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Joseph Niepce Creates First Photograph
"Heliograph" - Sun Drawings (the original image was exposed for 8 hours)
Using bitumen as a coating on glass or metal, hardened in relation to light or exposure, then washed with lavender oil and only the hardened image remains. -
First Daguerreotype
One offs - appearing as a positive on silver plated copper. Created by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre -
High Art/ Pictorialism in the UK
Most pictorialists started off as painters which can be evident in the final images - it was high art rebelling against the idea that photogtaphy was purely a scientific medium, that it only had to be a way of documenting. And relied more on 'picture making' as opposed to 'picture taking' with most scenes highly staged and created. This also included combination printing and using multiple negatives to create one image. -
Collodian Wet Plate Process Created
Which can be summarised as:
Coating a glass plate with collodion, dipping the plate in silver nitrate, exposing the plate in camera for many minutes (sometimes up to 15) pouring on a developer, fixing the plate, washing and varnishing and then finally making a print. A laborious and fragile process producing high quality images for the time. Due to these long exposure times the images where predominantly landscapes. -
John Everett Millais paints 'Ophelia'
This painting has been very influencial in future photographic styles -
First Paper Negative
William Henry Fox Talbot created the first photographic paper negative of a 'latticed window' and it is the oldest known in existance. -
Tintype Patented
Similar to wet plate collodian, this process became very popular due to the affordability for portraits and fact that fragile glass plates were replaced with a thin iron plate and taking only a few minutes to produce from start to finish, The result is a spookily detailed positive image left on a highly varnished plate. -
Roger Fenton
Paid to take photos of the Crimean and American Civil War WITHOUT dead bodies by the government (propaganda?) - created 700 glass plates (wet plate collodian process) all with positive connotations. -
Panoramic Camera Patented
The Sutton -
Period: to
American Civil War
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"Father of Photojournalism"
Mathew Brady
Said to have had 17 assistants - using wet plate collodian process photographed dead bodies for the first time, showing the reality of war instead of the romantacised idea. -
Eadweard Muybridge creates first Moving Image
Of a race horse running using a 'Zoopraxiscope' described as: "projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion" or stop motion. -
Straight/ Pure Photography Movement
Or naturalism, was started during the industrial revolution (1880 - 1920) when artists wanted to take photos as realistically as possible to the scene with no manipulation. Almost organic and mainly people in natural landscapes. Also saw the founding of a group called f. 64 which included:
Ansel Adams
Imogen Cunningham
John Paul Edwards
Sonya Noskowiak
Henry Swift
Willard Van Dyke
Edward Weston
Notorious for their sharp, simple, focussed images that were preceisely exposed. -
Kodak established
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Box Brownie
Roll - film camera introduced. The first mass marketed camera. -
Photo Secessionism
Alfred Stieglitz led a group called 'The Linked Ring Brotherhood' who understood it was not just what was in front of the camera (as in photojournalism) but the manipulation of the image by the artist/photographer to achieve his or her results -
Colour Autochrome Readily Available.
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Man Ray starts making Photograms
By placing objects on photographic paper and exposing them to various degrees of light, -
The Leica A is introduced
It's the first 35-mm camera with any real commercial success because of its portability and durability -
New Objective/ Modernist Photography Movement
Smaller cameras made taking photos from different angles undetected much easier, this movement focused on sky scrapers and machines, abstractions using shadow and light as well as everyday objects viewed from different angles, giving them new life. This movement spanned across many decades. -
Strobe Photography Introduced
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First Photo taken from space
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Magnum Agency Started
Photographer-run including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour. -
The Hasselblad is introduced
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Film Noir
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Polaroid SX-70
Polaroid introduces the first one-step instant photograph with the SX-70 camera -
The world's first digital camera
It was 4kg, took 16 batteries and recorded 0.01 megapixel black and white images to a cassette tape at the back. It is rumored the first photograph took 23 seconds to create and played back on a TV. -
Fuji introduces the first disposable camera.
Known as the 'Quicksnap' it is shaped like a box and can take approximately 20 pictures on 35-mm film. This remains largely unchanged. -
Adobe releases Photoshop 1.0
Originally for Macintosh exclusively. -
Camera Phone Released
Making the ability to take photos more accecible than even before, quite literally, everyone has a camera in their pockets. -
Kodak ceases production of film cameras
