How Photography Saw the Light

BY AWAKE! WRITER IN SWEDEN

The story goes that the visitors of Italian physicist Giambattista Della Porta (1535?-1615) were shocked. On the wall in front of them, images of small upside-down people were moving around. Panic-stricken, the onlookers scurried out of the room. Della Porta was put on trial for sorcery!

SO MUCH for trying to amuse his guests by introducing them to a camera obscura​—literally, in Latin, “dark chamber.” The principle on which the camera works is simple, but the results can be spectacular. How does it work?

When light enters a dark box or room through a tiny hole, an inverted picture of the outside is projected on the far wall. What Della Porta’s guests saw was nothing but actors performing outside. The camera obscura was a forerunner of the modern camera. Today you may be one of the millions of people who own a camera or at least have used the ubiquitous, inexpensive disposable camera.

 The camera obscura was not even new in Della Porta’s day. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) observed the principle on which the camera would later work. The 10th-century Arabic scholar Alhazen vividly described it, and the 15th-century painter Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it in his notebooks. The 16th-century introduction of the lens enhanced the accuracy of the camera, and many artists used it for accurate renderings of perspective and scale. But in spite of many attempts, making the resulting images permanent remained elusive until the 19th century.

The World’s First Photographer

French physicist Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce possibly started his quest to make permanent photos as early as 1816. But his real breakthrough came when he was experimenting with lithography and came across a light-sensitive substance called bitumen of Judaea. Sometime in the mid-1820’s, he put a bitumen-coated pewter plate in a camera obscura facing a window of his estate and exposed it for eight hours. Not even the most inexperienced of today’s amateur photographers would be proud of the blurry picture of a building, a tree, and a barn that resulted, but Niepce had reason to be. His picture was most likely the first permanent photograph ever taken!

To develop his method further, in 1829, Niepce entered a partnership with a dynamic entrepreneur named Louis Daguerre. In the years following Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre made some important progress. He used silver iodide as a coating on copper plates. This proved to be more light sensitive than bitumen. By accident he found that when he treated the plate with mercury fumes after exposure, a latent picture appeared clearly. This reduced the exposure time dramatically. When Daguerre later discovered that washing the plate with a salt solution prevented the picture from darkening over time, photography was ready to take the world by storm.

Presented to the World

When Daguerre’s invention, called daguerreotype, was presented to the public in 1839, the reaction was overwhelming. Scholar Helmut Gernsheim writes in his book The History of Photography: “Perhaps no other invention ever captured the imagination of the public to such a degree and conquered the world with such lightning rapidity as the daguerreotype.” An eyewitness to the public release wrote: “An hour later, all the opticians’ shops were besieged, but could not rake together enough instruments to satisfy the onrushing army of would-be daguerreotypists; a few days later you could see in all the squares of Paris three-legged dark-boxes planted in front of churches and palaces. All the physicists, chemists, and learned men of the capital were polishing silvered plates, and even the better-class grocers found it impossible to deny themselves the pleasure of sacrificing some of their means on the altar of progress, evaporating it in iodine and consuming it in mercury vapour.” The Paris press quickly named the craze daguerréotypomanie.

The outstanding quality of the daguerreotypes moved British scientist John Herschel to write: “It is hardly too much to call them miraculous.” Some even ascribed magical powers to the invention.

But not everybody hailed the new invention. In 1856 the king of Naples banned photography, possibly because it was thought to be associated with “the evil eye.” When  seeing a daguerreotype, French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed: “From today painting is dead!” The invention also caused great anxiety among painters who saw it as a threat to their livelihood. One commentator expressed the fears of some when he said: “Photography’s stringent truth to optical reality could nullify the individual’s apprehension of beauty.” In addition, photographic pictures were even criticized for the relentless realism with which they shattered cherished illusions of beauty and youth.

Daguerre Versus Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot, an English physicist, believed that he had invented photography and was thus taken aback by the announcement of Daguerre’s invention. Talbot had been putting silver-chloride-coated sheets of paper in a camera obscura. He waxed the resulting negative for transparency, placed it over another coated paper, and then exposed it to sunlight, thus producing a positive image.

Although initially a lot less popular and of inferior quality, Talbot’s process proved to have greater potential. It allowed for multiple copies of one single negative, and paper copies were cheaper and easier to handle than the fragile daguerreotypes. Modern photography is still based on Talbot’s process, whereas the daguerreotype, in spite of its initial popularity, proved to be a dead end.

Niepce, Daguerre, and Talbot were, however, not the only contenders for the title of Father of Photography. Following Daguerre’s 1839 announcement, at least 24 men​—from Norway in the north to Brazil in the south—​stepped forward claiming to have invented photography.

Drastic Changes Caused by Photography

One social reformer, Jacob August Riis, early on saw photography as a golden opportunity to bring poverty and suffering to the attention of the public. In 1880 he started taking pictures of New York City slums after dark by using burning magnesium powder in a frying pan as a flash​—a method not entirely without risk. He twice set ablaze the house in which he was working, and once his own clothes caught fire. His pictures are said to have been one of the reasons President Theodore Roosevelt undertook a number of social reforms when he moved into the White House. The persuasive power of a series of scenic photographs by William Henry Jackson also prompted the U.S. Congress in 1872 to make Yellowstone the world’s first national park.

Accessible to All

In the late 1880’s, many potential photographers were still held back because of the cost and complexity of photography. But in 1888 when George Eastman invented the Kodak, a portable easy-to-use box camera containing a roll of flexible film, he paved the way for unlimited amateur photography.

After exposing the roll, the customer would send the entire camera to the factory. There the film was processed and the camera was reloaded and sent back, along with the developed photos​—all this at a fairly low cost. The slogan “You push the button, we do the rest” was no exaggeration.

Photography for the masses had been born, and the billions of exposures taken annually today indicate that its acceptance has never abated. And now, adding to its popularity, there are digital cameras that define an image in megapixels. They use a tiny memory stick that may hold hundreds of photos. High-quality prints can even be made using a home computer and a printer. No doubt about it, photography has come a long way.

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Panoramic daguerreotype of Paris, c. 1845

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A reproduction of possibly the first photograph, c. 1826

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A drawing of a camera obscura, used by many artists

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Niepce

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An 1844 daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre, and his camera

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William Talbot’s studio, c. 1845, and his cameras

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An 1890 photo of George Eastman holding a Kodak No. 2 camera, and his No. 1 camera with film spool

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A scene from what became Yellowstone National Park, by W. H. Jackson, 1871

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Modern digital cameras record pictures with megapixels

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Panoramic of Paris: Photo by Bernard Hoffman/​Time Life Pictures/​Getty Images; Niepce’s photograph: Photo by Joseph Niepce/​Getty Images; camera obscura: Culver Pictures

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Page 23: Talbot’s studio: Photo by William Henry Fox Talbot & Nicholaas Henneman/​Getty Images; Talbot’s camera: Photo by Spencer Arnold/​Getty Images; Kodak photo, Kodak camera, and Daguerre camera: Courtesy George Eastman House; Yellowstone: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-52482