None of the inventions of 19th century has probably created as much astonishment and delight as the Camera. Early viewers of a photograph were awed and amazed by the objective records camera makes. Today we take photography for granted. It has long become a part of our daily lives and has ventured into the world of Art.

Photographs and initial reactions

Photography gradually took over what previously had been one of the main functions of art - the recording of factual visual information. Instead of a portrait painted, people had the first photographs called the "sun drawn miniatures" made. Instead of forming romantic notions of battles and faraway places from paintings, people began to see first-hand visual reports. Photographs recorded images that the unaided eye could not see and social miseries that the eye did not want to see. And photography began to function as an art in its own right.

There was a lot of initial doubt about the capabilities that camera offered. "The wish to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough German investigation, but the mere desire lone . . . is blasphemy" - thundered respected German publication, Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, in 1839 in response to the first public announcement of the invention of a successful photographic process. The Stadtanzeigerheld held that if such wise men of the past as Archimedes and Moses "knew nothing of mirror pictures made permanent, then one can straightway call the Frenchman Daguerre, who boast of such unheard of things, the fool of tools." Such disbelief was surprising, since most of the basic optical and chemical principles that make photography possible had long been established.

Camera Obscura - The First Instrument

The camera obscura, popularly known as the pinhole camera, was the forerunner of the modern camera. Since at least the time of Aristotle, it had been known that rays of light passing through a pinhole would form an image. The 10th-century Arabian scholar Alhazen described the effect in detail and told how to view an Eclipse of the sun in it. A camera obscura (literally, "dark chamber"), a darkened room with a pinhole opening to the outside. By the time of the Renaissance, a lens ad been fitted into the hole to improve the image, and the room-sized device had been reduced to the size of a small box that would easily be carried about. In the 16th Century, Giovanni Battista della Porta suggested in his book Natural Magic that artist use a camera obscura. "If you cannot paint, you can do this by this arrangement [the outline of images] with a pencil. You will have then only to lay on the colors. This is done by reflecting the image on to a drawing-board with paper." The suggestion was taken up by enthusiasm because the realistic portrayal of objects and their correct positioning to create an illusion of depth were important goals of artists in the Western world at that time. The camera obscura became a drawing aid that enabled an artist to trace an image reflected onto a sheet of drawing paper, by the 18th century an art expert was writing, "The best painters among the Italians have availed themselves greatly of this contrivance; nor it is possible that they should have otherwise represented things so much to life."

What remained to be discovered was way to fix the camera obscura image permanently. The darkening of certain silver compounds by exposure to light had been observed as early as the 17th century, but the unsolved and difficult problem was how to halt this reaction so that the image would not darken completely.

Chemistry of the first photograph

The first permanent picture was made by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a gentleman inventor living in central France. Niepce’s experiments with lithography led him to the idea of attempting to take views directly from nature using the camera obscura. He first experimented with silver chloride, which he knew darkened on exposure to light, but then turned to bitumen of Judea, a kind of asphalt that hardened when exposed to light. Niepce dissolved the bitumen in lavender oil, a solvent used in varnishes, then coated a sheet of pewter with the mixture. He placed the sheet in a camera obscura aimed through an open window at his courtyard and exposed it for eight hours. The light forming the image on the plate hardened the bitumen in bright areas and left it soft and soluble in dark areas. Niepce then washed the plate with lavender oil. This removed the still-soft bitumen that had not been struck by light, leaving a permanent image of the scene. Niepce named the process heliography (from the Greek helios, "sun," and graphos, "drawing").

    Image 1- JOSEPH NICEPHORE NIEPCE View from His Window at Gras, c. 1826. 
    Heliograph Niepce produced the world’s first photographic image a view of
    the yard buildings on his estate in about 1826. It was made on a sheet ofj 
    covered with bitumen of Judea, a kind of asphalt that hardened when to light. 
    The unexposed, still soft bitumen was then dissolved, leaving manent image. 
    The exposure time was so long (eight hours) that the su moved across the sky 
    and illuminated both sides of the courtyard.
    

News of Niepce’s work reached another Frenchman, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. Daguerre had been using the camera obscura for sketching and had also become interested in trying to preserve its images. He wrote Niepce suggesting an exchange of information, and by 1829 had become his partner. The mid-l9th century was ripe for an invention like photography. In Western countries a rising middle class with money to spend wanted pictures, especially family portraits, which until then only the rich had been able to afford. In addition, people were interested in faraway places; they traveled to them when they could and bought travel books and pictures when they could not.Niepce did not live to see the impact that photography was to have. He died in 1833, several years before Daguerre perfected a process that he considered different enough from Niepce’s to be announced to the world a s the daguerreotype.

     Image 2-LOUIS JACQUES MANDE DAGUERRE Still Life in the Artist’s Studio, 1837.
      The earliest known daguerreotype is by the inventor of the Daguerre. The exposure 
      was probably several minutes ion the eight hours required by Niepce heliograph,
      and the superior-rich in detail and tonality. The enthusiastic recept process 
      extended to poetry: "Light is that silent artist/Whic4 of man / Designs on silver 
      bright /Daguerre e immortal plan"
     

The response to the daguerreotype was sensational. After experimenting for many years, both with Niepce and alone, Daguerre was finally satisfied with his daguerreotype process, and it was announced before the French Academy of Sciences on January 7, 1839. A French newspaper rhapsodized - "What fineness in the strokes! What knowledge of chiaroscuro! What delicacy! What exquisite finish! How admirably are the foreshortenings given: this is Nature itself. A British scientist was more specific - "The perfection and fidelity of the pictures are such that on examining them by microscopic power, details are discovered which are not perceivable to the naked eye in the original objects: a crack in plaster, a withered leaf lying on a projecting cornice, or an accumulation of dust in a hollow molding of a distant building, are faithfully copied in these wonderful pictures." A daguerreotype viewed close up is still exciting to see".

Daguerreotype Studios

Almost immediately after the process was announced, daguerreotype studios were opened to provide "Sun Drawn Miniatures" to a very willing public. By 1853 an estimated three million daguerreotypes per year were being produced in the United States alone-mostly portraits but also scenic views.

The daguerreotype was made on a highly polished surface of silver that was placed on a copper sheet. It was sensitized by being placed, silver side down, over a container of iodine crystals inside a box. Rising vapor from the iodine reacted with the silver, producing the light-sensitive compound silver iodide. During exposure in the camera, the plate recorded a latent image: a chemical change had taken place, but no evidence of it was visible. To develop the image the plate was placed, silver side down, in another box containing a dish of heated mercury at the bottom. Vapor from the mercury reacted with the exposed areas of the plate. Wherever light had struck the plate, mercury formed a frostlike amalgam, or alloy, with the silver. This amalgam made up the bright areas of the image. Where no light had struck, no amalgam was formed; the unchanged silver iodide was dissolved in sodium thiosulfate fixer, leaving the bare metal plate, which looked black, to form the dark areas of the picture.

The daguerreotype was very popular in its time, but it was a technological dead end. There were complaints about the difficulty of viewing, for the image could be seen clearly only from certain angles. The mercury vapor used in the process was highly poisonous and probably shortened the life of more than one daguerreotypist. But the most serious drawback was that each plate was unique; there was no way of producing copies except by rephotographing the original. The beautiful daguerreotype was rapidly-and easily-eclipsed by a negative-positive process that allowed any number of positive images to be made from a single negative.

Calotype: pictures on paper

Another photographic process was announced almost at once. On January 25, 1839, less than three weeks after the announcement of Daguerre's process to the French Academy, an English amateur scientist, William Henry Fox Talbot, appeared before the Royal Institution of Great Britain to announce that he too had invented a way to permanently fix the image of the camera obscura. Talbot was a disappointed man when he gave his hastily prepared report. He admitted later that Daguerre's prior announcement "frustrated the hope with which I had pursued, during nearly five years, this long and complicated series of experiments-the hope, namely, of being the first to announce to the world the existence of the New Art-which has since been named Photography."

Talbot made his images on paper. His first experiments had been with negative silhouettes made by placing objects on paper sensitized with silver chloride and exposing them to light. Then he experimented with images formed by a camera obscura, exposing the light-sensitive coating long enough for the image to become visible during the exposure. In June 1840 Talbot announced a technique that became the basis of modern photography: the sensitized paper was exposed only long enough to produce a latent image, which then was chemically developed. Talbot reported that nothing could be seen on the paper after exposure, but "the picture existed there, although invisible and by a chemical process . . . it was made to appear in all its perfection." To make the latent negative image visible, Talbot used silver iodide (the light-sensitive element of the daguerreotype) treated with gallo nitrate of silver. He called his invention a calotype (after the Greek kalos, "beautiful," and typos, "impression").

  Image3- WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT lalbot's Photographic Establishment, c. 1844, Calotype.
   The activities at Talbot's establishment near London are shown in this early calolype 
   taken in two parts and pieced together At left, an assistant copies a painting. In the 
   center possibly Talbot Himself prepares a camera to take a portrait. At right, the man 
   at the racks makes contact prints while another photographs a statue. At far right, the 
   kneeling man holds a target for the maker of this photograph to focus on.
  

Advancement

Photography has come a long way after its inception and the first process to make a photograph. A camera still consists of lenses, a viewfinder and a way to store the images captured. Technology has ventured into each of these domains. Today we have lenses that are combination of multiple sets of individual lenses. Films have almost been replaced by digital solid state storage devices and LCD displays have come to aid viewfinders. The difficult and costly tools have been replaced by cheap and portable devices. Today it is much easier to capture what we see. The only challenge is probably to show what we feel, making camera a brush for a painter in a hurry.

  Mother and child -photograph by Akshat Jain Copyright 2010