Pick three events in the timeline from this week’s lesson History of Photography: An Introduction, and find photographs of the event on the Internet or in the library and write a paragraph explaining the event in more detail. Include your photographs in the description.
Sun Prints
Even though the first pinhole camera (also known as the camera obscura) was invented in about 1 000 AD by a man called Alhazen, and revisited by Aristotle at around 330 BC. It was not until a summer’s day in 1827 when Joseph Nicephore Niepce took the first photographic image with a camera obscura
Before Niepce took this photograph, artists only used the camera obscura to help them draw pictures, never to take photographs. Niepce’s creations were aptly named “sun prints”, since light is used to draw the picture. These prints formed the blueprint for modern photography.
Niepce created his sun prints by engraving a picture onto a metal plate, coating it in bitumen and then exposing it to light.
The daguerreotype
Another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre was also looking for ways to capture images with light. It took Daguerre over a decade before he was able to reduce the exposure time to less than half an hour and prevent the image from disappearing afterwards. This process made Daguerre the father of the practical process of photography.
In 1829 Daguerre and Niepce joined forces to improve the process of photography. After about ten years of experimentation, Daguerre created an easier and more effective way of taking photographs and called it the daguerreotype.
Daguerre would “fix” an image onto a sheet of silver-plated copper. He would then polish the silver and coat the sheet with iodine, which creates a surface that is sensitive to light. He then placed this plate in a camera and exposed it to light for a few minutes. After the image was created, Daguerre bathed the plate in a solution of silver chloride. This ensured that the image would last and that it wouldn’t change when it got into contact with light.
Daguerre and Niepce’s son sold the rights for daguerreotype to the French government in 1839. They also wrote and published a booklet that describes the process. The daguerreotype quickly became popular and in 1850 over seventy daguerreotype studios could be found in New York City alone.
Wet Plate Negatives
A Wet-Plate Glass Negative of Confederate Spy Belle Boyd, Isabella Marie “Belle” Boyd (1844 – 1900) was one of the most famous and notorious Confederate spies
In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet plate negative. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.
Photography advanced considerably when sensitised materials could be coated on plate glass. However, wet plates had to be developed quickly before the emulsion dried. In the field this meant carrying along a portable darkroom.
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