The Brief History of Photography

From the beginning of time, humankind has recorded its own history through oral traditions, pictures, song and eventually photography. Photography is the process of taking a picture with a device and later printing what is captured by that camera in some way, shape or form.

The history of photography dates back to ancient times, when civilizations such as the Ottomans and Greeks used pieces of paper and pinholes to burn onto parchment pictures drawn on one surface to another. While highly unsuccessful, the pinhole would manage to capture obscure fragments of a picture, and early photography had begun.

Modern photography, however, began in the year 1839 when the actual name came to the art form from Sir John Herschel. Photography is made up of two separate processes that make the entire art form possible. The first process was optical, the second was chemical.

"Camera obscura," the dark room, is the optical form. The idea of the dark room had existed for more than 400 years and was used to aid drawing in the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to aid the exposure to light paintings and drawings came under fire from while lying around studios. As light damages drawings and paintings, it also damages photographs when developing.

Chemically, photographs have to be developed on paper in order to be preserved and viewed. Robert Boyle, in the 1600s, determined that silver chloride would darken when exposed to light. Angelo Sala, in the early 1700s, noticed that powdered nitrate - from silver - would blacken when exposed to light. Johann H. Schulze also discovered the certain liquids, such as water, changed color when exposed to light for long periods of time. Finally, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Thomas Wedgwood began conducting experiments piecing together all of the above as he had captured images with a crude camera but he could not make the images permanent on anything.