Tag: calotype

Photography’s Struggle to be Recognized as Art – Pictorialism

Photography had a hard time establishing itself as a valid art medium. Read about the first movement that launched this push.

Photography is Mechanical

 

Between 1840 and 1860 the growth of photography was all about science.  The development of light sensitive media was dependent on a few brilliant scientists figuring out how to make them and experimenting with what would work best.  And Kodak was decades away from inventing roll film and the camera it came in.  If you wanted to be a photographer you had to master the chemistry of your chosen medium and in some cases, as we shall soon see, you had to be able to take your darkroom with you.

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The First Photographers: 1840 – 1860

Meet the influential pioneering photographers that created the medium in its first 20 years and on whose shoulders we stand today.

The First Photographers – 1840 – 1860

The 20-year period beginning in 1840 saw an explosion in photography. Prior to that the camera obscura could project upside down and backwards images on a sheet of paper that could be traced to produce a drawing. In fact, that is how painters used it. But the projection could not be captured and saved…, until Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype.

Before the daguerreotype, if you wanted a portrait you hired a painter, an option that was available to only the wealthy. But the daguerreotype made portraits available to many more people. Painters initially rejected the notion, believing that their portraits were superior. But most eventually conceded that the daguerreotype could reproduce a more accurate image of the person in less time and more economically.

The daguerreotype had a life of merely ten years and was followed first by the calotype and then by the collodion process.  And before the end of the century Kodak processed the role film which opened photography to everyone.  Read more at In the Beginning There Was a Camera but No Film.

Since the daguerreotype and its successors were fast, accurate and highly detailed, they were seen as great ways of documenting the physical world but incapable of creating art. But, even in those early days, some pioneering photographers pursued photography as a legitimate artistic medium and produced stunning, ground-breaking images that still touch our souls more than a century and a half later. The struggle to recognize photographs as art began with the daguerreotype and continues to this day (although to a lesser degree).

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In the Beginning There Was a Camera but No Film

Read how photography took off in the mid-1800s when its pioneers developed light-sensitive materials that were capable of captureing an image.

At the heart of photography is the camera, a device that uses lenses to focus the image, a variable aperture to control the brightness of the light and a shutter that can open and close in a precise duration of time. The other component is a light-sensitive medium to capture the image.

In the early 1800’s when much effort went into developing a light-sensitive medium, the camera was nothing new. The camera obscura had existed for centuries. In fact, there’s a high likelihood that you have created a camera obscura.

When there is a solar eclipse it is too dangerous to look directly at the sun without looking through very dark sunglasses. As an alternative, we take a piece of cardboard, punch a hole in it, and project the image of the sun on the sidewalk. As the moon consumes the sun, the projected image shows the image of the crescent sun.

Shining light through a small whole is the principle of the camera obscura. If the light shines on a screen, an upside-down image appears.

The Chinese understood this principle as early as the 4th century BCE knew when they created a sundial with a small hole in the gnomon, the sail-like piece that casts it’s moving shadow on the plate. The hole projected a bright spot on the plate which enabled the Chinese to not only tell the time from the position of the shadow but also the date from the position of the bright spot.

The camera obscura was used to study optics and astronomy in the 16th century. But by 1567, the camera obscura was being used by painters as a drawing aid.

Time passed until explorations into light-sensitive materials in the early 1800s began to produce results.

 

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