# The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory

Photography I · Photographic Language and the Taking of the Image · https://tryals.app/learn/photography-i/the-birth-of-photography-and-its-first-theory

## 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.

## Practice questions

10 of this lesson's 14 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Arrange these events in the invention of photography in chronological order.

**Answer:**

1. Ibn al-Haytham describes the camera obscura, about 1021
2. Schulze shows that silver salts darken from light rather than heat, 1727
3. Niépce makes the view from his window at Le Gras, about 1826
4. Arago announces the daguerreotype to the Académie des Sciences, 1839
5. Talbot patents the calotype negative-positive process, 1841

**Why:** The eight-hundred-year gap between the first two items is the shape of the story: the camera existed for centuries as a drawing aid and the whole problem was chemical. What was invented in the 1830s was not the image but the means of arresting it.

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### 2. The daguerreotype was sharper than the calotype and dominated the market for a decade, yet the calotype's principle is the one photography kept. Why?

A. The calotype was cheaper to produce because Talbot placed the process in the public domain
B. The calotype recorded continuous tonal range far more accurately than silvered copper plates
C. The calotype produced a negative, so any number of prints could be made from one exposure
D. The daguerreotype required mercury vapour development that could only be done in a studio

**Answer:** C. The calotype produced a negative, so any number of prints could be made from one exposure

**Why:** Because reproducibility beat resolution. A daguerreotype is a unique object that cannot be copied without rephotographing it; a calotype negative is a matrix from which prints can be pulled indefinitely. Every photographic process since, chemical or digital, is built on that principle rather than on the sharper one.

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### 3. Which are true of the daguerreotype?

A. The French state bought the process and released it, except in England where it was patented
B. Its image is laterally reversed unless a mirror or prism is used
C. It produced a unique image that could not be reprinted from itself
D. It produced a paper negative from which prints could be made

**Answer:** A. The French state bought the process and released it, except in England where it was patented; B. Its image is laterally reversed unless a mirror or prism is used; C. It produced a unique image that could not be reprinted from itself

**Why:** The fourth is Talbot's calotype. The daguerreotype is a direct positive on a silvered copper plate: unique, laterally reversed, astonishingly detailed, and a dead end as a principle precisely because there is nothing to print from.

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### 4. Sort each process by what it yields at the end of an exposure.

**Answer:**

- A unique positive image: Daguerreotype, Ambrotype, a collodion plate backed with black to read as a positive
- A negative made to be printed from: Talbot's calotype, Gelatin dry plate, 1871
- A positive made directly on paper without a negative: Bayard's 1839 process

**Why:** The ambrotype is the instructive case: physically it is an under-exposed collodion negative, and backing it with black velvet makes the eye read it as a positive. It shows that "negative" and "positive" describe how a plate is used and viewed, not only what is on it.

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### 5. Complete the account of the invention and its theory.

**Answer:** John Herschel identified hyposulphite of soda as a fixer in 1819 and gave the language the terms negative and **positive**. Bayard's protest picture of 1840 shows him as a **drowned** man. Barthes separated the general cultural interest of a picture, the studium, from the wounding accidental detail, the **punctum**. Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction dissolves the work's **aura**.

**Why:** Bayard in the second blank is the hinge between the two halves of the lesson. His picture is a technical demonstration, a political complaint and a fiction at once, made in 1840, which is to say that photography was being used to stage an untruth within eighteen months of being announced.

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### 6. Niépce reported that the view from his window at Le Gras required an exposure measured in hours. How many hours did he give as the figure?

**Answer:** 8 (within ±2)

**Why:** **Eight hours** is the figure Niépce reported, and it is the number every textbook repeats. Later research on the plate and on the movement of the shadows in it has argued for several days of intermittent exposure, so the honest statement is: eight hours as reported, probably longer in fact.

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### 7. Match each theorist to the term they contributed.

**Answer:**

- Roland Barthes → The punctum, the accidental detail that wounds a particular viewer
- Walter Benjamin → The aura, and its decay under mechanical reproduction
- Charles Sanders Peirce → The index, a sign physically caused by its object
- André Bazin → The ontology of an image formed without a human hand

**Why:** Peirce is the outlier and the most useful. He was building a general classification of signs and never wrote a theory of photography, but the category of the index is what explains why a photograph of a person persuades differently from a drawing of one, the light really did come off that face.

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### 8. John Herschel identified hyposulphite of soda as a fixer and gave photography the terms negative and positive.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True**, and the 1819 date is the striking part: the solution to the fixing problem existed for twenty years before there was an image worth fixing. Herschel supplied the chemistry to Talbot in 1839 and the vocabulary to everybody, which is a large contribution from someone who made few photographs.

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### 9. Arrange the steps of Talbot's negative-positive process in the order they are carried out.

**Answer:**

1. Expose sensitised paper in the camera to make a paper negative
2. Develop and fix that negative
3. Wax or oil the paper to make it more translucent
4. Lay it in contact with a second sheet of sensitised paper
5. Expose the sandwich to daylight and fix the positive print

**Why:** The waxing step is the one that shows the process fighting its own material. A paper negative scatters light in its fibres and prints soft, so it was oiled or waxed to reduce the scattering, a workaround that Le Gray formalised in 1851 and that glass, being transparent to begin with, made unnecessary.

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### 10. Peirce classified the photograph as an index because light physically imprints the subject onto chemistry, yet Bayard staged his own death in 1840. What tension does Bayard's portrait expose between photographic fact and meaning?

A. Indexical traces cannot capture human subjects without inherently falsifying them
B. A staged subject remains physically recorded even when the scene is a fiction
C. Staging an image destroys the physical causal link between the scene and emulsion
D. Chemical photography only functions indexically when capturing spontaneous events

**Answer:** B. A staged subject remains physically recorded even when the scene is a fiction

**Why:** An index guarantees a physical trace, not narrative honesty. Bayard exploited the camera's mechanical fidelity to stage an imposture, showing that semiotic causality does not guarantee truth value.

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