Before Photography became the universal way of recording a given moment, the job was dominated by realistic paintings which would depict anything from portraits to landscapes. This changed around the Renaissance period as Arabian pioneer Alhazen invented what is now called the Camera Obscura.
This revoloutionary, yet primitive and simple technology used a light source to project the outside world into a dark box roughly the size of a room. In Florence, Inventor Leonardo Da Vinci used this technology to create lifelike paintings; drawing over the projected images that covered the blacked out room . The camera obscura revoloutionised the way that paintings were painted, giving them more accurate and lifelike appearances, which caused them to stray away from purely fine art and into a means of recording. This created a public thirst for recording, and a cultural appetite to capture reality. This appetite was filled in 1827, when Joseph Niepce created the first still image in history. Called "View from his window at La Gras", the photo captured a landscape of the rooftops that loomed below the scientist's holiday home in the south of France. During the 19th century, technology advanced rapidly as the industrial revolution reached it's peak. with it, Photography improved through the rivalry of French scientist Louis Daguerre, and English scientist Henry Fox Talbot. Daguerre created the daguerrotype; a small image which was printed onto a shiny square of metal and had little tone. Although accurate and detailed, the Daguerrotype could only be produced once, making them valuable works of art to the ultra wealthy, but inaccessible for the masses. Henry Fox Talbot however, recorded plants and shrubbery through photogenic drawings, which were recorded onto a salted paper print as apposed to a shiny paper. This soon lead to the Callotype. Which created a negative. This was a very important milestone in photography because this meant that the negative could be reproduced and turned into a positives. Fox's introduction of the mass production of photographs meant that for the first time ever, photography was accessible to not just the bougoisis. Shortly after the phtograph became a cultural obsession, Paul delaroche famously proclaimed that "Painting is dead". This showed that photography was starting to move away as a form of fine art and more as a defined concept which was more efficient, accurate and could easily replace painting. In a matter of 60 years, the price of cameras dropped rapidly and cameras were made available for the majority of people to be able to purchase. Companys such as Kodak saw the investment to supply this new bracket of photographers with supplies such as film, gathering some of the biggest profits ever made and solidifying it as a household name. Photography continued to soar throughout the 20th century and even more in the 21st century with the introduction of digital photography. |
View from inside Camera Obscura, as Leonardo Da Vinci or Alhazen would have seen during the 16th century
Callotype taken by Henry Fox Talbot
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