Photography: The Early Days

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This article is part one of Surabhi Joshi’s featured series on the history of photography. Check out Part 2: The Later Years.

Taken for granted these days, we forget that the task of taking and developing pictures was once a scientist’s work. It involved dangerous chemicals, hours of work, and Herculean patience.

For several years now, pictures have formed an important part of everyone’s domain, which has transformed from an actual wall to a virtual wall. Every phone that is purchased comes with a camera and it is unimaginable to consider an alternative scenario; that is how obsessed we are with taking pictures or at least having the option of having pictures.

The history of photography too begins with this obsession of documenting visuals and dates back to the time of Aristotle who, in the 4^th century B.C., wondered why the sun takes an interest in creating inverted circular images when its light passes through a hole. The optical device here was a lightproof wall or a box with a hole on one side to provide a passage for the sunlight. This light from outside passes through the hole in the room or box and hits the surface inside. Here, an upside down image of the surroundings can be observed with color and perspective preserved. This type of setup was later called a camera obscura. Many scholars knew about this modest setup; however, it was Alhazen, an Arabian scientist, who, in the 10th century produced the first work that clearly described and analyzed this device.

Since then, several studies were undertaken to probe and improve this device. Some like Brunelleschi investigated the correct use of perspective by copying the reflected image. Da Vinci too used the camera obscura as a drawing aid. In 1550, Cardano noticed that he could obtain a brighter and cleaner image using a convex lens, thereby improving the design of this device. In 1604, Kepler provided us with the science and mathematics of reflection. Observing a reflection of the desired image was easy; storing a permanent record of it was unknown. This was the primary issue during the early nineteenth century. Fixing the reflected image without tracing it was still a mystery to artists and scientists that used the camera obscura. This motivated the work that followed in the field of photography. To acquire a permanent image, a chemical sensitive to light and capable of being developed was important.

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In 1725, a German physicist called Schulze managed to fix the reflected images, however, his recorded image lasted only for some time. In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood used silver nitrate and silver chloride and successfully created shadow images such as silhouettes, but was unable to make them permanent.

The world’s first photograph on a pewter plate was taken in France by Nicéphore Niépce. 

As the optical, technical, and chemical aspects improved, the first permanent picture was finally acquired in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce. This image was captured on a glass plate coated with bitumen of Judea using a camera obscura and 8 hours of exposure in sunshine. The impractical amount of time demanded during exposure drove the next endeavors in the field of photography. In 1835, Daguerre accidentally discovered that he could develop an image with mercury vapor using an exposure time of around thirty minutes. He was able to fix these images using common salt.

In the year 1839, the invention of photography was announced to the world. The public was able to access the daguerreotype process because the patent was sold to the French government. This was the first practical photographic process of capturing permanent images. It required a camera obscura, a silver-coated copper plate, bromine and iodine fumes (to sensitize the plate), mercury fumes (to develop images), and sodium chloride or sodium thiosulphate solutions (to fix images). Daguerreotypes made photography affordable for middle-class people because the traditional practice of painting portraits was too expensive. Artists began to use daguerreotypes to depict scenery. It is interesting to note that neither the exposure time of 3 to 15 minutes—the exposures were later reduced to a few seconds—nor the dangerous chemical fumes brought down the lasciviousness of the days of yore—apparently, there was daguerreotype pornography.

Meanwhile, in 1835, Henry Fox Talbot, a British inventor, developed another noteworthy photographic method, called the talbotype. His negative/positive method of photography is perhaps the most familiar to those of us who grew up in the 1990s. It involved making a negative that could be used by the photographer to make a printed image. This had the advantage of creating several positive paper copies of a single image from its negative, unlike the daguerreotype process.

Next, efforts were undertaken to bring out the color of these fixed but black and white images. In 1855, the renowned physicist James Clerk Maxwell suggested applying Young’s three-color theory to photography. This idea involved photographing an object and obtaining three black-and-white negatives such that one was exposed through a red filter, one through a green filter and one through a blue filter. These three negatives contained information about the color, which was regained from the image prints by projecting them on a screen using three lanterns, fitted with the suitable filter. Thomas Sutton used this method in 1861, and produced, for the first time ever, an image in color.

A picture of a ribbon, the first permanent color projection captured by Sutton in 1861 using the process proposed by James Clerk Maxwell

Maxwell’s process had some drawbacks: it was not very sensitive to red and green, which made this process impractical. In 1873, H.W. Vogel observed that photographic emulsions could be made more color-sensitive by adding small quantities of certain dyes. Many used Vogel’s work as the basis to study and improve the sensitivity of these emulsions. There was also work towards decreasing the exposure time.

Several remarkable research and improvements followed. For example, in 1891, Gabriel Lippmann enlightened the photography community with his Nobel Prize winning method of capturing colors using interference. By the late 1800s, photography had certainly witnessed an eventful career, from its days of temporary projection of images that were upside down and restricted to the surroundings of the dark room containing the light-providing hole to permanent images using a handheld apparatus and exposure times less than the length of Andy Warhol’s Empire.

This article is part one of Surabhi Joshi’s featured series on the history of photography. Check out Part 2: The Later Years.

Further Reading

- Shedding light on creativity by Michael Lesk
- A brief history of colour photography by R. W. Burns
- W. H. Fox Talbot and the history of photography by Helmut Gernsheim
- History of Photography and the Camera by Mary Bellis
- An Animated History of Photography by DL Cade
- A Beautiful Video of the Daguerreotype Process by DL Cade