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A brief archaeology of photography
What do we understand by the word photography?
It originates in the Greek words ‘photos’ and ‘graphos’ meaning, ‘light’ and ‘draw’. So, drawing with light seems to be the root of photography and in all truth that is exactly what we do.
What then is this camera that we use?
Basically, a camera is a box with a hole in the front to admit light and some kind of light sensitive material behind this hole that will record the scene in front of the camera.
A simple pinhole camera:
Before this however was the Camera Obscura and this dates back at least to Socrates and possibly as far as ancient Egypt. The first written descriptions come from the 11th century from the Arabic scholar Alhazen who wrote, “If the image of the sun at the time of an eclipse passes through a small round hole on to a plane surface opposite, it will be crescent shaped.”
This principle was used for the next 500 years as a way of observing solar eclipses without the obvious dangers of looking directly at the sun.
1558 saw a leap in knowledge when the Neopolitan scientist Giovanni Battista della Porta suggested the use of the Camera Obscura in art. He wrote, “If you cannot paint, you can by this arrangement draw the outline of the image with a pencil. You have then only to lay on the colour. ”This process is known to have been used by the Dutch painter Vermeer and is credited as the key method in his mastery of perspective.
Additions to the basic method such as the use of glass lenses and diaphragms to help focus the image followed and ‘cameras’ were produced in all sizes from a pocketable 6” x 4” up to and including whole rooms that showed panoramic images of the surrounding countryside. An excellent example of a room sized Camera Obscura can be found high above the promenade in Aberystwyth.
Camera Obscura: from 1544
The one problem that these pioneers had, was that there was no way of fixing the image onto a surface to make it portable. This had to wait until the 19th century.
April 1816 was a seminal period in photography. That was when Nicephore Niépce succeeded in fixing an image of the courtyard of his house on paper coated with silver chloride that he fixed using nitric acid. The image was in fact a negative and despite his best efforts he failed to produce a positive print from this.
A partnership with Louis Daguerre in 1829 led to the production of silvered copper plates, sensitized with iodine vapour, which formed silver iodide on the plate. After exposure (which could be hours) the latent image was developed by vapour of mercury heated over a spirit lamp and fixed by washing in hyposulphite of soda before rinsing with distilled water and covering with glass. William Henry Fox Talbot took the process further developing the Calotype, which allowed for printing on paper and therefore multiple copies.
This was the process, which led ultimately to the film and indeed the digital capture methods that we are blessed with today.
At first photography was lambasted by certain sections of society. They accused Daguerre of blasphemy and of being the ‘fool of fools’. Painting was seen to be dead and portraitists feared for their livelihoods. Thus began the debate which still rages toady; is photography Art?
Many other processes were worked on during the 19th century, Frederick Scott Archer’s Collodion process was based on wet glass plates and was itself rapidly superceded by the Gelatin dry plate from Richard Leach Maddox.
These heroic efforts culminated in the production of the first flexible negative film by George Eastman in 1884.
We could argue that Eastman is the father of popular photography. Not only did he produce the first film but he also produced the name ‘Kodak’ and the worlds first cheap, portable cameras which came with the logo; “You press the button, we do the rest” referring to the fact that the cameras were pre-loaded with film and sent back to Kodak for processing when all the shots were taken. These first cameras cost a guinea, £1.05 in modern money but dropped to 5 shillings (25p) when the ‘Brownie’ was introduced in 1900 a vast difference between that and the hand crafted models in brass and mahogany that cost several hundred pounds and were solely used by the very well off and professionals. Eastman bought photography to the masses.
In 1914 Oskar Barnack a microscope designer at Leitz in Germany built a small camera to make use of discarded cinematic film. This was finally bought to public sale in 1924 as the Leica (LEItz – CAmera) and began the world’s love affair with 35mm photography. Later, in 1929 Franke and Heidecker also in Germany produced a twin lens reflex camera the Rolleiflex that used a 6cm x 6cm negative.
These two formats became the mainstay of both amateur and professional photography for the next 70 years and although still produced in vast numbers they do now have a serious rival in the digital age.
From early beginnings in low-resolution cameras that cost many, many thousands of pounds they have developed rapidly into affordable high resolution camera systems that can now rival 35mm for quality. Higher quality digital backs for medium and large format cameras have a huge price premium on them £18,000 or so to get similar quality results to film but as technology advances and more efficient methods of building digital sensors are developed then these prices will inevitably fall and film will finally be threatened.
There are advantages and disadvantages with both film and digital capture and many of today’s practitioners have developed a hybrid workflow, using film to capture the image but then scanning the negative and producing ink jet prints within their own homes.
This, though sounding a simple way forward has led to a need for new skills with computers, colour management systems and a sound knowledge of available software.
Matching printer output to monitor images is not for the faint hearted and attracts considerable costs. Print prices are high when inks and papers are factored in and it is still quite true to say that the all singing all dancing high tech cameras of today will not magically produce award winning shots.
That, as always, is due purely to the eye and skill of the photographer.
Peter Clark LRPS 2009
