history of photography essay brainly

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Daguerre (1787–1851) and the invention of photography.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

Malcolm Daniel Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), a Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper.

Daguerre’s invention did not spring to life fully grown, although in 1839 it may have seemed that way. In fact, Daguerre had been searching since the mid-1820s for a means to capture the fleeting images he saw in his camera obscura, a draftsman’s aid consisting of a wood box with a lens at one end that threw an image onto a frosted sheet of glass at the other. In 1829, he had formed a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem—how to make a permanent image using light and chemistry—and who had achieved primitive but real results as early as 1826. By the time Niépce died in 1833, the partners had yet to come up with a practical, reliable process.

Not until 1838 had Daguerre’s continued experiments progressed to the point where he felt comfortable showing examples of the new medium to selected artists and scientists in the hope of lining up investors. François Arago, a noted astronomer and member of the French legislature, was among the new art’s most enthusiastic admirers. He became Daguerre’s champion in both the Académie des Sciences and the Chambre des Députés, securing the inventor a lifetime pension in exchange for the rights to his process. Only on August 19, 1839, was the revolutionary process explained, step by step, before a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with an eager crowd of spectators spilling over into the courtyard outside.

The process revealed on that day seemed magical. Each daguerreotype is a remarkably detailed, one-of-a-kind photographic image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized (or fixed) with salt water or “hypo” (sodium thiosulfate). Although Daguerre was required to reveal, demonstrate, and publish detailed instructions for the process, he wisely retained the patent on the equipment necessary to practice the new art.

From the moment of its birth, photography had a dual character—as a medium of artistic expression and as a powerful scientific tool—and Daguerre promoted his invention on both fronts. Several of his earliest plates were still-life compositions of plaster casts after antique sculpture—an ideal subject since the white casts reflected light well, were immobile during long exposures, and lent, by association, the aura of “art” to pictures made by mechanical means. But he also photographed an arrangement of shells and fossils with the same deliberation, and used the medium for other scientific purposes as well. The journalist Hippolyte Gaucheraud, in a scoop that appeared the day before daguerreotypes were first shown to the Académie des Sciences, wrote of having been shown the image of a dead spider photographed through a solar microscope: “You could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; [there is] not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine.” Even Arago, director of the Observatoire de Paris, was reportedly surprised by a daguerreian image of the moon.

Neither Daguerre’s microscopic nor his telescopic daguerreotypes survive, for on March 8, 1839, the Diorama—and with it Daguerre’s laboratory—burned to the ground, destroying the inventor’s written records and the bulk of his early experimental works. In fact, fewer than twenty-five securely attributed photographs by Daguerre survive—a mere handful of still lifes, Parisian views, and portraits from the dawn of photography.

Daniel, Malcolm. “Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855 . CD-ROM. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.

Additional Essays by Malcolm Daniel

• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Photographers in Egypt .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ The Daguerreian Age in France: 1839–55 .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ The Industrialization of French Photography after 1860 .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and the Invention of Photography .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Mission Héliographique, 1851 .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Harry Burton (1879–1940): The Pharaoh’s Photographer .” (January 2009)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ The Rise of Paper Photography in 1850s France .” (September 2008)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Édouard Baldus (1813–1889) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Nadar (1820–1910) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Roger Fenton (1819–1869) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Louis-Rémy Robert (1810–1882) .” (October 2004)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ The Countess da Castiglione .” (July 2007)
• Daniel, Malcolm. “ Edward J. Steichen (1879–1973): The Photo-Secession Years .” (November 2010)

Related Essays

• The Daguerreian Age in France: 1839–55
• Early Histories of Photography in West Africa (1860–1910)
• The Rise of Paper Photography in 1850s France
• The Rise of Paper Photography in Italy, 1839–55
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• The Daguerreian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839–60
• David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848)
• Early Documentary Photography
• Édouard Baldus (1813–1889)
• Eugène Atget (1857–1927)
• Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884)
• Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004)
• The Industrialization of French Photography after 1860
• International Pictorialism
• Louis-Rémy Robert (1810–1882)
• Mission Héliographique, 1851
• Nadar (1820–1910)
• Nineteenth-Century Court Arts in India
• Nineteenth-Century Iran: Art and the Advent of Modernity
• Photographers in Egypt
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• The Structure of Photographic Metaphors
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• History of Photography

A Brief History of Photography: The Beginning

Photography: an art form invented in the 1830s, which became publicly recognised ten years later.

Today, photography is the largest-growing hobby in the world, with the hardware alone creating a multi-billion-dollar industry. Not everyone knows what camera obscura or even shutter speed is, nor have many heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson or even Annie Leibovitz.

In this article, we take a step back and look at the fascinating beginning of photography, answering questions like "What led to the first camera invention?", "W hen was the first photograph taken?", and more.

What You'll Learn: The Firsts in Photography

• How did the beginning of photography happen?
• What was the first photograph?
• What preceded the camera invention?
• How was the path to the first camera ever made?
• When was the first photograph taken?
• Who made the first camera for mass use?
• When did color appear in the history of photography?
• Notable names in photography history

Jump to content in this section:

Before Photography: Camera Obscura

The first photograph, photography takes off, color photography history, the first photograph with people.

• Notables in Photography

Looking Forward

We all need a little help sometimes, more articles you might like.

Before photography was created, people had figured out the basic principles of lenses and the camera. They could project the image on the wall or a piece of paper, but no printing was possible at the time: recording light turned out to be a lot harder than projecting it.

The instrument that people used for processing pictures was called the camera obscura (which is Latin for the dark room). We can't look past it if we're talking about firsts in photography. And although it was around for a few centuries before photography came along, it is, however, the predecessor of the first camera ever made.

It is believed that the camera obscura was invented around the 13 or 14th centuries, although there is a manuscript by an Arabian scholar Hassan ibn Hassan dating from the 10th century that describes the principles on which the camera obscura works and on which analogue photography is based today.

A camera obscura is essentially a dark, closed space in the shape of a box with a hole on one side of it. The hole has to be small enough in proportion to the box to make the camera obscura work properly. Light coming in through a tiny hole transforms and creates an image on the surface that it meets, like the wall of the box. The image is flipped and upside down, however, which is why modern analogue cameras have made use of mirrors.

In the mid-16th century, Giovanni Battista della Porta, an Italian scholar, wrote an essay on how to use a camera obscura to make the drawing process easier. He projected the image of people outside the camera obscura on the canvas inside of it (the camera obscura was a rather big room in this case) and then drew over the image or tried to copy it.

The process of using a camera obscura looked very strange and frightening to people at that time. Giovanni Battista had to drop the idea after he was arrested and prosecuted on a charge of sorcery.

Even though only a few Renaissance artists admitted they used a camera obscura as an aid in drawing, it is believed most of them did. The reason for not openly admitting it was the fear of being charged with associating with occultism or simply not wanting to admit something many artists called cheating.

Today we can state that the camera obscura was a prototype of the modern photo camera, so it's essential to understand the beginning of photography . Many people still find it amusing and use it for artistic reasons or simply for fun.

Installing film and permanently capturing an image was a logical progression. So when did that happen? When was the first photograph taken?

The first photo picture—as we know it—was taken in 1825 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It records a view from the window at Le Gras.

In the early days of photography, the exposure had to last for eight hours, so the sun in the picture had time to move from east to west. This way, it would appear to shine on both sides of the building in the picture.

Niépce came up with the idea of using a petroleum derivative called "Bitumen of Judea" to record the camera's projection. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light, and the unhardened material could then be washed away.

The metal plate that Niépce used was then polished, rendering a negative image that could be coated with ink to produce a print. One of the problems with this method was that the metal plate was heavy, expensive to produce, and took a lot of time to polish.

What Every Photographer Should Know About Lenses

If you've ever wondered how lenses work, what makes a good or bad lens, and how to pick the one that's right for the kinds of photos you want to take, this is the course for you. 

In 1839, Sir John Herschel came up with a way of making the first glass negative. The same year he coined the term photography, deriving from the Greek "fos" meaning light and "grafo"—to write. Even though the process became easier and the result was better, it was still a long time until photography was publicly recognized.

When the history of photography began, it was either used as an aid in the work of a painter or followed the same principles the painters followed. The first publicly recognized portraits were usually portraits of one person or family portraits.

Finally, after decades of refinements and improvements, came a camera aimed at mass use with Eastman Kodak's simple-but-relatively-reliable cameras. The first camera ever made for market distribution, by Kodak, came out in 1888 with the slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest."

In 1900, the Kodak Brownie was introduced, becoming the first commercial camera in the market available for middle-class buyers. The camera only took black and white shots but was very popular due to its efficiency and ease of use. This was a big milestone in the history of photography!

Color photography was explored throughout the 19th century, but didn't become truly commercially viable until the middle of the 20th century.  Prior to this, color could not be preserved for long since the images quickly degraded. Several methods of color photography were patented from 1862 by two French inventors: Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros, working independently.

The first practical color plate in the history of photography reached the market in 1907. The method it used was based on a screen of filters. The screen let filtered red, green, and/or blue light through and then developed to a negative, later reversed to a positive.

Applying the same screen later on in the process of the print resulted in a color photo that would be preserved. The technology, even though slightly altered, is the one that is still used in the processing of images. Red, green, and blue are the primary colors for television and computer screens, hence the RGB modes in numerous imaging applications.

The first color photo, an image of a tartan ribbon (above), was taken in 1861 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who was famous for his work on electromagnetism. Despite the great influence his photograph had on the photo industry, Maxwell is rarely remembered for this as his inventions in the field of physics simply overshadowed this accomplishment. It is, nevertheless, another of the great firsts in photography history. 

The first ever picture to have a human in it was Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre, taken in 1838. The exposure lasted for about ten minutes at the time, so it was barely possible for the camera to capture a person on the busy street. However, it did capture a man who had his shoes polished for long enough to appear in the photo.

A Photographer's Guide to Light | FREE COURSE

Without light, there is no photography. In this course, you'll learn about visible light and the electromagnetic spectrum. You will learn about the three most important qualities of light for photographers: brightness, color, and contrast. Then you will learn about how light interacts with matter: how light is absorbed, how light is transmitted, and how light is reflected. We'll demonstrate the three types of reflection: diffuse, direct, and polarized.

Notable Figures in the History of Photography

At one time, photography was an unusual and perhaps even controversial practice. If not for the enthusiasts who persevered and indeed, pioneered, many techniques, we might not have the photographic styles, artists, and practitioners we have today. Here are just a few of the most influential people we can thank for many of the advances in photography.

Alfred Stieglitz

Photography became a part of day-to-day life and an art movement. One of the people behind photography as art was Alfred Stieglitz, an American photographer and a promoter of modern art.

Stieglitz said that photographers are artists. He, along with F. Holland Day, led the Photo-Secession, the first photography art movement whose primary task was to show that photography was not only about the subject of the picture but also the manipulation by the photographer that led to the subject being portrayed.

Stieglitz set up various exhibitions where photos were judged by photographers. Stieglitz also promoted photography through newly established journals such as "Camera Notes" and "Camera Work".

Examples of Stieglitz's Work

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (Felix Nadar)

Felix Nadar (a pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) was a French caricaturist, journalist and—once photography emerged—a photographer. He is most famous for pioneering the use of artificial lightning in photography. Nadar was a good friend of Jules Verne and is said to have inspired Five Weeks in a Balloon after creating a 60-metre-high balloon named Le Géant (The Giant). Nadar was credited for having published the first ever photo interview in 1886.

Nadar's portraits followed the same principles as a fine art portrait. He was known for depicting many famous people including Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Peter Kropotkin, and George Sand.

Examples of Nadar's Work

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer who is most famous for creating the "street photography" style of photojournalism, using the new compact 35mm format (which we still use today). Around the age of 23, he became very interested in photography and abandoned painting for it. "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant," he would later explain. Strangely enough, he would take his first pictures all around the world but avoided his native France. His first exhibition took place in New York's Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. Cartier-Bresson's first journalistic photos were taken at the George VI coronation in London, but none of those portrayed the King himself.

The Frenchman's works have influenced generations of photo artists and journalists around the world. Despite being narrative in style, his works can also be seen as iconic artworks. Despite all the fame and impact, there are very few pictures of the man. He hated being photographed, as he was embarrassed about his fame.

Examples of Cartier-Bresson's Work

We've learned everything from when the first photograph was taken through to the first camera ever made and the commercial camera invention, and finally we looked at some of the first big names in the field.

The next article in this series will look at the 1940s-80s. We'll cover some other big firsts in photography, like the invention of multi-layer color negatives or the introduction of Polaroid and Fujifilm instant cameras. We'll also investigate how photography became a tool of propaganda and why it came to be used in advertising products and promotion.

If you'd like to take the load off when it comes to photo editing, give Envato Elements a try. Here you can find photography resources like actions and presets , brushes , and more. For a monthly subscription, you can download as many as you like. Here's a great example:

14 Radiant Sunrise Lightroom Presets and LUTs

A set of 14 sunrise LUTs and presets with skin-tone protection. You can use these across most Adobe suites and beyond, including Lightroom (2023+), Lightroom Mobile, and Photoshop. They work best with photographs taken in RAW.

If you'd like to improve your photography skills and become the next big thing, why not try some of our free photography tutorials?

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An Illustrated History of Photography

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Pictures of a Camera Obscura

An illustrated tour of how photography has advanced through the ages.

Photography" is derived from the Greek words photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw") The word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.

Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000AD, invented the first pinhole camera, (also called the Camera Obscura} and was able to explain why the images were upside down.

Illustration of Camera Obscura in Use

Illustration of Camera Obscura in use from the "Sketchbook on military art, including geometry, fortifications, artillery, mechanics, and pyrotechnics"

Joseph Nicephore Niepce's Heliograph Photography

Joseph Nicephore Niepce's heliographs or sun prints as they were called were the prototype for the modern photograph.

In 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first known photographic image using the camera obscura. The camera obscura was a tool used by artists to draw.

Daguerreotype taken by Louis Daguerre

Daguerreotype portrait of louis daguerre 1844, first american daguerreotype - robert cornelius self-portrait.

Robert Cornelius's self-portrait is one of the first.

After several years of experimentation, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre developed a more convenient and effective method of photography, naming it after himself - the daguerreotype. In 1839, he and Niépce's son sold the rights for the daguerreotype to the French government and published a booklet describing the process. He was able to reduce the exposure time to less than 30 minutes and keep the image from disappearing… ushering in the age of modern photography.

Daguerreotype - Portrait of Samuel Morse

This head-and-shoulders portrait of Samuel Morse is a daguerreotype made between 1844 and 1860 from the studio of Mathew B Brady. Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, was also considered one of the finest portrait painters of the Romantic Style in America, had studied art in Paris, where he met Louis Daguerre inventor of the daguerreotype. Upon returning to the U.S., Morse set up his own photographic studio in New York. He was among the first in America to make portraits using the new daguerreotype method.

Daguerreotype Photograph 1844

Daguerreotype - key west florida 1849.

The daguerreotype was the earliest practical photographic process, and was especially suited to portraiture. It was made by exposing the image on a sensitized silver-plated sheet of copper, and as a result, the surface of a daguerreotype is highly reflective. There is no negative used in this process, and the image is almost always reversed left to right. Sometimes a mirror inside the camera was used to correct this reversal.

Daguerreotype - Photograph of Confederate Dead 1862

Confederate dead lying east of the Dunker Church, Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland.

Daguerreotype Photograph - Mount of the Holy Cross 1874

Example of an ambrotype - unidentified florida soldier.

Popularity of the daguerreotype declined in the late 1850s when the ambrotype, a faster and less expensive photographic process, became available.

The ambrotype is an early variation of the wet collodion process. The ambrotype was made by slightly underexposing a glass wet plate in the camera. The finished plate produced a negative image that appeared positive when backed with velvet, paper, metal or varnish.

The Calotype Process

The inventor of the first negative from which multiple postive prints were made was Henry Fox Talbot.

Talbot sensitized paper to light with a silver salt solution. He then exposed the paper to light. The background became black, and the subject was rendered in gradations of grey. This was a negative image, and from the paper negative, photographers could duplicate the image as many times as they wanted.

Tintype Photography

Daguerreotypes and tintypes were one of a kind images and the image was almost always reversed left to right.

A thin sheet of iron was used to provide a base for light-sensitive material, yielding a positive image. Tintypes are a variation of the collodion wet plate process. The emulsion is painted onto a japanned (varnished) iron plate, which is exposed in the camera. The low cost and durability of tintypes, coupled with the growing number of traveling photographers, enhanced the tintype’s popularity.

Glass Negatives & The Collodion Wet Plate

The glass negative was sharp and the prints made from it produced fine detail. The photographer could also produce several prints from one negative.

In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet plate. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.

Example of a Wet Plate Photograph

This photograph shows a typical field setup of the Civil War era. The wagon carried chemicals, glass plates, and negatives - the buggy used as a field darkroom.

Before a reliable, dry-plate process was invented (ca. 1879) photographers had to develop negatives quickly before the emulsion dried. Producing photographs from wet plates involved many steps. A clean sheet of glass was evenly coated with collodion. In a darkroom or a light-tight chamber, the coated plate was immersed in a silver nitrate solution, sensitizing it to light. After it was sensitized, the wet negative was placed in a light-tight holder and inserted into the camera, which already had been positioned and focused. The "dark slide," which protected the negative from light, and the lens cap were removed for several seconds, allowing light to expose the plate. The "dark slide" was inserted back into the plate holder, which was then removed from the camera. In the darkroom, the glass plate negative was removed from the plate holder and developed, washed in water, and fixed so that the image would not fade, then washed again and dried. Usually the negatives were coated with a varnish to protect the surface. After development, the photographs were printed on paper and mounted.

Photograph Using the Dry Plate Process

Gelatine dry plates were usable when dry and needed less exposure to light than the wet plates.

In 1879, the dry plate was invented, a glass negative plate with a dried gelatin emulsion. Dry plates could be stored for a period of time. Photographers no longer needed portable darkrooms and could now hire technicians to develop their photographs. Dry processes absorbed light quickly and so rapidly that the hand-held camera was now possible.

The Magic Lantern - Example of a Lantern Slide aka Hyalotype

Magic Lantern's reached their popularity about 1900, but continued to be widely used until they were gradually replaced 35mm slides.

Produced to be viewed with a projector, lantern slides were both popular home entertainment and an accompaniment to speakers on the lecture circuit. The practice of projecting images from glass plates began centuries before the invention of photography. However, in the 1840s, Philadelphia daguerreotypists, William and Frederick Langenheim, began experimenting with The Magic Lantern as an apparatus for displaying their photographic images. The Langenheims were able to create a transparent positive image, suitable for projection. The brothers patented their invention in 1850 and called it a Hyalotype (hyalo is the Greek word for glass). The following year they received a medal at the Crystal Palace Exposition in London.

Print Using Nitrocellulose Film

Nitrocellulose was used to make the first flexible and transparent film. The process was developed by the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin in 1887, and introduced by the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1889. The film's ease of use combined with intense marketing by Eastman-Kodak made photography increasingly accessible to amateurs.

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Into the 21st century: the digital age

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• Table Of Contents

The transformation of photography from an analog medium relying on chemically developed light-sensitive emulsions to one using digital technologies for image capture and storage began in the late 1980s with the introduction of the first consumer digital cameras and in 1990 the first version of Adobe Photoshop , a program for adjusting and manipulating digital image files. Conceived as an extension of the conventional darkroom, the program adopted many of the traditional tools of black-and-white film photography but let photographers go even further. By giving photographers the ability to easily change the structure of an image, and even its contents, it called into question long-held assumptions about photographic veracity or documentary “truth value.” To some minds, it changed the very nature of the medium.

Digital photography’s full impact was not felt until the first decade of the new century. Even as late as 2001, news events—most significantly, the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. —were photographed primarily with film cameras. But because digital images could be transmitted and edited much more quickly, by decade’s end nearly all newspapers and magazines had transitioned to a digital workflow process, and their photographers were using digital cameras designed for professionals.

The transgressive aspect of digital photography was apparent even before its widespread adoption, as in 1982 when the august National Geographic magazine published an altered image of the Egyptian pyramids . Because the magazine’s cover required a vertical image, editors used early computer software to push the pyramids closer together than they appeared in the original film photograph. The manipulation of visual fact for increased visual impact extends back before computers into the 19th century, notably during the Crimean War and American Civil War , but a spate of incidents of digital alteration of news photographs in the first decade of the 21st century created an uproar and led to the establishment of journalistic codes of ethics intended to regulate the alteration of digital images. Several photojournalists lost their jobs after their published pictures were found to have been digitally doctored.

Whereas photojournalists and documentarians reacted with caution to what came to be called digital imaging, other types of photographers were generally enthusiastic about its possibilities. Many artists using photography as their medium developed creative approaches that took advantage of the seamless mutability of digitally altered images, extending a long history of photographic collage , double printing , and other pre-digital forms of manipulation. Among the early adopters were Aziz + Cucher (Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher), Andreas Gursky , and Loretta Lux, all of whom stretched the limits of what is believable about a photographic image. Digital alteration also influenced the spheres of fashion and celebrity, as photographers such as Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (working together as Inez & Vinoodh) remade the looks of models and movie stars. Magazines began to regularly send their cover photographs to digital retouchers to eliminate blemishes and minimize their models’ waistlines.

Arguably the most profound impact of digital photography was the proliferation of picture taking and picture sharing. Beginning in 2007, the year Apple introduced its first iPhone , so-called smartphones became ubiquitous , as did picture-sharing applications like Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram that enable users to upload pictures from phone to Internet in a matter of seconds. One result was an almost unfathomable archive of images of mundane events and everyday places, a virtual map of the world that finds its commercial equivalent in Google Earth , which incorporates both satellite views and Google Street View, an assemblage of ground-level pictures of human habitation.

At the same time, commercial, governmental, and military uses of photography expanded to include 24-hour surveillance of public sites and businesses, the remote targeting of drone missile strikes, databases of digital fingerprints, portraits on identification cards, and the development of facial-recognition software to aid in the identification of criminals and terrorists. Debates about the impact of the camera on civil liberties intensified as a result.

Photographers reacted to digital photography’s omnipresence in a variety of ways. Some—such as Chuck Close , Sally Mann , Deborah Luster, and Jerry Spagnoli—journeyed back to photographic processes of the 19th century, making daguerreotypes or working with wet-collodion plates, or—like Chris McCaw and Alison Rossiter—took to printing on outdated enlarging paper from the mid-20th century. Photographic books , predicted to be made obsolete by readily viewable online images, experienced a resurgent popularity, not only because digital printing reduced the cost of publication but also because books allowed photographers to control the narrative sequence and context in which their images are seen.

Others seized an opportunity to critically reflect on the new image environment in which they lived. Trevor Paglen, for example, photographed the light trails of spy satellites as they crossed the night sky. In addition, the convergence of still digital photographs and moving video images and the popularity of Web design tools that allowed for animation , motion control, and audio editing produced a creative arena in which photography was but one tool in the production of multimedia experiences. In the 21st century, photography was absorbed into both the contemporary art world and that of online digital communication , blurring its formerly distinct identity but vastly enhancing its importance as a visual medium.

Introduction

The Nineteenth Century: The Invention of Photography

Photography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Photography Between the Wars

Postwar Photography

Building a Collection: Photography at the National Gallery , Lecture by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs

Sarah Greenough Senior Curator and Head, Department of Photographs National Gallery of Art, Washington Diane Waggoner Associate Curator, Department of Photographs National Gallery of Art, Washington

Press Release

Exhibition Checklist

View All Photographs

Celebrating Twenty-five Years of the Department of Photographs

In 1839 a new means of visual representation was announced to a startled world: photography. Although the medium was immediately and enthusiastically embraced by the public at large, photographers themselves spent the ensuing decades experimenting with techniques and debating the nature of this new invention. The works in this section suggest the range of questions addressed by these earliest practitioners. Was photography best understood as an art or a science? What subjects should photographs depict, what purpose should they serve, and what should they look like? Should photographers work within the aesthetics established in other arts, such as painting, or explore characteristics that seemed unique to the medium? This first generation of photographers became part scientists as they mastered a baffling array of new processes and learned how to handle their equipment and material. Yet they also grappled with aesthetic issues, such as how to convey the tone, texture, and detail of multicolored reality in a monochrome medium. They often explored the same subjects that had fascinated artists for centuries — portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes — but they also discovered and exploited the distinctive ways in which the camera frames and presents the world.  

William Henry Fox Talbot , British, 1800–1877, A Scene in York: York Minster from Lop Lane , 1845 , salted paper print , Edward J. Lenkin Fund, Melvin and Thelma Lenkin Fund, and Stephen G. Stein Fund, 2011.57.1

A British polymath equally adept in astronomy, chemistry, Egyptology, physics, and philosophy, Talbot spent years inventing a photographic process that created paper negatives, which were then used to make positive prints—the conceptual basis of nearly all photography until the digital age. Calotypes, as he came to call them, are softer in effect than daguerreotypes, the other process announced in 1839. Though steeped in the sciences, Talbot understood the ability of his invention to make striking works of art. Here the partially obstructed view of the cathedral rising from the confines of the city gives a sense of discovery, of having just turned the corner and encountered this scene.

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson , Scottish, 1802–1870, and Scottish, 1821–1848, David Octavius Hill at the Gate of Rock House, Edinburgh , 1843–1847, salted paper print, Paul Mellon Fund, 2007.29.27

In the mid-1840s, the Scottish team of Hill, a painter, and Adamson, a photographer who had opened the first photography studio in Edinburgh, produced some of the finest pictures made with the newly invented medium. Theirs was a true partnership of technical skills and creativity. In the four brief years of their alliance before Adamson’s untimely death, they created some three thousand portraits and pictures of local life. This picture of Hill, made at the entrance to his studio, is characteristic of the partners’ deft harnessing of light and shadow to model the subject’s face, suggesting a psychological intensity.

Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes , American, 1811–1894, and American, 1808–1901, The Letter , c. 1850, daguerreotype, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1999.94.1

Working together in Boston, the portrait photographers Southworth and Hawes aimed to capture the character of their subjects using the daguerreotype process. Invented in France and one of the two photographic processes introduced to the public in early 1839, the daguerreotype is made by exposing a silver-coated copper plate to light and then treating it with chemicals to bring out the image. The heyday of the technique was the 1840s and 1850s, when it was used primarily for making portraits. The daguerreotype’s long exposure time usually resulted in frontal, frozen postures and stern facial expressions; this picture’s pyramidal composition and strong sentiments of friendship and companionship are characteristic of Southworth and Hawes’s innovative approach.

Roger Fenton , British, 1819–1869, Moscow, Domes of Churches in the Kremlin, 1852, salted paper print, Paul Mellon Fund, 2005.52.1

Trained as a lawyer and painter, Fenton photographed for only eleven years, yet he was one of Britain’s most influential and skilled practitioners. The first official photographer to the British Museum, he was also one of the founders of the Photographic Society, an organization he hoped would establish photography’s importance in modern life. He constantly tested the limits of his practice, even hauling his cumbersome equipment abroad to places such as Russia, where he made this photograph as part of a remarkable series of architectural views of the Kremlin.

Roger Fenton , British, 1819–1869, Fruit and Flowers , 1860, albumen print, Paul Mellon Fund, 2005.52.4

Gustave Le Gray , French, 1820–1884, The Pont du Carrousel, Paris: View to the West from the Pont des Arts, 1856–1858, albumen print, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1995.36.94

Early Decades of Photography in France (Slides 6–9)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, some photographers in France, hired by governmental agencies to make photographic inventories or simply catering to the growing demand for pictures of Paris, drew on the medium’s documentary abilities to record the nation’s architectural patrimony and the modernization of Paris. Others explored the camera’s artistic potential by capturing the ephemeral moods of nature in the French countryside. Though photographers faced difficulties in carting around heavy equipment and operating in the field, they learned how to master the elements that directly affected their pictures, from securing the right vantage point to dealing with movement, light, and changing atmospheric conditions during long exposure times.

Charles Marville , French, 1813–1879, Hôtel de la Marine , 1864–1870, albumen print, Diana and Mallory Walker Fund, 2006.23.1

Édouard-Denis Baldus , French, 1813–1889, Toulon, Train Station , c. 1861, albumen print, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1995.36.10

Eugène Cuvelier , French, 1837–1900, Belle-Croix , 1860s, albumen print, Gail and Benjamin Jacobs for the Millennium Fund, 2007.115.1

Julia Margaret Cameron , British, 1815–1879, The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, June 1866, albumen print, New Century Fund, 1997.97.1

Ensconced in the intellectual and artistic circles of midcentury England, Cameron manipulated focus and light to create poetic pictures rich in references to literature, mythology, and history. Her monumental views of life-sized heads were unprecedented, and with them she hoped to define a new mode of photography that would rival the expressive power of painting and sculpture. The title of this work alludes to John Milton’s mid-seventeenth-century poem “L’Allegro.” Describing the happy life of one who finds pleasure and beauty in the countryside, the poem includes the lines:

Come, and trip it as ye go On the light fantastic toe; And in thy right hand lead with thee, The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty.

Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator , British, 1831–1881, Cator Family Album (detail), 1866–1877, collage of watercolor and albumen prints in bound volume, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2014.174.1

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, upper-class women frequently created collages out of small, commercial portrait photographs of family and friends, cutting out heads and figures and pasting them onto paper that they then embellished with drawings and watercolor. Made decades before the twentieth-century avant-garde discovered the provocative allure of photocollage, these inventive, witty, and whimsical pictures undermined the standards of respectability seen in much studio portrait photography of the time.

Carleton E. Watkins , American, 1829–1916, Piwac, Vernal Falls, 300 feet, Yosemite , 1861, albumen print, Gift of Mary and David Robinson, 1995.35.23

The westward expansion of America opened up new opportunities for photographers such as Watkins and William Bell (see the following slide). Joining government survey expeditions, hired by railroad companies, or catering to tourists and the growing demand for grand views of nature, they created photographic landscapes that reached a broad audience of scientists, businessmen, and engineers, as well as curious members of the middle class. Watkins’s photographs of the sublime Yosemite Valley, which often recall landscape paintings of similar majestic subjects, helped convince Congress to pass a bill in 1864 protecting the area from development and commercial exploitation.

William H. Bell , American, born England, 1830–1910, Grand Cañon, Colorado River, Near Paria Creek, Looking West , 1872, in Geographical and Geological Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, Seasons of 1871, 1872, and 1873 (1873), albumen print in bound volume, Corcoran Collection (Gift of William Wilson Corcoran, 1886)

Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne (de Boulogne) , French, 1806–1875, Plate 63, Fright, from Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression) (1862), 1854–1855, albumen print, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

A neurologist, physiologist, and photographer, Duchenne de Boulogne conducted a series of experiments in the mid-1850s in which he applied electrical currents to various facial muscles to study how they produce expressions of emotion. Convinced that these electrically-induced expressions accurately rendered internal feelings, he then photographed his subjects to establish a precise visual lexicon of human emotions, such as pain, surprise, fear, and sadness. In 1862 he included this photograph representing fright in a treatise on physiognomy (a pseudoscience that assumes a relationship between external appearance and internal character), which enjoyed broad popularity among artists and scientists.

Eadweard Muybridge , American, born England, 1830–1904, Plate 365, Head-spring, a flying pigeon interfering, from Animal Locomotion , 1887, collotype, Corcoran Collection (Museum purchase, 1887)

Muybridge’s experiments in the 1880s revolutionized the understanding of movement and inspired scientists and artists alike. Using banks of cameras equipped with precisely triggered shutters, he captured sequences of pictures of people and animals moving and performing simple actions, such as climbing stairs or, as here, performing a head-spring. Showing small increments of movements, his work made visible what once was imperceptible to the human eye and laid the foundation for motion pictures.

Next: Photography at the Turn of the Century

Tolyatti: A Russian Homage To Italy

This is the curious story of a Russian city named after an Italian politician, Palmiro Togliatti.

“Togliatti” by Shine Phantom is licensed under CC BY 2.0

This is the curious story of a russian city named after an italian politician, palmiro togliatti.

There are cities which were made great by men, and men which have been made great by a city. This is the case of Palmiro Togliatti — a founding member and the longest serving secretary of the Italian Communist Party — and a Russian city located in Samara Oblast, known as Stavropol on Volga until 1964, which was then renamed Tolyatti, becoming the greatest tribute in the world to an Italian politician. The city of Tolyatti was named after him immediately after his death in Yalta — a seaside town in the then Soviet Union — on August 21st, 1964, as a result of a sudden stroke and cerebral bleed. He was on vacation, on his way to give his support for Brezhnev as Khrushchev’s successor.

Who was Palmiro Togliatti?

If you happen to travel around Italy, you may have noticed that in every Italian city — however big or small — there is a street named after Palmiro Togliatti. That’s because Togliatti was not just the charismatic secretary and one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, but a legendary figure of Italian and international politics. He started his political career before World War I, joining the Italian Socialist Party in 1914, then serving as a volunteer, and returning home to Turin after being injured. During this period he learned about the Russian Revolution and became fascinated, wanting to bring soviet ideas to Italy. He became a founder of the Communist Party of Italy, which was a part of Communists International (Comintern). In fact, after the end of Fascism — during which he spent almost 17 years in Moscow, becoming one of the highest representatives of the Comintern with the blessing of Stalin — he came back to Italy as Deputy Prime Minister until 1945 and taking part in the Constituent Assembly until 1948, writing the current constitution of the Italian Republic. Under his political and intellectual leadership — enough to be nicknamed ‘The Best ’ — the Italian Communist Party would become the largest non-ruling party in Europe and the second in Italy, after the Christian Democracy, which was consistently the most popular Italian party until 1992, when the Cold War ended and the danger of a ‘ Soviet ’ turning point in Italy was warded off.

Nevertheless, the Communist Party ruled by Togliatti had a big influence in Italian society, especially regarding culture, and achieved great results in local elections within particular regions of Italy. Togliatti chose to become a Soviet Union citizen in 1930, in fact giving up Italian citizenship. What may have seemed like complete devotion to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its General Secretary Joseph Stalin, clashes with his next choice of refusing the head of the Communist Information Bureau proposed by Stalin himself in 1951, preferring to remain General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party. Throughout his career he supported his communist beliefs but fought to bring them to his beloved home country of Italy. Palmiro Togliatti wanted to fulfill his dream of a communist plan through democracy: the original ‘ Italian way to Socialism’.

Tolyatti, the Russian city

The Russian homage to Palmiro Togliatti was not chosen at random. In fact, a significant city was named after him: Stavropol on Volga became Tolyatti ( Togliatti Russianized) because right there — on the banks of Volga river — the Italian politician had a key role in building the popular AvtoVAZ factory, the manufacturer of the Lada car brand. And thus, in the 1960s, through cooperation with FIAT , the city took a new shape and a new name, because the old Stavropol on Volga was also covered by the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Station. This infrastruscture was crucial for the development of a large industry. Therefore Tolyatti — just like what happened in Italy with Turin — became the working-class city par excellence, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union made it a great vehicle for propaganda and experimentation. Many facilities were built, especially for sports, and new parks and monuments emerged in Tolyatti, which were made to represent the perfect Soviet city for the perfect Soviet citizen.

Not surprisingly, many popular athletes grew up in Tolyatti, such as the Olympic champion Alexei Nemov and the former ice hockey players Alexei Kovalev, Ilya Bryzgalov, Viktor Kozlov and Alexei Emelin. As you might imagine, ice hockey is very popular around there, and the local club sponsored by Lada is one of the best across Russia. Tolyatti, due to its vast spaces, has several monuments of national interest : Victory Park, a memorial dedicated to the Soviet victory in World War II built in the Auto Factory district; Liberty Square with its Obelisk of Glory dedicated to the fighters of World War II; the Mourning Angel standing in Central Park, a memorial to victims of political repression built after the end of the Communist era. Also the Transfiguration Cathedral, with its wonderful golden domes, was built after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tolyatti was also the city where the great Russian painter Ilya Repin stayed for a brief period in 1870, painting his masterpiece ‘ Barge Haulers on the Volga’. The house where he stayed then became a monument.

Last but not least, among the most meaningful monuments of Tolyatti is ‘ Loyalty’. It is a bronze statue dedicated to a faithful dog, called ‘ Kostya’, who survived a car accident in which its owners lost their lives. Like what happened in Japan with Hachiko, Kostya wouldn’t give up, waiting for its owners for seven consecutive years at the same spot. Under the snow and the rain, winter and summer, the dog stayed there, running up to all the passing cars and hoping one day to again see its beloved masters. Only his own death let him abandon his spot, but Tolyatti citizens unanimously wanted to honor the loyalty of Kostya, building a sculpture in his memory. I could say no place was more appropriate than Tolyatti, because the city’s namesake itself represents a great metaphor of loyalty: that of Palmiro Togliatti to the Soviet Union.

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