History of Photo Exam 1

Fixing an image permanently was one of the main goals of early photography. Before Daguerre, many inventors were able to create photographs but they would fade away after a short time. People wanted to capture a moment in time, a memory, and have it stay fixed forever. Experiments were conducted by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1800s on white leather and paper using silver nitrate.

(to) Fix (an image)

The year in which Daguerre patents the Daguerreotype. Also the year Daguerre pleads with French government to be paid for contributions to arts and science. Advocating for photography before the government, also, signifies validation of photography as a scientific and artistic advancement worth recognition

1839

One of the great advantages or disadvantages of photography is how accessible the medium is. Many accredited artists disapprove of the spread of photography, claiming the lower classes or simple citizens taking part in photography simplifies the form.

Accessibility

Photography in the mid 18th Century was the closest reproduction of reality the world had seen. In Arago's Report he declared that the Daguerreotype's ability to create a "faithful pictorial record" was necessary for a better future, that would aid France and the world in unimaginable ways.

Accuracy

It was invented by Abel Niepce and was a process that involved applying egg whites to glass. It improved the quality of the photographs but the process was very slow compared to the collodion process.

Albumen process

When Collodion glass negatives are placed in front of a black background, they appear as positives, and therefore become ambrotypes. A common backing for these photographs is black velvet, or a painted black background.

Ambrotype

He improved the calotype process of photography by inventing the collodion process. His work helped improve the speed and quality of the calotype negatives.

Archer Scott

According to Baudelaire, art is "the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary" (125). He repetitively refers to photography as an "industry" whereas art is "poetry". To him, photography cannot be considered art because it captures life exactly as it is. There is no aspect of creation involved in the image being taken, meaning no one is creating the trees or the mountains. As a result, it's far too scientific and literal.

Art

One of the earliest photographs, made by Daguerre in 1839, this was one of the first (if not the very first) images to show a human. Though the image was taken with a minutes long exposure, a man who had been having his boots polished was standing so still as to have been recorded. All other traffic in the street is effaced by the length of the exposure, so the street appears unnaturally empty for the middle of the day.

Boulevard du Temple

Introduced by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841, the calotype process is the first available negative-positive photographic process. It was less expensive and easier to produce than a daguerreotype. However, the image is fuzzy and grainy because the texture of the paper is incapable of holding continuous information. There was lots of strong contrast in calotypes, because they were contact prints. It was much harder to have control over exposure, and it was difficult to control how much light would be reflected off of white/smooth objects.

Calotype

A device patented in 1807 by William Hyde Wollaston. It can be used as a tracing aid for artists, because it allows the artist to see the drawing surface and the scene which they want to depict, at the same time. It can also be used outdoors, giving artists more mobility when creating a landscape scene. This was the device Fox Talbot was using as he sketched Lake Como.

Camera lucida

A pivotal tool in creating the modern invention of the Daguerreotype and calotype printing methods, the camera obscura created a photographic-like image using sunlight. A blacked out room with a pin hole allowing light to pass into the room. A vibrant vertically inverted image of the outside world is projected on the onsite wall from the pinhole. Photographs made with the Camera Obscura method have a very dreamlike, painterly quality.

Camera obscura

Famous French bourgeois poet who holds a negative opinion of photography. He despises masses' obsession of the medium and calling them "sunworshippers". He believed that the general photography-loving public was misinformed, and falsely equated exact likeness with art. To Baudelaire, photography represented a lack of skill and artfulness that creators of "real" art possess.

Charles Baudelaire

Describes the contrast of light and shade in a painting or drawing and the artist's ability to use shadows to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms. Eastlake relates this distortion of nature to the texture of the object that is being photographed and suggests that smooth objects such as glass or parts of the human face will reflect more light, photograph quicker, and "disarrange the order of relation" (58).

Chiaroscuro

Developed 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. The process rendered 3 different types of images: wet plate photographs, ambrotypes and tintypes.

Collodion Process

A negative that is placed over sensitive material that obstructs/absorbs certain light, leaving the opposite of that image on photo paper. Calotypes relied on contact prints, while daguerreotypes were direct exposures.

Contact Print

Within these images, the photographic team plays with the angles, conventions of portraiture, object signification and symbolism, and composition. For example, in the image of Dr. Capadose, he is looking off to the side and holding a large book (signifying his intelligence and sparking curiosity in the viewer).

Conventions of Portraiture

The first publicity available photographic process published in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. The daguerreotype process produces a non-reproducible positive/negative with extreme sharpness and detail due to the nature of its material. To make the image, a daguerreotypist would polish a sheet of silver-plated metal, treat it with fumes that made its surface light sensitive, and expose it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, and then chemically treat it again to fix the image.

Daguerreotype

Form the first photography studio in Scotland in 1843 using calotypes. The duo was the known for the attempt to incorporate artistic elements into the medium of photography contrary to its mainstream mechanical documentary function. They exclusively used calotypes on salted paper from paper negatives, and mainly photographed well-known Scottish figures. Often, their images featured other objects as well, to give context to their subject (books, sculptures, religious objects etc.).

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson

Douglass's love for the medium went beyond the contemporary debate over photography and its place in art. He touted the craft as a "democratic" medium and for good reason. With the many photos of himself he commissioned, he was asserted a new form of black representation with more accuracy and dignity than what had preceded it. ADD DU BOIS INFO

Democratic Medium

Close friend of Daguerre and strong supporter of his work in developing the Daguerreotype. Made the announcement of Daguerre's new photographic process to the French Chamber of Deputies, extolling the virtues of the form and its potential uses for science, archaeology, and the arts. He argued for Daguerre and Niepce to receive a pension for their noble contribution to France and the world with their invention of the Daguerreotype.

Dominique François Arago

The unquestionable truth about one's surroundings. When photography was first invented, Baudelaire felt as though other art forms would lose its value because of the newfound obsession with photography, which was the most accurate rendition of "external reality" of its time.

External Reality

He was the most photographed person of his time, and used this invention as a powerful tool to find and spread social and political change.

Frederick Douglass

What Nicéphore Niépce called his process of photography. This process is what he used to take the first photograph.

Heliography

An element used in photography that allowed the necessary exposure time to be reduced from hours to minutes by greatly increasing the sensitivity of the plate.

Iodine

A female scholar and art critic who wrote in the 1850s about her view of photography's place in society. Similarly to Baudelaire, she believed that photos that were too exact in detail, like the Daguerreotype, were not art. However, she saw the merit of photos like those of Hill and Adamson, which were more concerned with "artful" qualities like lighting, form, and feeling than Daguerreotypes were capable of.

Lady Elizabeth Eastlake

Fox Talbot became obsessed with achieving image fixation after a vacation to Lake Como in northern Italy. It was there where he was unsuccessful in a using a camera lucida to accurately trace the beautiful landscape around him. His frustration lead him to strive to discover a working photographic process.

Lake Como

An invisible image produced by the exposure to light of a photosensitive material such as photographic film. Upon developing the film the image becomes visible.

Latent Picture

One of William Henry Fox Talbot's first photographs, a tiny negative of a window in his home in Wiltshire, England. This image was made with the camera obscura and his own photogenic drawing technique. Over time and exposure to light, the detail of the image has faded, however, the creation of this image prompted Talbot to continue his research and eventually create the calotype process.

Latticed Window, 1835

The inventor of the daguerreotype photographic process. Daguerre legally partnered with Joseph Nicéphore de Niepce, and although Niepce died in 1833, he made many advances towards photography and helped Daguerre to make his own discoveries.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

This man introduced the chemical chloride of bromine combined with iodine, which caused the daguerreotype process to be significantly faster and much more efficient for use.

M. Claudet

Photography appears during the development of industrialisation. Baudelaire condemns it and sees it as a form of degradation of art. Nevertheless, as Eastlake shows, photography helps science and promotes the diffusion of images. After the announcement of the Daguerreotype, its commercialization is immensely successful throughout the world.

Modernization

Fox Talbot's calotype method created negative images on paper, which were then used to create a positive image. Substituting the original paper used to capture the image for glass, Archer was able to invent the collodion process in which multiple positive images could be made from the negative image on glass.

Negative

Scientist who helped discover photography, taking the first photograph in 1826, with a method which took many hours for the image to be recorded. He later worked with Daguerre to help invent the daguerreotype, though he died in 1833, before Daguerre's full research was completed.

Nicephore Niépce

The development of photography is linked to France in the 1800s, especially Paris. Daguerre met Niepce and their association began there. On his Daguerreotypes, he represented a city at a very important moment of its evolution, modification of the streets and the industrialization.

Paris

Process by which leaves, or lace, or the wings of insects, or any flat and semi-transparent substance, laid upon prepared paper, and exposed to the direct action of the sun, will leave the perfect tracery of their forms. (Modern photogram). Developed 1834 by Henry Fox Talbot in England. This process created a very soft, delicate image.

Photogenic Drawing

Comes from the greek word for "light drawing".

Photograph

During the beginning of the photography movement and its spread into mass cultural society, the photographer's role was much unlike what we are accustomed to today. He was more of a facilitator and not an artist.

Photographer

It was established in 1853 in London, England to appreciate photography as an art and a science. Sir Charles Eastlake, husband of Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, was the first chair of the society for two years.

Photographic Society

When the invention of the daguerreotype was announced, the public was most excited about portraiture. Photography presented a much quicker, cheaper option than painted portraits. In early portraits, subjects were usually formally dressed and posed before a blank background. Because exposures were so long, subjects had to sit still for several minutes, often giving them a stiff look.

Portraiture

A positive image, unlike a negative image, presents the light and shade of the image in the same position as one would find in nature. The Daguerreotype method created direct positives, as the polished metal plates on which the images were captured displayed the image with the correct shading. However, in Fox Talbot's negative positive paper process, negative images on paper were laid on top of another piece of sensitive paper to capture light through the negative, resulting in a positive image.

Positive

An early political use for photography. In his address, Arago mentions the degree to which photography could be used by France for political gain.

Propaganda

The daguerreotype amazed people because it was able to capture exact details. However photography could not always capture the whole truth. For example, the daguerreotype of the busy street that had no people because the daguerreotype could only capture that which stood still. Photography can show imperfect reality.

Reality

The degree of accuracy and realism conveyed by photography was of great importance to Frederick Douglass, who saw it as a way to reclaim the image of himself as a black person. Images of black people had, until the invention of photography, been subject to prejudice and stereotypes.

Reclamation

Early photographs, including the daguerreotype, were not reproducible in the same way we think of modern photographic images. They were either impossible to reproduce or the quality of the image was very degraded. This was because the earliest types of photographs came from a positive-only process, as opposed to a negative to positive process that can allow for easier reproduction.

Reproducibility

Especially common around the development of ambrotypes, painters would work at a photographic studio and delicately yet quickly paint rosy cheeks or other small, colored details on the glass plates to capture the beauty and the aliveness of the sitter without disturbing the image itself.

Retouching

In Henry Fox Talbot found that coats of salt could prevent the image from further darkening, essentially "fixing" it, though not permanently.

Salted Paper

Throughout the advent of the photographic process, silver has played a huge role in creating and preserving images. The Calotype process, invented by Fox Talbot used it to coat the paper and Daguerre it to fix the image to the metal plate of his daguerreotype.

Silver

Sir Humphry Davy was a leading British scientist who worked with the early photographer Thomas Wedgwood. He experimented with silver chloride in the production of photographic drawings, and published a paper on his discoveries about the light-sensitivity of silver nitrate. Eastlake called him "The first to make the practical application of these materials, and to foresee their uses".

Sir Humphry Davy

Obtaining a patent on the Daguerreotype would logistically very difficult, so rather than receiving patenting rights to it, Louis Daguerre received a lifetime state pension from the French government. For the pension, he would have to continue to refine and improve the process throughout his life. Daguerre's pension also meant that the photographic process would essentially become available in the public domain in France.

State Pension

These are two daguerreotypes taken by Louis Daguerre. These photos highlight what people thought photography could be used for at the time with Still life representing the view that photography could be used for artistic reference and Shell and Fossils representing how it could be used for scientific purposes.

Still Life (1837) and Shells and Fossils (1839)

Photography was discovered to be especially good at portraying texture and uneven surfaces, because of the details of light and shadow it captures. In her essay, Elizabeth Eastlake mentions "a face of rugged rock, and the front of a carved and fretted building" as being the best photographic subjects.

Texture

Working with Humphry Davy, they were the first people to get an image on paper by using the camera obscura. However, because they were never able to "fix" the images and have them be permanent and immune to changes caused by light, their images could only be preserved in absolute darkness.

Thomas Wedgwood

This process was popular from the 1850s to 70s. It is a collodion process. Despite its name, light sensitive material is coated onto a piece of iron. It takes only a matter of minutes to take a photo.

Tintype

When asked to make a report about photography's contributions to the art world, the reputable painter M. Paul Delaroche stresses how much of an impact the invention will have on current art forms. He described the details seen in a daguerreotype as having "unimaginable precision," which he believed could be extremely useful for painters when it comes to observation.

Unimaginable Precision

In the context of photography, for a photo to have verisimilitude would mean that the photograph looks like the subject. More specifically, in the context of our class, one of the main differences between Daguerreotypes and Fox Talbot's various methods of producing photos is the verisimilitude of each; while Daguerreotypes were praised for being very realistic and capturing all the details of a scene with accuracy (verisimilitude), while Fox Talbot's photos and photogenic drawings were less accurate and had a softer, more artistic quality.

Verisimilitude

By Nicéphore Niépce, this is a heliographic image and the first photographic image, showing the view from Niépce's estate in France on a pewter plate. Taken with the camera obscura, the exposure time was once thought to be around eight hours, although today it is thought to have been up to multiple days.

View from the Window at Le Gras

This produced a negative, which, after being fixed, could be contact printed onto photo-sensitive treated paper such as salted paper.

Wet Plate Process

inventor of the photogenic drawing, a negative-positive process. He invented this at about the same time as Daguerre invented his photographic process. The photogenic drawing is fixed on paper, which made it somewhat fuzzy, but it could produce shades of grey, unlike the daguerreotype.

William Henry Fox Talbot

Patented the camera lucida in 1807, which acted as a tracing tool by superimposing an image of an object over a piece of paper and was used by William Henry Fox Talbot in his early experiments.

William Hyde Wollaston