sciences, asserting the priority of his own invention. He then lost no time in presenting
his researches to England's Royal Society, of which he was a distinguished member.
All three pioneers, Niepce, Daguerre, and Talbot, along with Sir John Herschel—who in
1819 discovered the suitability of hyposulfite of soda, or “hypo,” as a fixing agent for
sensitized paper images and who is generally credited with giving the new medium its
name—deserve to share the title Inventor of Photography. Each made a vital and unique
contribution to the invention of the photographic process. The process developed by
Daguerre and Niepce was, in a grand gesture, purchased from them by the French
government and given, free of patent restrictions, to the world. Talbot patented his own
process and then published a description of it, entitled The Pencil of Nature (1844–46).
This book, containing 24 original prints, was the first ever illustrated with photographs.

The Daguerreotype

Daguerreotypy spread rapidly, except in England, where Daguerre had secretly patented
his process before selling it to the French government. The legal problems attending the
pursuit of photography as a profession account in part for the widespread influence of
amateurs (e.g., Nadar, the French pioneer photographer) on the early development of the
medium. The popularity of the daguerreotype is attributable to two principal factors. The
first of these was the Victorian passion for novelty and for the accumulation of material
objects, which found its perfect paradigm in these silvery, exquisitely detailed miniatures.
The second was the greatly increasing demand from a rising middle class for qualitatively
good but—compared to a painter's fee—inexpensive family portraits. The cheaper tintype
eventually made such likenesses available to all.

The principal shortcoming of the daguerreotype and its variants was inherent in its nature
as a direct positive. Unique and unreproducible, it could not serve for the production of
any image intended for wide distribution. This factor, combined with the lengthy
exposure time necessitated by the process, restricted its function to portraiture. The vast
majority of surviving daguerreotypes are portraits; images of any other subject are
exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, for 20 years the daguerreotype completely overshadowed
the greater utility of the calotype. In the United States, where it was equally popular, the
daguerreotype was promoted by John W. Draper and Samuel F. B. Morse.

The Calotype

The calotype's paper negative made possible the reproduction of photographic images.
The unavoidably coarse paper base for the negative, however, eliminated the delicate
detail that made the daguerreotype so appealing. This lack of precision was understood
and used to advantage by the Scottish painter David Octavius Hill and his assistant,
Robert Adamson. From 1843 to 1848 they made an extensive series of calotype portraits
of Scottish clergymen, intended to serve only as studies for a group portrait in oils, that
stands today among the major bodies of work in the medium. Hill and Adamson
composed their portraits in broad planes, juxtaposing bold masses of light and dark,
creating works that are monumental in feeling despite their small size.

The Collodion Process

The dilemma of detail versus reproducibility was resolved in 1851 by an Englishman,
Frederick Scott Archer, who introduced the collodion process. This method, also known
as the “wet plate” technique, involved coating a glass plate with silver iodide in
suspension, exposing it while still wet, and developing it immediately. Once fixed and
dried, the glass plate was covered with a thin, flexible film containing the negative image,
the definition and detail of which approached that of the daguerreotype. As this process
merged the advantages of both its predecessors, it was universally adopted within a very
short time.

The Impact of Early Photography

With the advent of the collodion process came mass production and dissemination of
photographic prints. The inception of these visual documents of personal and public
history engendered vast changes in people's perception of history, of time, and of
themselves. The concept of privacy was greatly altered as cameras were used to record
most areas of human life. The ubiquitous presence of photographic machinery eventually
changed humankind's sense of what was suitable for observation. The photograph was
considered incontestable proof of an event, experience, or state of being.

To fulfill the mounting and incessant demand for more images, photographers spread out
to every corner of the world, recording all the natural and manufactured phenomena they
could find. By the last quarter of the 19th cent. most households could boast respectable
photographic collections. These were in three main forms: the family album, which
contained cabinet portraits and the smaller cartes-de-visite and tintypes; scrapbooks
containing large prints of views from various parts of the world; and boxes of stereoscope
cards, which in combination with the popular stereo viewer created an effective illusion
of three-dimensionality.

A number of photographers, including Timothy O'Sullivan, J. K. Hillers, and W. H.

Jackson, accompanied exploratory expeditions to the new frontiers in the American West,
while John Thomson returned from China and Maxime Du Camp from Egypt with
records of vistas and peoples never before seen by Western eyes. Roger Fenton, who
photographed the Crimean conflict, and Mathew Brady's photographic corps, who
documented the American Civil War, provided graphic evidence of the hellishness of
combat.

Further Developments

E. J. Marey, the painter Thomas Eakins, and Eadweard Muybridge all devised means for
making stop-action photographs that demonstrated the gap between what the mind thinks
it sees and what the eye actually perceives. Muybridge's major work, Animal Locomotion
(1887), remains a basic source for artists and scientists alike. As accessory lenses were
perfected, the camera's vision extended both telescopically and microscopically; the
moon and the microorganism became accessible as photographic images.
The introduction of the halftone process (see photoengraving; printing) in 1881 made
possible the accurate reproduction of photographs in books and newspapers. In
combination with new improvements in photographic technology, including dry plates
and smaller cameras, which made photographing faster and less cumbersome, the
halftone made immediate reportage feasible and paved the way for news photography.
George Eastman's introduction in 1888 of roll film and the simple Kodak box camera
provided everyone with the means of making photographs for themselves. Meanwhile,
studies in sensitometry, the new science of light-sensitive materials, made exposure and
processing more practicable.

Art and Documentary Photography

The fight to certify photography as a fine art has been among the medium's dominant
philosophical preoccupations since its inception. Photography's legitimacy as an art form
was challenged by artists and critics, who seized upon the mechanical and chemical
aspects of the photographic process as proof that photography was, at best, a craft.
Perhaps because so many painters came to rely so heavily on the photograph as a source
of imagery, they insisted that photography could only be a handmaiden to the arts.

To prove that photography was indeed an art, photographers at first imitated the painting
of the time. Enormous popularity was achieved by such photographers as O. J. Rejlander
and Henry Peach Robinson, who created sentimental genre scenes by printing from
multiple negatives. Julia Margaret Cameron blurred her images to achieve a painterly
softness of line, creating a series of remarkably powerful soft-focus portraits of her
celebrated friends.

In opposition to the painterly aesthetic in photography was P. H. Emerson and other early
advocates of what has since become known as “straight” photography. According to this
approach the photographic image should not be tampered with or subjected to handwork
or other affectations lest it lose its integrity. Emerson proposed this philosophy in his
controversial and influential book, Naturalistic Photography (1889). Appropriately,
Emerson was the first to recognize the importance of the work of Alfred Stieglitz, who
battled for photography's place among the arts during the first part of the 20th cent.

In revolt against the entrenched imitation of genre painting known as “salon”

photography, Stieglitz founded a movement which he called the Photo-Secession, related
to the radical secession movements in painting. He initiated publication of a magazine,
Camera Work (1903–17), which was a forum for the Photo-Secession and for enlightened
opinion and critical thought in all the arts. It remains the most sumptuously and
meticulously produced photographic quarterly in the history of the medium. In New York
City, Stieglitz opened three galleries, the first (1908–17) called “291” (from its address at
291 Fifth Ave.), then the Intimate Gallery (1925–30), and An American Place (1930–46),
where photographic work was hung beside contemporary, often controversial, work in
other media.
Stieglitz's own photographs and those of several other Photo-Secessionists—Edward
Steichen, one of his early protégés; Frederick Evans, the British architectural
photographer; and the portraitist Alvin L. Coburn—adhered with relative strictness to a
“straight” aesthetic. The quality of their works, despite a pervasive self-consciousness,
was consistently of the highest craftsmanship. Stieglitz's overriding concern with the
concept “art for art's sake” kept him, and the audience he built for the medium, from an
appreciation of an equally important branch of photography: the documentary.

The power of the photograph as record was demonstrated in the 19th cent., as when
William H. Jackson's photographs of the Yellowstone area persuaded the U.S. Congress
to set that territory aside as a national park. In the early 20th cent. photographers and
journalists were beginning to use the medium to inform the public on crucial issues in
order to generate social change.

Taking as their precedents the work of such men as Jackson and reporter Jacob Riis
(whose photographs of New York City slums resulted in much-needed legislation),
documentarians like Lewis Hine and James Van DerZee began to build a photographic
tradition whose central concerns had little to do with the concept of art. The
photojournalist sought to build, strengthen, or change public opinion by means of novel,
often shocking images. The finished form of the documentary image was the inexpensive
multiple, the magazine or newspaper reproduction. For a time the two traditions, art
photography and documentary photography, appeared to be merged within the work of
one man, Paul Strand. Strand's works combined a documentary concern with a lean,
modernist vision related to the avant-garde art of Europe.

The Aesthetics of Photography

Seeking to determine the particular aesthetics of photography, the American Berenice

Abbott and the Frenchmen Eugène Atget, André Kertész, and Henri Cartier-Bresson
developed intensely personal styles. The exponents of surrealism in France and of
futurism in Italy and the various German art movements that were focused in the Bauhaus
all explored the medium of photography. The international exhibition “Film und Foto,”
held in Stuttgart in 1929, helped to make formal a purely photographic aesthetic. The
works exhibited combined elements of functionalism and abstraction. Photographic
subject matter shifted from the past to the present—a present of new forms in machinery
and architecture, new concern with the experience of the working classes, and a new
interest in the timeless forms of nature.

In California during the 1920s and 30s Edward Weston and a handful of kindred spirits
founded the f/64 group, taking their name from the smallest lens opening, that which
provides the greatest precision of line and detail. This small and unofficial group—which
included Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke—came to dominate
photographic art, overshadowing the pictorial aesthetic. They and their imitators
eschewed all post-exposure handwork, and worked with 8 × 10-in. view cameras in order
to obtain the largest possible negatives from which to make straightforward contact
prints. They limited their subject matter to static things: the still life, the distant or closely
viewed landscape, and the formal portrait. The influential teacher Minor White became
known for his poetic, visionary work related in technique to this straight approach.

The Impact of New Technology

The development of the 35-mm or “candid” camera by Oskar Barnack of the Ernst Leitz
company, first marketed in 1925, made documentarians infinitely more mobile and less
conspicuous, while the manufacture of faster black-and-white film enabled them to work
without a flash in situations with a minimum of light. Color film for transparencies
(slides) was introduced in 1935 and color negative film in 1942. Portable lighting
equipment was perfected, and in 1947 the Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a
positive print in seconds, was placed on the market. All of these technological advances
granted the photojournalist enormous and unprecedented versatility.

The advent of large-circulation picture magazines, such as Life (begun 1936) and Look
(begun 1937), provided an outlet and a vast audience for documentary work. At the same
time a steady stream of convulsive national and international events provided a wealth of
material for the extended photo-essay, the documentarian's natural mode. One of these
was the Great Depression of the 1930s, which proved to be the source of an important
body of documentary work. Under the leadership of Roy Stryker, the photographic
division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) began to make an archive of images
of America during this epoch of crisis. Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and
Dorothea Lange of the FSA group photographed the cultural disintegration generated by
the Depression and the concomitant disappearance of rural lifestyles.

With the coming of World War II photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White,

Edward Steichen, W. Eugene Smith, Lee Miller, and Robert Capa, documented the global
conflict. The war was a stimulus to photography in other ways as well. From the stress
analysis of metals to aerial surveillance, the medium was a crucial tool in many areas of
the war effort, and, in the urgency of war, numerous technological discoveries and
advances were made that ultimately benefited all photographers.

Modern Photography

After the war museums and art schools opened their doors to photography, a trend that
has continued to the present. Photographers began to break free of the oppressive
strictures of the straight aesthetic and documentary modes of expression. As exemplified
by Robert Frank in his highly influential book-length photo-essay, The Americans (1959),
the new documentarians commenced probing what has been called the “social
landscape,” often mirroring in their images the anxiety and alienation of urban life. Such
introspection naturally led to an increasingly personal form of documentary photography,
as in the works of J. H. Lartigue and Diane Arbus.

Many young photographers felt little inhibition against handwork, collage, multiple
images, and other forms that were anathema to practitioners of the straight aesthetic.
Since the 1960s photography has become an increasingly dominant medium within the
visual arts. Many painters and printmakers, including Andy Warhol, Robert
Rauschenberg, and David Hockney have blended photography with other modes of
expression, including computer imaging in mixed media compositions at both large and
small scale. Contemporary photographers who use more traditional methods to explore
non-traditional subjects include Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince.

The 1990s brought the first attempt to provide a fully integrated photographic system.
Aimed at the amateur photographer, the Advanced Photo System (APS) was developed
by an international consortium of camera and film manufacturers. The keystone of the
new system is a magnetic coating that enables the camera, film, and photofinishing
equipment to communicate. The cameras are self-loading, can be switched among three
different formats (classic, or 4 by 6 in.; hi vision, or 4 by 7 in.; and panoramic, or 4 by
11.5 in.), and are fully automatic (auto-focus, auto-exposure—“point-and-shoot”). The
film is a new, smaller size (24 mm), has an improved polyester plastic base, and two
magnetic strips that record the exposure and framing parameters for each picture and
allow the user to add a brief notation to each frame. The photofinishing equipment can
read the magnetic data on the film and adjust the developing of each negative to
compensate for the conditions. After processing, the negatives (still encased in the
cassette) are returned along with the photographs and an index sheet of thumbnail-size
contact prints from which reprints and enlargements can be selected.

Other Aspects of Photography

In the contemporary world the practical applications of the photographic medium are
legion: it is an important tool in education, medicine, commerce, criminology, and the
military. Its scientific applications include aerial mapping and surveying, geology,
reconnaissance, meteorology, archaeology, and anthropology. New techniques such as
holography, a means of creating a three-dimensional image in space, continue to expand
the medium's technological and creative horizons. In astronomy the charge coupled
device (CCD) can detect and register even a single photon of light.

Digital Technology

By the end of the 20th cent. digital imaging and processing and computer-based
techniques had made it possible to manipulate images in many ways, creating
revolutionary changes in photography. Digital technology allowed for a fundamental
change in the nature of photographic technique. Instead of light passing through a lens
and striking emulsion on film, digital photography uses sensors and color filters. In one
technique three filters are arranged in a mosaic pattern on top of the photosensitive layer.
Each filter allows only one color (red, green, or blue) to pass through to the pixel beneath
it. In the other technique, three separate photosensitive layers are embedded in silicon.
Since silicon absorbs different colors at different depths, each layer allows a different
color to pass through. When stacked together, a full color pixel results. In both techniques
the photosensitive material converts images into a series of numbers that are then
translated back into tonal values and printed. Using computers, various numbers can
easily be changed, thus altering colors, rearranging pictorial elements, or combining
photographs with other kinds of images. Some digital cameras record directly onto
computer disks or into a computer, where the images can be manipulated at will.

Bibliography

See B. Newhall, The History of Photography: 1839 to the Present Day (5th rev. ed.
1982); R. Bolton, Contest of Meaning (1992); G. Batchen, Burning with Desire: The
Conception of Photography (1999); J. Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs (1999); M. J.
Langford, Basic Photography (2001); T. Ang, Digital Photography: An Introduction
(2003). Among the many outstanding volumes of collected photographs are E. Steichen,
ed., The Family of Man (1955) and American Album (1968; comp. by the ed. of
American Heritage); V. Goldberg, Photography in Print (1988); W. J. Mitchell, The
Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Age (1993).

Photography (IPA: [fә'tɒgrәfi] or IPA: [fә'tɑːgrәfi][1]) (from Greek φωτο and γραφία) is
the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on
a sensitive medium, such as a film, or an electronic sensor. Light patterns reflected or
emitted from objects activate a sensitive chemical or electronic sensor during a timed
exposure, usually through a photographic lens in a device known as a camera that also
stores the resulting information chemically or electronically. Photography has many uses
for business, science, art and pleasure.

Lens and mounting of a large-format camera.

A historic camera: the Contax S of 1949 — the first pentaprism SLR.

Nikon F of 1959 — the first 35mm film system camera.

The word "photography" comes from the Greek φώς (phos) "light" + γραφίς (graphis)
"stylus", "paintbrush" or γραφή (graphê) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing",
together meaning "drawing with light." Traditionally, the products of photography have
been called negatives and photographs, commonly shortened to photos.

The discipline of making lighting and camera choices when recording photographic
images for the cinema is dealt with under Cinematography

Photographic cameras

The camera or camera obscura is the image-forming device, and photographic film or a
silicon electronic image sensor is the sensing medium. The respective recording medium
can be the film itself, or a digital electronic or magnetic memory.

Photographers control the camera and lens to "expose" the light recording material (such
as film) to the required amount of light to form a "latent image" (on film) or "raw file" (in
digital cameras) which, after appropriate processing, is converted to a usable image.
Digital cameras replace film with an electronic image sensor based on light-sensitive
electronics such as charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal-oxide-
semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The resulting digital image is stored electronically,
but can be reproduced on paper or film.

The movie camera is a type of photographic camera which takes a rapid sequence of
photographs on strips of film. In contrast to a still camera, which captures a single
snapshot at a time, the movie camera takes a series of images, each called a "frame". This
is accomplished through an intermittent mechanism. The frames are later played back in a
movie projector at a specific speed, called the "frame rate" (number of frames per
second). While viewing, a person's eyes and brain merge the separate pictures together to
create the illusion of motion.[2]

In all but certain specialized cameras, the process of obtaining a usable exposure must
involve the use, manually or automatically, of a few controls to ensure the photograph is
clear, sharp and well illuminated. The controls usually include but are not limited to the
following:

• Focus - the adjustment to place the sharpest focus where it is desired on the
subject.
• Aperture – adjustment of the iris, measured as f-number, which controls the
amount of light passing through the lens. Aperture also has an effect on focus and
depth of field, namely, the smaller the opening aperture, the less light but the
greater the depth of field--that is, the greater the range within which objects
appear to be sharply focused. The current focal length divided by the f-number
gives the actual aperture size in millimeters.
• Shutter speed – adjustment of the speed (often expressed either as fractions of
seconds or as an angle, with mechanical shutters) of the shutter to control the
amount of time during which the imaging medium is exposed to light for each
exposure. Shutter speed may be used to control the amount of light striking the
image plane; 'faster' shutter speeds (that is, those of shorter duration) decrease
both the amount of light and the amount of image blurring from motion of the
subject and/or camera.
• White balance – on digital cameras, electronic compensation for the color
temperature associated with a given set of lighting conditions, ensuring that white
light is registered as such on the imaging chip and therefore that the colors in the
frame will appear natural. On mechanical, film-based cameras, this function is
served by the operator's choice of film stock or with color correction filters. In
addition to using white balance to register natural coloration of the image,
photographers may employ white balance to aesthetic end, for example white
balancing to a blue object in order to obtain a warm color temperature.
• Metering – measurement of exposure so that highlights and shadows are exposed
according to the photographer's wishes. Many modern cameras meter and set
exposure automatically. Before automatic exposure, correct exposure was
accomplished with the use of a separate light metering device or by the
photographer's knowledge and experience of gauging correct settings. To translate
the amount of light into a usable aperture and shutter speed, the meter needs to
adjust for the sensitivity of the film or sensor to light. This is done by setting the
"film speed" or ISO sensitivity into the meter.
• ISO speed – traditionally used to "tell the camera" the film speed of the selected
film on film cameras, ISO speeds are employed on modern digital cameras as an
indication of the system's gain from light to numerical output and to control the
automatic exposure system. A correct combination of ISO speed, aperture, and
shutter speed leads to an image that is neither too dark nor too light.
• Auto-focus point – on some cameras, the selection of a point in the imaging
frame upon which the auto-focus system will attempt to focus. Many Single-lens
reflex cameras (SLR) feature multiple auto-focus points in the viewfinder.

Many other elements of the imaging device itself may have a pronounced effect on the
quality and/or aesthetic effect of a given photograph; among them are:
 • Focal length and type of lens (telephoto or "long" lens, macro, wide angle,
fisheye, or zoom)
• Filters placed between the subject and the light recording material, either in front
of or behind the lens
• Inherent sensitivity of the medium to light intensity and color/wavelengths.
• The nature of the light recording material, for example its resolution as
measured in pixels or grains of silver halide.

Controlling the photographic exposure and rendering

A photographer using a flash.

Camera controls are inter-related. The total amount of light reaching the film plane (the
"exposure") changes with the duration of exposure, aperture of the lens, and, the effective
focal length of the lens (which in variable focal length lenses, can change as the lens is
zoomed). Changing any of these controls can alter the exposure. Many cameras may be
set to adjust most or all of these controls automatically. This automatic functionality is
useful for occasional photographers in many situations.

The duration of an exposure is referred to as shutter speed, often even in cameras that
don't have a physical shutter, and is typically measured in fractions of a second. Aperture
is expressed by an f-number or f-stop (derived from focal ratio), which is proportional to
the ratio of the focal length to the diameter of the aperture. If the f-number is decreased
by a factor of , the aperture diameter is increased by the same factor, and its area is
increased by a factor of 2. The f-stops that might be found on a typical lens include 2.8, 4,
5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, where going up "one stop" (using lower f-stop numbers) doubles
the amount of light reaching the film, and stopping down one stop halves the amount of
light.

Exposures can be achieved through various combinations of shutter speed and aperture.
For example, f/8 at 8 ms (=1/125th of a second) and f/5.6 at 4 ms (=1/250th of a second)
yield the same amount of light. The chosen combination has an impact on the final result.
In addition to the subject or camera movement that might vary depending on the shutter
speed, the aperture (and focal length of the lens) determine the depth of field, which
refers to the range of distances from the lens that will be in focus. For example, using a
long lens and a large aperture (f/2.8, for example), a subject's eyes might be in sharp
focus, but not the tip of the nose. With a smaller aperture (f/22), or a shorter lens, both the
subject's eyes and nose can be in focus. With very small apertures, such as pinholes, a
wide range of distance can be brought into focus.

Image capture is only part of the image forming process. Regardless of material, some
process must be employed to render the latent image captured by the camera into the final
photographic work. This process consists of two steps, development and printing.

During the printing process, modifications can be made to the print by several controls.
Many of these controls are similar to controls during image capture, while some are
exclusive to the printing process. Most controls have equivalent digital concepts, but
some create different effects. For example, dodging and burning controls are different
between digital and film processes. Other printing modifications include:

• Chemicals and process used during film development

• Duration of exposure – equivalent to shutter speed
• Printing aperture – equivalent to aperture, but has no effect on depth of field
• Contrast
• Dodging – reduces exposure of certain print areas, resulting in lighter areas
• Burning in – increases exposure of certain areas, resulting in darker areas
• Paper texture – glossy, matte, etc
• Paper type – resin-coated (RC) or fiber-based (FB)
• Paper size
• Toners – used to add warm or cold tones to black and white prints

Uses of photography

Photography gained the interest of many scientists and artists from its inception.
Scientists have used photography to record and study movements, such as Eadweard
Muybridge's study of human and animal locomotion in 1887. Artists are equally
interested by these aspects but also try to explore avenues other than the photo-
mechanical representation of reality, such as the pictorialist movement. Military, police,
and security forces use photography for surveillance, recognition and data storage.
Photography is used by amateurs to preserve memories of favorite times, to capture
special moments, to tell stories, to send messages, and as a source of entertainment. Many
mobile phones now contain cameras to facilitate such use.

Commercial advertising relies heavily on photography and has contributed greatly to its
development.
History of photography

icéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph of a scene from nature, c. 1826. This
image required an eight-hour exposure, which resulted in sunlight being visible on both
sides of the buildings.

Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the
first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti described a pinhole camera in
the 5th century B.C.E,[3] Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera
obscura and pinhole camera,[4][3] Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate,
and Georges Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered silver chloride.[citation needed] Daniel Barbaro
described a diaphragm in 1568.[citation needed] Wilhelm Homberg described how light
darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694.[citation needed] The fiction book
Giphantie, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as
photography.[citation needed]

Photography as a usable 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. 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 1837. Daguerre took the first ever photo of a person
in 1839 when whilst taking a daguerrotype of a paris street a pedestrian happened to stop
long enough to be captured by the the long exposure (several minutes). Eventually,
France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his formula, in exchange for his promise to
announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did in 1839.

Meanwhile, Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process in 1832,
naming it Photographie, and William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to
fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention,
Talbot refined his process so that portraits were made readily available to the masses. By
1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process, which creates negative images. John
Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the cyanotype
process, now familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography",
"negative" and "positive". He discovered sodium thiosulphate solution to be a solvent of
silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it
could be used to "fix" pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass
negative in late 1839.

In March 1851, Frederick Scott Archer published his findings in "The Chemist" on the
wet plate collodion process. This became the most widely used process between 1852 and
the late 1880s when the dry plate was introduced. There are three subsets to the Collodion
process; the Ambrotype (positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (positive
image on metal) and the negative which was printed on Albumen or Salt paper.

Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made in through the
nineteenth century. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace
photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.

In 1908 Gabriel Lippmann won the Nobel Laureate in Physics for his method of
reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference, also
known as the Lippmann plate.

Photographic processes

Black-and-white photography

All photography was originally monochrome, most of these photographs were black-and-
white. Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography
continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its "classic" photographic
look. It is important to note that some monochromatic pictures are not always pure blacks
and whites, but also contain other hues depending on the process. The Cyanotype process
produces an image of blue and white for example. The albumen process which was used
more than 150 years ago had brown tones.

Many photographers continue to produce some monochrome images. Some full color
digital images are processed using a variety of techniques to create black and whites, and
some cameras have even been produced to exclusively shoot monochrome.

Color photography

Color photography was explored beginning in the mid 1800s. Early experiments in color
could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first permanent color
photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
Early color photograph taken by Prokudin-Gorskii (1915).

One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera
would have a color filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer
with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a darkroom or
processing plant. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed
another technique, with three color plates taken in quick succession.

Practical application of the technique was held back by the very limited color response of
early film; however, in the early 1900s, following the work of photo-chemists such as H.
W. Vogel, emulsions with adequate sensitivity to green and red light at last became
available.

The first color plate, Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the
market in 1907. It was based on a 'screen-plate' filter made of dyed dots of potato starch,
and was the only color film on the market until German Agfa introduced the similar
Agfacolor in 1932. In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern ('integrated tri-
pack') color film, Kodachrome, based on three colored emulsions. This was followed in
1936 by Agfa's Agfacolor Neue. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack process, the color
couplers in Agfacolor Neue were integral with the emulsion layers, which greatly
simplified the film processing. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based
on the Agfacolor Neue technology. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.

Color photography may form images as a positive transparency, intended for use in a
slide projector or as color negatives, intended for use in creating positive color
enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film
(non-digital) color photography owing to the introduction of automated photoprinting
equipment.

Full-spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared photography

Ultraviolet and infrared films have been available for many decades and employed in a
variety of photographic avenues since the 1960s. New technological trends in digital
photography have opened a new direction in full spectrum photography, where careful
filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and infrared lead to new artistic visions.
Modified digital cameras can detect some ultraviolet, all of the visible and much of the
near infrared spectrum, as most digital imaging sensors are sensitive from about 350nm
to 1000nm. An off-the-shelf digital camera contains an infrared hot mirror filter that
blocks most of the infrared and a bit of the ultraviolet that would otherwise be detected
by the sensor, narrowing the accepted range from about 400nm to 700nm[5]. Replacing a
hot mirror or infrared blocking filter with an infrared pass or a wide spectrally
transmitting filter allows the camera to detect the wider spectrum light at greater
sensitivity. Without the hot-mirror, the red, green and blue (or cyan, yellow and magenta)
colored micro-filters placed over the sensor elements pass varying amounts of ultraviolet
(blue window) and infrared (primarily red, and somewhat lesser the green and blue
micro-filters).

Uses of full spectrum photography are for fine art photography, geology, forensics & law
enforcement, and even some claimed use in ghost hunting.

Digital photography

A handheld digital camera.

The Nikon D1, the first DSLR to truly compete with, and begin to replace, film cameras
in the professional photojournalism and sports photography fields.
Nikon DSLR and scanner, which converts film images to digital

Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone.

Traditional photography burdened photographers working at remote locations without

easy access to processing facilities, and competition from television pressured
photographers to deliver images to newspapers with greater speed. Photo journalists at
remote locations often carried miniature photo labs and a means of transmitting images
through telephone lines. In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a
charge-coupled device for imaging, eliminating the need for film: the Sony Mavica.
While the Mavica saved images to disk, the images were displayed on television, and the
camera was not fully digital. In 1990, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100, the first
commercially available digital camera. Although its high cost precluded uses other than
photojournalism and professional photography, commercial digital photography was
born.

Digital imaging uses an electronic image sensor to record the image as a set of electronic
data rather than as chemical changes on film. The primary difference between digital and
chemical photography is that chemical photography resists manipulation because it
involves film and photographic paper, while digital imaging is a highly manipulative
medium. This difference allows for a degree of image post-processing that is
comparatively difficult in film-based photography and permits different communicative
potentials and applications.

Digital point-and-shoot cameras have become widespread consumer products, outselling

film cameras, and including new features such as video and audio recording. Kodak
announced in January 2004 that it would no longer sell reloadable 35 mm cameras in
western Europe, Canada and the United States after the end of that year. Kodak was at
that time a minor player in the reloadable film cameras market. In January 2006, Nikon
followed suit and announced that they will stop the production of all but two models of
their film cameras: the low-end Nikon FM10, and the high-end Nikon F6. On May 25,
2006, Canon announced they will stop developing new film SLR cameras.[6]
Camera phones, combined with sites like flickr have lead to a new kind of social
photography.

Though most new camera designs are now digital, a new 6*6cm/6*7cm medium format
film camera was introduced in 2008 in a cooperation between Fuji and Voigtländer.[7][8]

According to a survey made by Kodak in 2007, 75 percent of professional photographers

say they will continue to use film, even though some embrace digital.[9]

According to the U.S. survey results, more than two-thirds (68 percent) of professional
photographers prefer the results of film to those of digital for certain applications
including:

• film’s superiority in capturing more information on medium and large format

films (48 percent);
• creating a traditional photographic look (48 percent);
• capturing shadow and highlighting details (45 percent);
• the wide exposure latitude of film (42 percent); and
• archival storage (38 percent)

Because photography is popularly synonymous with truth ("The camera doesn't lie."),
digital imaging has raised many ethical concerns. Many photojournalists have declared
they will not crop their pictures, or are forbidden from combining elements of multiple
photos to make "illustrations," passing them as real photographs. Many courts will not
accept digital images as evidence because of their inherently manipulative nature and
they could be completely fake, do they only take solid evidence. Today's technology has
made picture editing relatively simple for even the novice photographer.

Recent changes of in-camera processing allows digital fingerprinting of RAW photos to

verify against tampering of digital photos for forensics use.

Photographic modes of production

Amateur photography

An amateur photographer is one who practices photography as a hobby and not for profit.
The quality of some amateur work is comparable to that of many professionals but may
be highly specialised or eclectic in its choice of subjects. Amateur photography is often
pre-eminent in photographic subjects which have little prospect of commercial use or
reward.

Commercial photography
Manual shutter control and exposure settings can achieve unusual results.

Commercial photography is probably best defined as any photography for which the
photographer is paid for images rather than works of art. In this light money could be
paid for the subject of the photograph or the photograph itself. Wholesale, retail, and
professional uses of photography would fall under this definition. The commercial
photographic world could include:

• Advertising photography: photographs made to illustrate and usually sell a service

or product. These images are generally done with an advertising agency, design
firm or with an in-house corporate design team.
• Fashion and glamour photography: This type of photography usually incorporates
models. Fashion photography emphasizes the clothes or product, glamour
emphasizes the model. Glamour photography is popular in advertising and in
men's magazines. Models in glamour photography may be nude, but this is not
always the case.
• Crime Scene Photography: This type of photography consists of photographing
scenes of crime such as robberies and murders. A black and white camera or an
infrared camera may be used to capture specific details.
• Still life photography usually depicts inanimate subject matter, typically
commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made.
• Food photography can be used for editorial, packaging or advertising use. Food
photography is similar to still life photography, but requires some special skills.
• Editorial photography: photographs made to illustrate a story or idea within the
context of a magazine. These are usually assigned by the magazine.
• Photojournalism: this can be considered a subset of editorial photography.
Photographs made in this context are accepted as a documentation of a news
story.
• Portrait and wedding photography: photographs made and sold directly to the end
user of the images.
• Landscape photography: photographs of different locations.
• Wildlife photography that demonstrates life of the animals.
• Photo sharing: publishing or transfer of a user's digital photos online.
The market for photographic services demonstrates the aphorism "one picture is worth a
thousand words," which has an interesting basis in the history of photography. Magazines
and newspapers, companies putting up Web sites, advertising agencies and other groups
pay for photography.

Many people take photographs for self-fulfillment or for commercial purposes.

Organizations with a budget and a need for photography have several options: they can
employ a photographer directly, organize a public competition, or obtain rights to stock
photographs. Photo stock can be procured through traditional stock giants, such as Getty
Images or Corbis; smaller microstock agencies, such as Fotolia; or web marketplaces,
such as Cutcaster.

Photography as an art form

Classic Alfred Stieglitz photograph, The Steerage shows unique aesthetic of black and
white photos.

During the twentieth century, both fine art photography and documentary photography
became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the United
States, a handful of photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John
Szarkowski, F. Holland Day, and Edward Weston, spent their lives advocating for
photography as a fine art. At first, fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles.
This movement is called Pictorialism, often using soft focus for a dreamy, 'romantic'
look. In reaction to that, Weston, Ansel Adams, and others formed the f/64 Group to
advocate 'straight photography', the photograph as a (sharply focused) thing in itself and
not an imitation of something else.

The aesthetics of photography is a matter that continues to be discussed regularly,

especially in artistic circles. Many artists argued that photography was the mechanical
reproduction of an image. If photography is authentically art, then photography in the
context of art would need redefinition, such as determining what component of a
photograph makes it beautiful to the viewer. The controversy began with the earliest
images "written with light"; Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and others among the
very earliest photographers were met with acclaim, but some questioned if their work met
the definitions and purposes of art.

Clive Bell in his classic essay Art states that only "significant form" can distinguish art
from what is not art.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist;
“ possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is
this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic
emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres,
Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua,
and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one
answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in
a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic
emotions. ”
On February 14th 2006 Sotheby’s London sold the 2001 photograph "99 Cent II
Diptychon" for an unprecedented $3,346,456 to an anonymous bidder making it the most
expensive of all time.

• Conceptual photography: Photography that turns a concept or idea into a

photograph. Even though what is depicted in the photographs are real objects, the
subject is strictly abstract.

Scientific and Forensic photography

Original Tay Bridge from the north showing structure based on towers built from cast
iron columns. When enlarged this plate shows a key design flaw in the bridge: the smaller
surviving towers were supported by a continuous girder at their tops, while the fallen
towers lack this essential reinforcing element.
Fallen Tay Bridge from the north. The two surviving high towers show a gap in their tops.

The camera has a long and distinguished history as a means of recording phenomena
from the first use by Daguerre and Fox-Talbot, such as astronomical events (eclipses for
example) and small creatures when the camera was attached to the eyepiece of
microscopes (in photomicroscopy). The camera also proved useful in recording crime
scenes and the scenes of accidents, one of the first applications being at the scene of the
Tay Rail Bridge disaster of 1879. The court, just a few days after the accident, ordered
James Valentine of Dundee to record the scene using both long distance shots and close-
ups of the debris. The set of accident photographs was used in the subsequent court of
inquiry so that witnesses could identify pieces of the wreckage, and the technique is now
commonplace both at accident scenes and subsequent cases in courts of law. The set of
over 50 Tay bridge photographs are of very high quality, being made on large plate
cameras with a small aperture and using fine grain emulsion film on a glass plate. When
scanned at high resolution, they can be enlarged to show details of the failed components
such as broken cast iron lugs and the tie bars which failed to hold the towers in place.
They show that the bridge was badly designed, badly built and badly maintained. The
methods used in analysing old photographs are known as forensic photography.

Between 1846 and 1852 Charles Brooke invented a technology for the automatic
registration of instruments by photography. These instruments included barometers,
thermometers, psychrometers, and magnetometers, which recorded their readings by
means of an automated photographic process.

Other photographic image forming techniques

Besides the camera, other methods of forming images with light are available. For
instance, a photocopy or xerography machine forms permanent images but uses the
transfer of static electrical charges rather than photographic film, hence the term
electrophotography. Photograms are images produced by the shadows of objects cast on
the photographic paper, without the use of a camera. Objects can also be placed directly
on the glass of an image scanner to produce digital pictures.
Social and cultural implications

There are many ongoing questions about different aspects of photography. In her writing
“On Photography” (1977) Susan Sontag discusses concerns about the objectivity of
photography. This is a highly debated subject within the photographic community
(Bissell, 2000). It has been concluded that photography is a subjective discipline “to
photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting one’s self into a
certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge, and therefore like power” (Sontag,
1977: p 4). Photographers decide what to take a photo of, what elements to exclude and
what angle to frame the photo. Along with the context that a photograph is received in,
photography is definitely a subjective form.

Modern photography has raised a number of concerns on its impact on society. The
concept of the camera being a 'phallic' tool has been exemplified in a number of
Hollywood productions. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), the camera is
presented as a promoter of voyeuristic inhibitions. 'Although the camera is an observation
station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing' [Sontag Susan 1977: p
12]. Michal Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) portrays the camera as both sexual and
sadistically violent technology that literally kills in this picture and at the same time
captures images of the pain and anguish evident on the faces of the female victims.

"The camera doesn't rape or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass,
distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assasinate- all activities that, unike
the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment"
[Sontag Susan 1977: p 12]

Photography is one of the new media forms that changes perception and changes the
structure of society (Levinson, 1997). Further unease has been caused around cameras in
regards to desensitization. Fears that disturbing or explicit images are widely accessible
to children and society at large have been raised. Particularly, photos of war and
pornography are causing a stir. (Sontag). Sontag is concerned that “to photograph is to
turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed”. Desensitization discussion
goes hand in hand with debates about censored images. Sontag writes of her concern that
the ability to censor pictures means the photographer has the ability to construct reality.