The Long Prehistory and the Sudden Arrival
The optics were ancient. Ibn al-Haytham described the camera obscura around 1021. By the seventeenth century, painters used it regularly.
The chemistry arrived separately:
- In 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulze proved silver salts darken from light.
- In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy captured unfixed images on paper.
The challenge was stopping the darkening process.
| Inventor | Process | What it produced |
|---|---|---|
| Nicéphore Niépce, c. 1826 | Heliography, bitumen on pewter | A unique plate after hours of exposure (1826) |
| Louis Daguerre, announced 1839 | Daguerreotype, silver on copper | A unique, laterally reversed, mirror-bright positive |
| William Henry Fox Talbot, 1839 to 1841 | Calotype (photogenic drawing) | A paper negative producing multiple prints |
| Hippolyte Bayard, 1839 | Direct positive on paper | A unique direct positive, and a grievance |
François Arago announced Daguerre's process on 7 January 1839. The French state purchased it for the world. However, Daguerre patented it in England.
Talbot patented the calotype in 1841. He enforced his rights strictly, which slowed adoption.
Bayard was sidelined in 1839. In 1840, he staged Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man. The back bore an angry protest note. The medium could now lie.
In 1819, John Herschel discovered hyposulphite of soda as a fixer. He shared it with Talbot in 1839. Herschel also coined the terms negative and positive.
Later breakthroughs accelerated the field:
- 1851: Frederick Scott Archer invents wet collodion.
- 1871: Richard Leach Maddox introduces the gelatin dry plate.
- 1888: George Eastman launches roll film and the Kodak camera.
The First Theory
Theoretical debates began at once:
- Charles Sanders Peirce categorised signs. He identified the photograph as an index, physically caused by its subject.
- Walter Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935). He argued mass reproduction strips an artwork of its original aura.
- André Bazin wrote "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" (1945). He located photography's power in the absence of human intervention.
- Susan Sontag published On Photography (1977). She analysed taking photos as an act of acquisition.
- Roland Barthes introduced two key ideas in 1980. The studium is the general cultural reading of an image. The punctum is the piercing, personal detail that strikes the viewer.
Common pitfall: dating Photography solely to 1839. Daguerre produced crisp, popular direct images. Talbot created reproducible paper negatives. Modern photography descended from Talbot's multi-print system, not Daguerre's unique metal plates.