The history of Photography is nearly synomous with the history of the Camera. The following timeline outlines a brief list of benchmarks in the last 160 years of camera technology and those who have used them.

Handout: Photographic History [.pdf]

11th Century: The Camera Obscura

The camera obsucra had been discovered by accident in Egypt. (Though it’s optical properties were observed by Aristotle during a solar eclipse). It soon had come into practice giving artists and craftsman the ability to project a daylight scene onto a two dimensional flat plane to trace. Using a small opening into a dark room (or large box) an image from the outside environment would be projected in inverse on the backside of the room, much like a rudimentary projector. Further developments over the centuries (Leonardo DaVinci gave clear examples in his notebooks in 1490) implemented mirrors and smaller, portable boxes to project scenes onto flat traceable surfaces.

These devices did not create an image, only provided the means of converting a three dimensional daylight scene into a projected flat surface.

The fundametnals of a Camera Obscura

Wooden Box Camera Obscuras

Camera Obscura Illustration

1826: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce makes the first photograph.

From his windowsill in Paris France, he used a wooden camera invented by two brothers; Charles and Vincent Chevalier. Niépce called his process “heliography”, meaning “sun writing”. The exposure time require is an issue still debated today, somewhere between 8 and 20 hours. Because of the incredibly long exposure time, the process was used to photograph buildings and inanimate objects, but could not be practically used to photograph people.

Niépce’s first photograph

1835: The first practical photographic process was invented by Louis Daguerre.

Named the daguerreotype, this process was a postive image that could not be duplicated nor reprinted. William Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. Both used a sensitized plate or sheet of paper placed in front of the viewing screen to record the image. Focusing was generally via sliding boxes. Soon a new industry, portrait photography became vogue for the upper class gentry who could afford them.

An early Daguerreotype

1840: Frederick Scott Archer developed the Wet Plate Process

This advancment cut exposure times dramatically, allowing for a wider range of subjects, but required photographers to prepare glass plates with light sensitive chemicals in a dark room prior to making the exposure.

The photographic process during the American Civil War

1877: Dry Plate development eclipsed Wet plates

The Dry Plate process could be done far in advnce of loading the camera, allowing photographers to take commercially made plates of the shelf and load them into cameras. This was the precursor to modern film, and allowed for a proliferation of camera designs, some small enough to be handheld.

Dry Plate Process Outlined

Eastman’s Dry Plate Development: Timeline

1888: George Eastman offers the first film camera

Preloaded with 100 exposures worth of celluloid film, he called his camera the “Kodak”. The camera needed to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished. It was a simple camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer.

In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one-step further with the Brownie, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.

The Brownie Camera Collection

Koak Company History

1920’s: The invention of 35mm film leads to new cameras

35mm film was invented 1892 by William Dickson and Thomas Edison, using film stock supplied by George Eastman. The photographic film is cut into strips 1 3/8 inches or 35 mm wide — hence the name. German Oskar Barnack built the first 35mm camera in 1914, though further development was delayed for several years by World War I. Leitz test-marketed the design between 1923 and 1924, receiving enough positive feedback that the camera was put into production as the Leica I (for Leitz camera) in 1925. The 35mm film format became the most popular film used in cameras for the rest of the 1900’s. Though Eastman’s brownie camera models, with their roll film remained popular format of choice for mass-market cameras, 35mm cameras became affordable before the Second World War.

1930’s: The fledgling Japanese camera industry began to take off

In 1936 the Canon 35mm rangefinder was released. It was an improved version of the 1933 Kwanon prototype, and Japanese cameras would begin to become popular in the West after Korean War veterans and soldiers stationed in Japan brought them back to the United States and elsewhere.

1947: The Single Lens Reflex camera (SLR)

This invention was developed in the 1930’s, but did not gain wide appeal until further refinement after WWII. The first major post-war SLR innovation was the eye-level viewfinder, which first appeared on the Hungarian Duflex in 1947 and was refined in 1948 with the Contax S, the first camera to use a pentaprism, a mirror system to bend light coming through the lens into a viewfinder above the lens in the back of the camera.

SLR Cameras at eBay

1948: Polariod Cameras Debut

While conventional cameras were becoming more refined and sophisticated, an entirely new type of camera appeared on the market in 1948. This was the Polaroid Model 95, the world’s first viable instant-picture camera. These cameras were relatively high priced and were not marketed to the general public until 1965, when consumer a priced consumer priced model, the Polaroid Swinger was released. It was a huge success and remains one of the top-selling cameras of all time.

Polaroid Company History

1975: Cameras continue to evolve

Texas Instruments designed a filmless analog camera in 1972, but it is not known if it was ever built. The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was by Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak. It used the then-new solid-state CCD chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds, recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of .01 mega pixel (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture it’s first image in December of 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production, and it still existed as of 2005.

The Origins of the Digital Camera

1982: The Holga Perhaps a corruption of the Cantonese phrase ho gwong, meaning “very bright”, the Holga is a very inexpensive, medium format box camera appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga originated in Hong Kong in 1982, and used 120 film, the most widely available film in China at that time. The camera was originally intended to provide an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese in order to record family portraits and events. The Holga’s cheap construction, combined with poor quality materials and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions. The often bizarre photographic results of these effects have ironically popularized the camera with an international audience, and Holga photos have won numerous awards and competitions in art and news photography.

A Holga Overview

1991: Digital Capture and Transimission

The early adopters tended to be in the news media, where the cost was negated by the utility and the ability to transmit images by telephone lines. The poor image quality was offset by the low resolution of newspaper graphics. This capability to transmit images without a satellite link was useful during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the first Gulf War in 1991.

The Digital Journalist: Images of the Gulf War

The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 16MB internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed in the United States. The first commercially available digital camera was the 1991 Kodak DCS-100, the beginning of a long line of professional SLR cameras by Kodak that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a 1.3 mega pixel sensor and was priced at $13,000.

1999: The Digital SLR

saw the introduction of the Nikon D1; a 2.74 mega pixel camera that was the first digital SLR developed entirely by a major manufacturer, and at a cost of under $6,000 at introduction was affordable by professional photographers and high-end consumers. This camera also used Nikon F-mount lenses, which meant film photographers could use many of the same lenses they already owned.

2003 saw the introduction of the Canon Digital Rebel, also known as the 300D; a 6-mega pixel camera and the first DSLR priced under $1,000, and marketed to consumers.

The Relationship between Photography & Cameras

There are few examples in history where an artform is so closely related to technology and industrial enterprise. The photographic medium has always been in flux, with each generation of photographers grappling with past, current, and future forms of image making.

Above and beyond the act of making a photograph, there is always the concept, the reason, and the essense of image making. It has existed without interference from the constanlty changing camera industry. Impactful images resonate and stir our human psyche because of how they communicate messages to our hearts and minds; they are timelss and trandscend the optics of the camera. They move us by the skill and vision of the photographer, not by what camera was used.

Class Reading: Chapter #3