THE BIRTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Sometime between 1823 and 1826 in the French town of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the above - the world’s first photographic exposure by pointing creating a small camera obscura out his rear window. (For those unfamiliar with the term, the camera obscura is a method of using a small hole in a screen or wall to project an optically inverted image into the interior of a room or box. The technique has been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years, and the earliest known example of applied optics.) Dubbed the ‘heliograph’ by Niépce, it took 8 hours to complete, was made on asphalt, and the image could not be reproduced. While clearly photographic, it's difficult to consider this image part of the ritualized photographic practice that is now commonplace. Indeed, photography itself would be submitted to substantial social, historical, and technological changes before it would emerge as the ubiquitous technology of self-making it is today.
Shortly after Niépce’s discovery, he was introduced to Paris-based theatrical artist and experimental physicist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre through his optician Charles Chevalier, who had supplied both men with fine lenses for their experiments. The two would form a partnership to improve on the heliographic technique in 1829, until Niépce’s unexpected death in 1833 (intriguingly, of which I have yet to see a decent explanation).
Boulevard du Temple, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1837)
Through the 1830s Daguerre would continue to toil, refining the technique that would eventually become the Daguerreotype as another inventor, botanist William Henry Fox Talbot, would be separately perfecting his own photographic process in England. While for years Daguerre was generally the person credited with ‘inventing’ photography following his presentation to a joint session of the French Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts in January, 1839, it was Tablot’s innovation of a paper-based, positive/negative process capable of making multiple copies of any one image that would be more indicative of the development of photography into a mass medium. In fact, Niépce himself had experimented with a similar light-sensitive paper process using silver halide, but was unable to keep the images from darkening when continually exposed to light and gave up in favor of more permanent exposures using the bitumen (asphalt) process he became remembered for.
And yet it would be Daguerre's process - which lent itself to creating ornate family heirlooms in fine portraits of polished silver - that helped popularize photography among the upper classes, leading to the creation of portrait studios throughout Europe and America. This interplay of competing scientific and commercial interests illustrates the multiple and sometimes conflicting historical roots of contemporary photography, the genealogy of which illuminates its use today.
Daguerreotype of Daguerre himself, (1844)
As art historian Ian Jeffrey has noted in his A Brief History of Photography, it is next to impossible to put together a comprehensive historical survey of photography: too much of the photographic past has been lost either to the elements - fires (many of the photographic processes and materials used through the 1940s were highly explosive nitrates), floods, and improper storage - or the economically ‘rational’ destruction of negatives housed in shuttered photo-agencies and publication houses. We must also contend with the fact that there may be hundreds if not thousands of unrecognized ‘masters’ of photography that have been buried under the unstoppable march of industrial progress with no way to display their work for public viewing. Consider, for example, the recent discovery in Chicago of the previously unknown work of Vivian Meyer, who now has posthumously been the subject of several exhibitions and an Academy Award nominated documentary film. Any work on photography will always remain a work in progress.
On top of this, in order to fully appreciate the cultural inheritance that informs photographic imaging we must also acknowledge the historical influence of those technologists whose work made its invention possible, including the scientific and empirical tradition from which it was built. It would be a mistake to consider the development of photography without addressing the important legacy of Francis Bacon on scientific education in the West, the Dutch mastery of lens-making exemplified by Johann Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, the birth of modern chemistry with Antoine Lavoisier, the revolutionary work of Isaac Newton in physics, optics, and mathematics, and the contribution of Michael Faraday to the field of electromagnetism (later developed by James Clerk Maxwell into a unified theory that to this day is the basis for the televisual reproduction of color). See the tragically underappreciated works of Lewis Mumford - particularly Technics and Civilization - for more on this.
Tartan Ribbon, the first ever color photograph made using the additive three-color primary system devised by James Clerk Maxwell (1861)
It is from this historical moment – defined by the utilitarian, positivist, and humanist philosophies of the Enlightenment, as well as the emergence of mechanized, industrial modes of production – that gave rise to photography. (The term ‘Enlightenment’ is telling in itself. The etymological implication is metaphorical ‘bringing to light’ of the world – indeed, this was taken literally in some respects, as in the manipulation and control of light in the developing observational sciences.)