The Industrial Revolution

Photography The concept behind the device used for making images by photomechanical process, the camera obscura, was known in the ancient world as early as the time of Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.

A camera obscura is a darkened room or box with a small opening or lens in one side.
Light rays passing through this aperture are projected onto the opposite side and form a picture of the bright objects outside.

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Photography Artists have used the camera obscura as an aid to drawing for centuries. Around 1665, small, portable boxlike camera obscuras were developed. The only additional element needed to fix or make permanent the image projected into a camera obscura was a lightsensitive material capable of capturing this image.

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Know these people: Joseph Niepce Louis Jacques Daguerre William Henry Fox Talbot George Eastman Matthew Brady F.T. Nadar

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Photography Photography and graphic communications have been closely linked beginning with the first experiments to capture an image of nature with a camera. Joseph Niepce, the Frenchman who first produced a photographic image, began his research by seeking an automatic means of transferring drawings onto plates.

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Photography As a lithographic printer, Niepce searched for a way to make plates other than by drawing. In 1822 he coated a pewter sheet with a light-sensitive asphalt, called bitumen of Judea, that hardens when exposed to light. Then he contact printed a drawing, which had been oiled to make it transparent, to the pewter with sunlight.

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Photography He then washed the pewter plate with lavender oil to remove the parts not hardened by light, and then he etched it with acid to make an incised copy of the original.

This routine portrait print is the first image printed from a plate that was created by the photochemical action of light rather than by the human hand.

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Photography In 1826 Niepce expanded his discovery by putting one of his pewter plates in the back of his camera obscura and pointing it out the window.

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Photography Looking out over the rear courtyard of the Niepce home, the light and shadow patterns formed by (from left to right) a wing of the house, a pear tree, a barn roof in front of a low bake house with a chimney, and another wing of the house are seen.

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Photography A theatrical performer and painter who had participated in the invention of the diorama contacted Niepce. Louis Jacque Daguerre had been conducting similar research, and the two shared ideas until Niepce died in 1833.

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Photography The Daguerreotype The daguerreotype is a direct-positive process, creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative.

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Photography The Daguerreotype The process required great care. The silver-plated copper plate had first to be cleaned and polished until the surface looked like a mirror. Next, the plate was sensitized in a closed box over iodine until it took on a yellow-rose appearance.

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Photography The Daguerreotype The plate, held in a lightproof holder, was then transferred to the camera. After exposure to light, the plate was developed over hot mercury until an image appeared. To fix the image, the plate was immersed in a solution of sodium thiosulfate or salt and then toned with gold chloride.

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Photography The Daguerreotype Exposure times for the earliest daguerreotypes ranged from three to fifteen minutes, making the process nearly impractical for portraiture. Modifications to the sensitization process coupled with the improvement of photographic lenses soon reduced the exposure time to less than a minute.

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Photography daguerreotype

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Photography Simultaneous research was conducted in England by William Henry Fox Talbot, who pioneered a process that formed the basis for both photography and photographic printing plates.

While sketching in the Lake Como region of Italy in 1833, Talbot became frustrated with his limited drawing abilities.

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Photography By sandwiching the flowers between his photographic paper and a sheet of glass and exposing the lightsensitive emulsion to sunlight, Talbot invented the photogram, later extensively used as a design tool by designers such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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Photography William Henry Fox Talbot photograms

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Photography William Henry Fox Talbot photograms

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Photography William Henry Fox Talbot, the first photographic negative, 1835. This image was made on Talbots light-sensitive paper in a camera obscura, which pointed toward the leaded glass windows in a large room of his mansion, Lacock Abbey.

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Photography William Henry Fox Talbot, print from the first photographic negative. The sun provided the light source to contact-print the negative to another sheet of sensitized paper, producing this positive image of the sky and land outside the windows..

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Photography William Henry Fox Talbot Print from the first photographic negative. The sun provided the light source to contact print the negative to another sheet of sensitized paper, producing this positive image of the sky and land outside the windows.

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Photography An American dry-plate manufacturer, George Eastman, put the power of photography into the hands of the lay public when he introduced his Kodak camera in 1888.

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Photography George Eastmans camera, simple enough for anyone who can wind a watch, played a major role in making photography every persons art form.

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Photography Mathew Brady, Dunker Church and the Dead, 1862. Made in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, this photograph shows how visual documentation took on a new level of supposed authenticity with photography.

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Photography Due to technical limitations of the medium, photographers such as Brady could only photograph the results of battles, not the actual fighting. This has led to speculation by scholars that scenes captured by photographs were staged or otherwise altered. For example, scholars have suggested that the bodies of the dead may have been moved to enhance the effectiveness of the image.

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Photography Eadweard Muybridge, plate published in The Horse in Motion, 1883. Sequence photography proved the ability of graphic images to record time-and-space relationships. Moving images became a possibility.

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Photography Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt, 1859. The famous actress took Paris by storm and became a major subject for the emerging French poster.

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Photography Jacob Riis 1890

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Photography Lewis Hine 1909

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Photography Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form.

1907

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Photography Man Ray was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements. 1922

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Photography Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. 1932

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Photography William Wegman is an artist best known for creating series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses.

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Photography Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits.

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Photography Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal."