Introduction to the History of Photography

"If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it while his heart was beating thirty or forty times, promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker. This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture. This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,--the one that would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It h...

Sketch of Lake Como - Talbot - 1833 Drawing created using a Camera Lucida source: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_p/1_photographers_talbot_smm_sketch.htm "(In) October, 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como in Italy, taking sketches with a Camera Lucida, or rather, I should say, attempting to make them; but with the smallest possible amount of success... After various fruitless attempts I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing which unfortunately I did not possess. I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried many years before. This method was to take a Camera Obscura and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus - fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away... It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint...

"The camera has been seen as an image-making machine swiftly spewing out pictures as mechanized looms produced cloth for a new market. But the swift camera started to take shape only after 1855, through the combined effect of technological changes, the development of networks for the production and consumption of images, and the emergence of a mass market public. The first photographs were much closer to pre-industrial craft production, in which single, unique objects were made by hand." Marien, Mary Warner - Photography, A Cultural History , New York: 2002, page 7

Daguerre - The Effect of Fog and Snow Seen through a Ruined Gothic Colonnade, 1826 Oil on canvas, L. J. M. Daguerre, in Gerard Levy Collection Reproduced in Panoramania! by Ralph Hyde, London: Trefoil Publications / Barbican Art Gallery 1988, catalogue item No.99 on p.119 with colour illustration on p. 168 source: The Diorama: some images compiled by R. Derek Wood http://www.midley.co.uk/ Ticket signed by Daguerre in 1830 for complimentary visit of two persons to his Diorama in Paris Reproduced from H. & A. Gernsheim L. J. M. Daguerre , fig. 26, Secker & Warburg: London 1956 source: The Diorama: some images compiled by R. Derek Wood http://www.midley.co.uk/ Photographed by R. D. Wood (July 2001) The diorama painted by Daguerre in 1842 in the church at Bry-sur-Marne, poorly surviving there after 159 years. source: The Diorama: some images compiled by R. Derek Wood http://www.midley.co.uk/ Diorama by Daguerre in the church at Bry-sur-Marne c. 1840 (in process of restorati...

Contemporary painting of the construction of a Panorama Rotunda. c.1830 note the 'vellum' in the upper right of the image source: http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/PANORAMA.html Cross section of Robert Barker's Panorama, Leicester Square, London, 1789 source: http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/PANORAMA.html Panorama of Edinburgh from the top of St Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile Robert Barker, c.1787, 2.5m x 0.3m (model) source: http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/PANORAMA.html

Daguerre, Atelier, 1837, daguerreotype source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Daguerreotype_Daguerre_Atelier_1837.jpg Born in 1787, Daguerre was apprenticed to an architect in his hometown of Corneilles-en-Parisis. In 1804 in Paris, he served in the studio of Degotti, a stage designer, and later assisted the painter of panoramas Prevost. Daguerre attained the post of stage designer at the Opera around 1819. He conceived and built the Diorama around 1822, offering staged illusionist entertainment that combined realistic painting and moving light effects. The constant use of the camera obscura to create his large scale paintings led to the idea of fixing the images of the optical apparatus and to his collaboration with Niepce that would result, after the dead of his collaborator and creator of the first photograph, in the invention of the daguerreotype.

W. Fox Talbot The Open Door Salt print from a calotype negative, April 1844. 18.8 x 23.1 cm. source: http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/resources/opendoor.html " The Open Door reveals a telling interest in the artistic treatment of the mundane." The image's "picturesque dimension suggests the inventor's familiarity with examples of Dutch genre painting of the 17 th century" Rosenblum , Naomi - World History of Photography, 1997 ( page 31) It is interesting to note that , as Rosenblum herself explains, "soft definition", that is the "blurry" or "fuzzy" characteristics of the calotype image, contrasted the calotype print to the finesse of detail and sharpness of the daguerreotype. Talbot in fact referred to the effects of his early "photogenic drawings" as " Rembrandtish " ( Rosenblum , page 29) Although the negative-positive method of Talbot would point the way to future developments of photography, the qua...