History of Photography - Britannica Online Encyclopedia

09.06.
2020 History of photography -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
History of photography
History of photography, method of recording the image of an object through the action of light, or related
radiation, on a light-sensitive material. The word, derived from the Greek photos (“light”) and graphein (“to
draw”), was first used in the 1830s.
This article treats the historical and aesthetic aspects of still

photography. For a discussion of the technical aspects of the
medium, see photography, technology of. For a treatment of
motion-picture photography, or cinematography, see motion
picture, history of, and motion-picture technology.
General considerations
stereoscope
Pocket stereoscope with original test As a means of visual communication and expression,
image; the instrument is used by the photography has distinct aesthetic capabilities. In order to
military to examine 3-D aerial
understand them, one must first understand the characteristics of
photographs.
the process itself. One of the most important characteristics is
Joaquim Alves Gaspar
immediacy. Usually, but not necessarily, the image that is
recorded is formed by a lens in a camera. Upon exposure to the
light forming the image, the sensitive material undergoes changes in its structure, a latent (but reversed)
image usually called a negative is formed, and the image becomes visible by development and permanent by
fixing with sodium thiosulfate, called “hypo.” With modern materials, the processing may take place
immediately or may be delayed for weeks or months.
The essential elements of the image are usually established immediately at the time of exposure. This
characteristic is unique to photography and sets it apart from other ways of picture making. The seemingly
automatic recording of an image by photography has given the process a sense of authenticity shared by no
other picture-making technique. The photograph possesses, in the popular mind, such apparent accuracy that
the adage “the camera does not lie” has become an accepted, if erroneous, cliché.
This understanding of photography’s supposed objectivity has dominated evaluations of its role in the arts. In
the early part of its history, photography was sometimes belittled as a mechanical art because of its
dependence on technology. In truth, however, photography is not the automatic process that is implied by the
use of a camera. Although the camera usually limits the photographer to depicting existing objects rather than
imaginary or interpretive views, the skilled photographer can introduce creativity into the mechanical
reproduction process. The image can be modified by different lenses and filters. The type of sensitive
material used to record the image is a further control, and the contrast between highlight and shadow can be
changed by variations in development. In printing the negative, the photographer has a wide choice in the
physical surface of the paper, the tonal contrast, and the image colour. The photographer also may set up a
completely artificial scene to photograph.
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09.06.2020 History of photography -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
The most important control is, of course, the creative photographer’s vision. He or she chooses the vantage
point and the exact moment of exposure. The photographer perceives the essential qualities of the subject and
interprets it according to his or her judgment, taste, and involvement. An effective photograph can
disseminate information about humanity and nature, record the visible world, and extend human knowledge
and understanding. For all these reasons, photography has aptly been called the most important invention
since the printing press.
Inventing the medium

Antecedents
The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a dark chamber or room with a hole (later a lens) in
one wall, through which images of objects outside the room were projected on the opposite wall. The
principle was probably known to the Chinese and to ancient Greeks such as Aristotle more than 2,000 years
ago. Late in the 16th century, the Italian scientist and writer Giambattista della Porta demonstrated and
described in detail the use of a camera obscura with a lens. While artists in subsequent centuries commonly
used variations on the camera obscura to create images they could trace, the results from these devices
depended on the artist’s drawing skills, and so scientists continued to search for a method to reproduce
images completely mechanically.
In 1727 the German professor of anatomy Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts, a
phenomenon known since the 16th century and possibly earlier, was caused by light and not heat. He
demonstrated the fact by using sunlight to record words on the salts, but he made no attempt to preserve the
images permanently. His discovery, in combination with the camera obscura, provided the basic technology
necessary for photography. It was not until the early 19th century, however, that photography actually came
into being.
Early experiments
Heliography
Nicéphore Niépce, an amateur inventor living near Chalon-sur-Saône, a city 189 miles (304 km) southeast of
Paris, was interested in lithography, a process in which drawings are copied or drawn by hand onto
lithographic stone and then printed in ink. Not artistically trained, Niépce devised a method by which light
could draw the pictures he needed. He oiled an engraving to make it transparent and then placed it on a plate
coated with a light-sensitive solution of bitumen of Judea (a type of asphalt) and lavender oil and exposed the
setup to sunlight. After a few hours, the solution under the light areas of the engraving hardened, while that
under the dark areas remained soft and could be washed away, leaving a permanent, accurate copy of the
engraving. Calling the process heliography (“sun drawing”), Niépce succeeded from 1822 onward in copying
oiled engravings onto lithographic stone, glass, and zinc and from 1826 onto pewter plates.
In 1826/27, using a camera obscura fitted with a pewter plate, Niépce produced the first successful
photograph from nature, a view of the courtyard of his country estate, Gras, from an upper window of the
house. The exposure time was about eight hours, during which the sun moved from east to west so that it
appears to shine on both sides of the building.
Niépce produced his most successful copy of an engraving, a portrait of Cardinal d’Amboise, in 1826. It was
exposed in about three hours, and in February 1827 he had the pewter plate etched to form a printing plate
and had two prints pulled. Paper prints were the final aim of Niépce’s heliographic process, yet all his other
attempts, whether made by using a camera or by means of engravings, were underexposed and too weak to be
etched. Nevertheless, Niépce’s discoveries showed the path that others were to follow with more success.
Daguerreotype
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a professional scene painter for the theatre. Between 1822 and 1839 he
was coproprietor of the Diorama in Paris, an auditorium in which he and his partner Charles-Marie Bouton
displayed immense paintings, 45.5 by 71.5 feet (14 by 22 metres) in size, of famous places and historical
events. The partners painted the scenes on translucent paper or muslin and, by the careful use of changing
lighting effects, were able to present vividly realistic tableaux. The views provided grand, illusionistic
entertainment, and the amazing trompe l’oeil effect was purposely heightened by the accompaniment of
appropriate music and the positioning of real objects, animals, or people in front of the painted scenery.
Like many other artists of his time, Daguerre made preliminary sketches by tracing the images produced by
both the camera obscura and the camera lucida, a prism-fitted instrument that was invented in 1807. His
attempt to retain the duplication of nature he perceived in the camera obscura’s ground glass led in 1829 to a
partnership with Niépce, with whom he worked in person and by correspondence for the next four years.
However, Daguerre’s interest was in shortening the exposure time necessary to obtain an image of the real
world, while Niépce remained interested in producing reproducible plates. It appears that by 1835, three years
after Niépce’s death, Daguerre had discovered that a latent image forms on a plate of iodized silver and that it
can be “developed” and made visible by exposure to mercury vapour, which settles on the exposed parts of
the image. Exposure times could thus be reduced from eight hours to 30 minutes. The results were not
permanent, however; when the developed picture was exposed to light, the unexposed areas of silver
darkened until the image was no longer visible. By 1837 Daguerre was able to fix the image permanently by
using a solution of table salt to dissolve the unexposed silver iodide. That year he produced a photograph of
his studio on a silvered copper plate, a photograph that was remarkable for its fidelity and detail. Also that
year, Niépce’s son Isidore signed an agreement with Daguerre affirming Daguerre as the inventor of a new
process, “the daguerreotype.”
In 1839 Niépce’s son and Daguerre sold full rights to the

daguerreotype and the heliograph to the French government, in
return for annuities for life. On August 19 full working details
were published. Daguerre wrote a booklet describing the
process, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various
Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama, which at once
Still Life, daguerreotype by Louis- became a best seller; 29 editions and translations appeared
Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, 1837; in the
collection of the Société Française de
before the end of 1839.
Photographie, Paris.
Collection de la Société Francaiçe de Photogenic drawing
Photographie, Paris
The antecedents of photogenic drawing can be traced back to
1802, when Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, reported his experiments in
recording images on paper or leather sensitized with silver nitrate. He could record silhouettes of objects
placed on the paper, but he was not able to make them permanent. Sir Humphry Davy published a paper in
the Journal of the Royal Institution, London, in June 1802, on the experiments of his friend Wedgwood; this
was the first account of an attempt to produce photographs.
In 1833 the French-born photographer Hercules Florence worked with paper sensitized with silver salts to
produce prints of drawings; he called this process “photography.” However, since he conducted his
experiments in Brazil, apart from the major scientific centres of the time, his contributions were lost to
history until 1973, when they were rediscovered. Others in Europe, including one woman, claimed to have
discovered similar photographic processes, but no verifiable proof has come to light.
William Henry Fox Talbot, trained as a scientist at the University of Cambridge, could not draw his scientific
observations, even with the aid of a camera lucida; this deficiency inspired him to invent a photographic
process. He decided to try to record by chemical means the images he observed, and by 1835 he had a
workable technique. He made paper light-sensitive by soaking it alternately in solutions of common salt
(sodium chloride) and silver nitrate. Silver chloride was thus produced in the fibres of the paper. Upon
exposure to light, the silver chloride became finely divided silver, dark in tone. Theoretically, the resulting
negative, in which tonal and spatial values were reversed, could be used to make any number of positives
simply by putting fresh sensitized paper in contact with the negative and exposing it to light. Talbot’s method
of fixing the print by washing it in a strong solution of sodium chloride was inadequate, however, and the
process was not successful until February 1839, when his astronomer friend Sir John Herschel suggested
fixing the negatives with sodium hyposulphite (now called sodium thiosulfate) and waxing them before
printing, which reduced the grain of the paper.
When news of Daguerre’s process reached England in January 1839, Talbot rushed publication of his
“photogenic drawing” process and subsequently explained his technique in complete detail to the members of
the Royal Society—six months before the French government divulged working directions for the
daguerreotype.
Early views of the medium’s potential

Photography’s remarkable ability to record a seemingly inexhaustible amount of detail was marveled at again
and again. Still, from its beginnings, photography was compared—often unfavourably—with painting and
drawing, largely because no other standards of picture making existed. Many were disappointed by the
inability of the first processes to record colours and by the harshness of the tonal scale. Critics also pointed
out that moving objects were not recorded or were rendered blurry and indistinct because of the great length
of time required for an exposure.
Despite these deficiencies, many saw the technique of photography as a shortcut to art. No longer was it
necessary to spend years in art school drawing from sculpture and from life, mastering the laws of linear
perspective and chiaroscuro. Others saw these realizations as threatening. For example, upon first seeing the
daguerreotype process demonstrated, the academic painter Paul Delaroche declared, “From today, painting is
dead”; although he would later realize that the invention could actually aid artists, Delaroche’s initial reaction
was indicative of that of many of his contemporaries. Such artists at first feared what Daguerre boasted in a
1838 broadsheet: “With this technique, without any knowledge of chemistry or physics, one will be able to
make in a few minutes the most detailed views.”
Photography’s early evolution, c. 1840–c. 1900

The revolution of technique
Development of the daguerreotype

Daguerre’s process rapidly spread throughout the world. Before the end of 1839, travelers were buying
daguerreotypes of famous monuments in Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Spain; engravings of these works were
made and then published in two volumes as Excursions daguerriennes between 1841 and 1843. Although
Daguerre’s process was published “free to the world” by the French government, he took out a patent for it in
England; the first licensee was Antoine-François-Jean Claudet. The first daguerreotypes in the United States
were made on September 16, 1839, just four weeks after the announcement of the process. Exposures were at
first of excessive length, sometimes up to an hour. At such lengthy exposures, moving objects could not be
recorded, and portraiture was impractical.
Experiments were begun in Europe and the United States to improve the optical, chemical, and practical
aspects of the daguerreotype process to make it more feasible for portraiture, the most desired application.
The earliest known photography studio anywhere opened in New York City in March 1840, when Alexander
Wolcott opened a “Daguerrean Parlor” for tiny portraits, using a camera with a mirror substituted for the lens.
During this same period, József Petzval and Friedrich Voigtländer, both of Vienna, worked on better lens and
camera design. Petzval produced an achromatic portrait lens that was about 20 times faster than the simple
meniscus lens the Parisian opticians Charles Chevalier and N.M.P. Lerebours had made for Daguerre’s
cameras. Meanwhile, Voigtländer reduced Daguerre’s clumsy wooden box to easily transportable proportions
for the traveler. These valuable improvements were introduced by Voigtländer in January 1841. That same
month another Viennese, Franz Kratochwila, freely published a chemical acceleration process in which the
combined vapours of chlorine and bromine increased the sensitivity of the plate by five times.
The first studio in Europe was opened by Richard Beard in a glasshouse on the roof of the Royal Polytechnic
Institution in London on March 23, 1841. Unlike the many daguerreotypists who were originally scientists or
miniature painters, Beard had been a coal merchant and patent speculator. Having acquired the exclusive
British license for the American mirror camera (he later also purchased the exclusive rights to Daguerre’s
invention in England, Wales, and the colonies), Beard employed the chemist John Frederick Goddard to try to
improve and accelerate the exposure process. Among the techniques Goddard studied were two that Wolcott
had tried: increasing the light sensitivity of the silver iodide with bromine vapours and filtering the blindingly
bright daylight necessary for exposure through blue glass to ease the portrait sitter’s eye strain. By December
1840 Goddard had succeeded well enough to produce tiny portraits ranging in size from 0.4 inch (1 cm) in
diameter to 1.5 by 2.5 inches (4 by 6 cm). By the time Beard opened his studio, exposure times were said to
vary between one and three minutes according to weather and time of day. His daguerreotype portraits
became immensely popular, and the studio made considerable profits the first few years, but competition soon
appeared, and Beard lost his fortune in several lawsuits against infringers of his licenses.
The finest daguerreotypes in Britain were produced by Claudet, who opened a studio on the roof of the Royal
Adelaide Gallery in June 1841. He was responsible for numerous improvements in photography, including
the discovery that red light did not affect sensitive plates and could therefore be used safely in the darkroom.
The improvements that had been made in lenses and sensitizing techniques reduced exposure times to
approximately 20 to 40 seconds.
Daguerreotyping became a flourishing industry. Practitioners such as Hermann Biow and Carl Ferdinand
Stelzner worked in Germany, and William Horn opened a studio in Bohemia in 1841. It was the United
States, however, that led the world in the production of daguerreotypes. Portraiture became the most popular
genre in the United States, and within this genre, standards of presentation began to develop. Certain parts of
the daguerreotype portrait, usually the lips, eyes, jewelry, and occasionally the clothing, were hand-coloured,
a job often done by women. Because of their fragile nature, daguerreotype images always were covered with
glass and encased in a frame or casing made of leather-covered wood or gutta-percha, a plasticlike substance
made from rubber.
In the late 1840s every city in the United States had its own “daguerrean artist,” and villages and towns were
served by traveling photographers who had fitted up wagons as studios. In New York City alone there were
77 galleries in 1850. Of these, the most celebrated was that of Mathew B. Brady, who began in 1844 to form
a “Gallery of Illustrious Americans,” a collection of portraits of notables taken by his own and other
cameramen. Several of these portraits, including those of Daniel Webster and Edgar Allan Poe, were
published by lithography in a folio volume.
In Boston, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes opened a studio in 1843 that was advertised
as “The Artists’ Daguerreotype Rooms”; here they produced the finest portraits ever made by the
daguerreotype process. The partners avoided the stereotyped lighting and stiff posing formulas of the average
daguerreotypist and did not hesitate to portray their sitters unprettified and “as they were.” For example, in
his portrait Lemuel Shaw, a judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, stands with a crumpled coat and
unruly locks of hair under a glare of sunshine; in her portrait Lola Montez—adventurer, dancer, actress—lolls
over the back of a chair, a cigarette between her gloved fingers.
Cities and towns, as well as their inhabitants, were also photographed by American daguerreotypists: the
rapid growth of San Francisco was documented month by month, and the first history of the city, published in
1855, was illustrated with engravings made from daguerreotypes.
Daguerreotyping spread throughout the world during the 1850s as photographers from England, France, and
the United States followed colonialist troops and administrators to the Middle East, Asia, and South America.
Army personnel and commercial photographers portrayed foreign dignitaries, landscape, architecture, and
monuments in order to show Westerners seemingly exotic cultures. Particularly notable were daguerreotypes
made in Japan by the American photographer Eliphalet Brown, Jr., who accompanied the 1853–54 mission
led by Matthew C. Perry to open Japan to Western interests.
While most of the initial photographic work in these places was by Westerners, by the 1860s local
practitioners had begun to open studios and commercial establishments. Marc Ferrez in Brazil, Kusakabe
Kimbei in Japan, the (French-born) Bonfils family in Lebanon, and Kassian Céphas in Indonesia were among
the international photographers who set up studios to supply portraits and views during this period.
Development of the calotype
The popularity of the daguerreotype surpassed that of the photogenic drawing, but Talbot, convinced of the
value of duplicability, continued to work to improve his process. On September 21–23, 1840, while
experimenting with gallic acid, a chemical he was informed would increase the sensitivity of his prepared
paper, Talbot discovered that the acid could be used to develop a latent image. This discovery revolutionized
photography on paper as it had revolutionized photography on metal in 1835. Whereas previously Talbot had
needed a camera exposure of one hour to produce a 6.5-by-8.5-inch (16.5-by-21.6-cm) negative, he now
found that one minute was sufficient. Developing the latent image made photography on paper as valued as
the daguerreotype, although the image still was not as clearly defined. Talbot named his improved negative
process the calotype, from the Greek meaning “beautiful picture,” and he protected his discoveries by patent.
The first aesthetically satisfying use made of this improved process was in the work of David Octavius Hill, a
Scottish landscape painter, and his partner, Robert Adamson, an Edinburgh photographer. In 1843 Hill
decided to paint a group portrait of the ministers who in that year formed the Free Church of Scotland; in all,
there were more than 400 figures to be painted. Sir David Brewster, who knew of Talbot’s process from the
inventor himself, suggested to Hill that he make use of this new technique. Hill then enlisted the aid of
Adamson, and together they made hundreds of photographs, not only of the members of the church meeting
but also of people from all walks of life. Although their sitters were posed outdoors in glaring sunlight and
had to endure exposures of upward of a minute, Hill and Adamson managed to retain a lifelike vitality. Hill’s
aesthetic was dominated by the painting style of the period in lighting and posing, particularly in the
placement of the hands; in many of Hill’s portraits, both the sitter’s hands are visible, placed in a manner
meant to add grace and liveliness to a dark portion of an image. Indeed, many of his calotypes are strikingly
reminiscent of canvases by Sir Henry Raeburn and other contemporary artists. Proving the calotype’s artistic
qualities, William Etty, a royal academician, copied in oils the calotype Hill and Adamson made of him in
1844 and exhibited it as a self-portrait. In addition to their formal portraiture, the partners made a series of
photographs of fishermen and their wives at Newhaven and in Edinburgh, as well as architectural studies.
Portrait of Two Men (John Henning and The calotype, which lent itself to being manipulated by
Alexander Handyside Ritchie), calotype
by David Octavius Hill and Robert
chemicals and paper, was used in the 1850s to create
Adamson, c. 1845; in the Art Institute of exceptionally artistic images of architectural monuments.
Chicago.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
Development of stereoscopic photography
1949.685/Photography © The Art Institute of
Chicago
Stereoscopic photographic views (stereographs) were
immensely popular in the United States and Europe from about
the mid-1850s through the early years of the 20th century. First described in 1832 by English physicist Sir
Charles Wheatstone, stereoscopy was improved by Sir David Brewster in 1849. The production of the
stereograph entailed making two images of the same subject, usually with a camera with two lenses placed
2.5 inches (6 cm) apart to simulate the position of the human eyes, and then mounting the positive prints side
by side laterally on a stiff backing. Brewster devised a stereoscope through which the finished stereograph
could be viewed; the stereoscope had two eye pieces through which the laterally mounted images, placed in a
holder in front of the lenses, were viewed. The two images were brought together by the effort of the human
brain to create an illusion of three-dimensionality.
Stereographs were made of a wide range of subjects, the most popular being views of landscapes and
monuments and composed narrative scenes of a humorous or slightly suggestive nature. Stereoscopes were
manufactured for various price ranges and tastes, from the simple hand-held device introduced by Oliver
Wendell Holmes (who promoted stereography through articles in The Atlantic Monthly) to elaborate floor
models containing large numbers of images that could be flipped into place. The stereograph became
especially popular after Queen Victoria expressed interest in it when it was exhibited at the 1851 Crystal
Palace Exposition. Like television today, stereography during the second half of the 19th century was both an
educational and a recreational device with considerable impact on public knowledge and taste.
Development of the wet collodion process

Photography was revolutionized in 1851 by the introduction of the wet collodion process for making glass
negatives. This new technique, invented by the English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer, was 20 times faster
than all previous methods and was, moreover, free from patent restrictions. Paper prints could easily be made
from glass-plate negatives. The process had one major drawback: the photographer had to sensitize the plate
almost immediately before exposure and expose it and process it while the coating was moist. Collodion is a
solution of nitrocellulose (guncotton) in alcohol and ether; when the solvents evaporate, a clear plasticlike
film is formed. Since it is then impervious to water, the chemicals used for developing the exposed silver
halides and removing the unexposed salts cannot penetrate the coating to act upon them. The wet collodion
process was almost at once universally adopted because it rendered detail with great precision that rivaled
that of the daguerreotype. It reigned supreme for more than 30 years and greatly increased the popularity of
photography, despite the fact that it was unequally sensitive to different colours of the spectrum.
At first the positive prints made from the glass plate negatives were produced by Talbot’s salt paper method,
but from the mid-1850s on they were made on albumen paper. Introduced in 1850 by Louis-Désiré
Blanquart-Evrard, albumen paper is a slow printing-out paper (i.e., paper that produces a visible image on
direct exposure, without chemical development) that had been coated with egg white before being sensitized.
The egg white gave the paper a glossy surface that improved the definition of the image.
A new style of portrait utilizing albumen paper, introduced in Paris by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in
1854, was universally popular in the 1860s. It came to be called the carte-de-visite because the size of the
mounted albumen print (4 by 2.5 inches [10.2 by 6 cm]) corresponded to that of a calling card. Disdéri used a
four-lens camera to produce eight negatives on a single glass plate. Each picture could be separately posed, or
several exposures of the same pose could be made at once. The principal advantage of the system was its
economy: to make eight portraits the photographer needed to sensitize only a single sheet of glass and make
one print, which was then cut up into separate pictures. At first cartes-de-visite almost invariably showed the
subjects standing. Over time, backgrounds became ornate: furniture and such architectural fragments as
papier-mâché columns and arches were introduced, and heavy-fringed velvet drapes were hung within range
of the camera. With the advent of the cabinet-size (6.5 by 4 inches [16.5 by 10.2 cm]) picture in 1866, the
decorative strategies of the photographer became yet more pronounced, so that in 1871 a photographer wrote:
“One good, plain background, disrobed of castles, piazzas, columns, curtains and what not, well worked, will
suit every condition of life.”
The new wet collodion process was also used to produce

Uncut print from a carte-de-visite
negative by André-Adolphe-Eugène positive images on glass called ambrotypes, which were simply
Disdéri, c. 1860; in the George Eastman underexposed or bleached negatives that appeared positive when
House Collection, Rochester, New York.
placed against a dark coating or backing. In pose and lighting,
George Eastman House Collection
these popular portraits were similar to daguerreotypes in sizes
and were enclosed in similar types of cases. They did not
approach the brilliancy of the daguerreotype, however.
Tintypes, first known as ferrotypes or melainotypes, were cheap variations of the ambrotype. Instead of being
placed on glass, the collodion emulsion was coated on thin iron sheets that were enameled black. At first they
were presented in cases, surrounded by narrow gilt frames, but by the 1860s this elaborate presentation had
been abandoned, and the metal sheets were simply inserted in paper envelopes, each with a cutout window
the size of the image. Easy to make and inexpensive to purchase, tintypes were popular among soldiers in the
Civil War and remained a form of folk art throughout the 19th century. Poses of sitters in tintypes were often
informal and sometimes humorous. Because they were cheap and easy to produce, tintypes became a popular
form of street photography well into the 20th century. Street-corner photographers, often equipped with a
donkey, were common in European countries.
Development of the dry plate

In the 1870s many attempts were made to find a dry substitute for wet collodion so that plates could be
prepared in advance and developed long after exposure, which would thereby eliminate the need for a
portable darkroom. In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, suggested suspending silver
bromide in a gelatin emulsion, an idea that led, in 1878, to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates
coated with gelatin containing silver salts. This event marked the beginning of the modern era of
photography.
Gelatin plates were about 60 times more sensitive than collodion plates. The increased speed freed the camera
from the tripod, and a great variety of small hand-held cameras became available at relatively low cost,
allowing photographers to take instantaneous snapshots. Of these, the most popular was the Kodak camera,
introduced by George Eastman in 1888. Its simplicity greatly accelerated the growth of amateur photography,
especially among women, to whom much of the Kodak advertising was addressed. In place of glass plates,
the camera contained a roll of flexible negative material sufficient for taking 100 circular pictures, each
roughly 2.5 inches (6 cm) in diameter. After the last negative was exposed, the entire camera was sent to one
of the Eastman factories (Rochester, New York, or Harrow, Middlesex, England), where the roll was
processed and printed; “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” was Eastman’s description of the Kodak
system. At first Eastman’s so-called “American film” was used in the camera; this film was paper based, and
the gelatin layer containing the image was stripped away after development and fixing and transferred to a
transparent support. In 1889 this was replaced by film on a transparent plastic base of nitrocellulose that had
been invented in 1887 by the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, New Jersey.
Photography of movement
A few years before the introduction of the dry plate, the world was amazed by the photographs of horses
taken by Eadweard Muybridge in California. To take these photographs, Muybridge used a series of 12 to 24
cameras arranged side by side opposite a reflecting screen. The shutters of the cameras were released by the
breaking of their attached threads as the horse dashed by. Through this technique, Muybridge secured sets of
sequential photographs of successive phases of the walk, the trot, and the gallop. When the pictures were
published internationally in the popular and scientific press, they demonstrated that the positions of the
animal’s legs differed from those in traditional hand-drawn representations. To prove that his photographs
were accurate, Muybridge projected them upon a screen one after the other with a lantern-slide projector he
had built for the purpose; the result was the world’s first motion-picture presentation. This memorable event
took place at the San Francisco Art Association in 1880.
Muybridge, whose early studies were made with wet plates,

Figure Hopping, series of photographs by
Eadweard Muybridge, 1887; in the continued his motion studies for some 20 years. With the new
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, gelatin plates, he was able to improve his technique greatly, and
Smithsonian Institution, New York City.
The series depicts a sequence of eight
in 1884–85, at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania,
stages of movement, simultaneously he produced 781 sequential photographs of many kinds of
photographed by multiple cameras at
animals as well as men and women engaged in a wide variety of
three different positions.
activities. He was aided in this project by painter Thomas
Courtesy of the Cooper—Hewitt Museum of
Decorative Arts and Design, Smithsonian Eakins, who also made motion studies.
Institution/Art Resource, New York
Muybridge’s photographic analysis of movement coincided with

studies by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to develop chronophotography. Whereas Muybridge had
employed a battery of cameras to record detailed, separate images of successive stages of movement, Marey
used only one, recording an entire sequence of movement on a single plate. With Marey’s method, the images
of various phases of motion sometimes overlapped, but it was easier to see and understand the flow of
movement. Marey was also able to record higher speeds at shorter intervals than Muybridge. Both his and
Muybridge’s work greatly contributed to the field of motion study and to the development of the motion
picture.
Early attempts at colour
Photography’s transmutation of nature’s colours into various shades of black and white had been considered a
drawback of the process from its inception. To remedy this, many portrait photographers employed artists
who hand-tinted daguerreotypes and calotypes. Artists also painted in oils over albumen portraits on canvas.
Franz von Lenbach in Munich, for example, was among the many who projected onto canvas an image that
had been made light-sensitive, whereupon he painted freely over it. In Japan, where hand-coloured woodcuts
had a great tradition and labour was cheap, some firms from the 1870s onward sold photographs of scenic
views and daily life that had been delicately hand-tinted. In the 1880s photochromes, colour prints made from
hand-coloured photographs, became fashionable, and they remained popular until they were gradually
replaced in the first decades of the 20th century by Autochrome plates.
Establishing genres
Portraiture
From the medium’s beginnings, the portrait became one of photography’s most popular genres. Some early
practitioners such as Southworth and Hawes and Hill and Adamson broke new ground through the artistry
they achieved in their portraits. Outside such mastery, however, portraiture throughout the world generally
took on the form of uninspired daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and ambrotypes, and most
portraitists relied heavily on accessories and retouching. Such conventions were broken by several important
subsequent photographers, notably Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a Parisian writer, editor, and caricaturist who
used the pseudonym of Nadar; Étienne Carjat, likewise a Parisian caricaturist; and Julia Margaret Cameron.
Nadar took up photography in 1853 as a means of making studies of the features of prominent Frenchmen for
inclusion in a large caricature lithograph, the “Panthéon Nadar.” He posed his sitters against plain
backgrounds and bathed them with diffused daylight, which brought out every detail of their faces and dress.
He knew most of them, and the powers of observation he had developed as a caricaturist led him to recognize
their salient features, which he recorded directly, without the exaggeration that he put in his drawings. When
Nadar’s photographs were first exhibited, they won great praise in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, then the
leading art magazine in France.
Carjat depicted the prominent Parisian artists, actors, writers,

Gustave Eiffel, photographed by Nadar
(Gaspard-Félix Tournachon); in the musicians, and politicians of his day. These portraits display
Caisse Nationale des Monuments dignity and distinction like those of Nadar, his contemporary
Historiques, Paris.
and rival, but with a sometimes startling level of intensity in the
Courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des
Monuments Historiques, Paris sitters’ gazes.
Cameron took up photography as a pastime in 1864. Using the

wet-plate process, she made portraits of such celebrated Victorians of her acquaintance as Sir John F.W.
Herschel, George Frederick Watts, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For her
portraits, a number of which were shown at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Cameron used a lens
with the extreme focal length of 30 inches (76.2 cm) to obtain large close-ups. This lens required such long
exposures that the subjects frequently moved. The lack of optical definition and this accidental blurring was
criticized by the photographic establishment, yet the power of her work won her praise among artists. This
can be explained only by the intensity of her vision. “When I have had these men before my camera,” she
wrote about her portraits of great figures,
my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty toward

The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty,
photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner
1867; in the George Eastman House man as well as the features of the outer man. The
Collection, Rochester, New York.
photograph thus obtained has almost been the
embodiment of a prayer.
Besides these memorable portraits, Cameron produced a large number of allegorical studies, as well as
images of children and young women in costume, acting out biblical scenes or themes based on the poetry of
her hero, Tennyson. In making these pictures—which some today find weak and sentimental—she was
influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who portrayed similar themes in their work.
Photojournalism
From the outset, photography served the press. Within weeks after the French government’s announcement of
the process in 1839, magazines were publishing woodcuts or lithographs with the byline “from a
daguerreotype.” In fact, the two earliest illustrated weeklies—The Illustrated London News, which started in
May 1842, and L’Illustration, based in Paris from its first issue in March 1843—owe their origin to the same
cultural forces that made possible the invention of photography. Early reproductions generally carried little of
the conviction of the original photograph, however.
Photography as an adjunct of war reportage began when Roger Fenton sailed from London to the Crimea to
photograph the war between England, Russia, and Turkey in 1855. He was sent to provide visual evidence to
counter the caustic written reports dispatched by William Russell, war correspondent for The Times of
London, criticizing military mismanagement and the inadequate, unsanitary living conditions of the soldiers.
Despite the difficulties of developing wet-collodion plates with impure water, in high temperatures, and under
enemy fire, during his four-month stay Fenton produced 360 photographs, the first large-scale camera
documentation of a war. Crimean War imagery was also captured by British photographer James Robertson,
who later traveled to India with an associate, Felice Beato, to record the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of
1857–58.
When the Civil War broke out in the United States, Mathew B. Brady, a New York City daguerreotypist and
portraitist, conceived the bold plan of making a photographic record of the hostilities. When told the
government could not finance such an undertaking, he invested his own savings in the project, expecting to
recover his outlay by selling thousands of prints. Brady and his crew of about 20 photographers—among
them Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who both left his employ in the midst of hostilities—
produced an amazing record of the battlefield. At his New York gallery, Brady showed pictures of the dead at
Antietam. The New York Times reported on October 20, 1862:
Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the

Ruins of the Gallego Flour Mills,
Richmond, Va., photograph by Mathew terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not
B. Brady, 1865; in the Museum of Modern brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along
Art, New York City.
the streets, he has done something very like it.…It seems
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, Purchase somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on
the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from
the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their
features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is.
Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, intermittent conflicts in Asia and Africa arising from
imperialist ambitions were documented by photographers working for news media and for companies that
manufactured stereographs. For the most part, war images were accepted as truthful depictions of painful
events. However, after images of the Communard uprising in Paris in 1871 were shown to have been
doctored, the veracity of such camera documentation no longer could be taken for granted.
Regular use of photographs in magazines began with the perfection of the halftone process, which allowed
the camera image to be printed at the same time as the type and thereby reduced the cost of reproduction. The
first newspaper halftone in the United States appeared in 1888, and shortly thereafter newspapers turned to
photography for reporting topical events, making the profession of newspaper illustrator obsolete. Although
technical advances improved reproduction quality, apart from impressive examples of combat photography,
the subjects and styles of early journalistic photography were generally unimaginative and dull.
Documentary photography
Landscape and architectural documentation

From the earliest days of the medium, landscape, architecture, and monuments were appealing subjects for
photographers. This sort of photography, which was collected by artists, scientists, and travelers, was
impelled by several factors. In Europe one powerful factor was the maneuverings among western European
powers for control of portions of North Africa and Asia. From the late 1850s through the 1870s, British
photographers were particularly active in recording the natural landscape and monuments of the empire’s
domains: Francis Frith worked in Egypt and Asia Minor, producing three albums of well-composed images;
Samuel Bourne photographed throughout India (with a retinue of equipment bearers); John Thomson
produced a descriptive record of life and landscape in China; and French photographer Maxime Du Camp
traveled to Egypt with Gustave Flaubert on a government commission to record landscape and monuments.
Both for patriotic reasons and as a commodity for travelers, photographers also were active in recording the
landscape of western Europe in the 1850s and ’60s. Important British photographers included Roger Fenton,
who worked in England and Wales; Charles Clifford, who worked in Spain; Robert Macpherson, who
photographed Rome; and George Washington Wilson, who photographed Scotland. French photographer
Adolphe Braun recorded the landscape around his native Alsace, as well as the mountainous terrain of the
French Savoy, as did the brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson. Herman Krone in Germany
and Giacchino Altobelli and Carlo Ponti in Italy were also intent on recording the beauties of their regional
landscapes.
Photographs of specific historical buildings were made for a number of purposes: to satisfy antiquarian
curiosity, to provide information for restoration, to supply artists with material on which to base paintings, or
to effect preservation efforts. Practically from photography’s inception, such documentation was
commissioned by public and private authorities. In western Europe and the United States, photographs
captured the building of the industrial infrastructure, from bridges to railroad lines, from opera houses to
public places to monumental statuary. In the early 1850s Philip Henry Delamotte was hired to document the
progress of the construction of the Crystal Place in London, and a few years later Robert Howlett depicted the
building of the Great Eastern transatlantic steamship. Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon worked for the
Society for Photographing Old London, recording historical buildings and relics. In the 1850s the French
government commissioned several photographers to document historical buildings. Working with cameras
making photographs as large as 20 by 29 inches (51 by 74 cm), Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, and Charles
Nègre produced remarkable calotypes of the cathedrals of Notre-Dame (Paris), Chartres, and Amiens, as well
as other structures that were being restored after centuries of neglect. An establishment was set up in Lille,
France, by Blanquart-Evrard at which these paper negatives could be printed in bulk.
In the United States explorations of the lands beyond the Great Plains led to the apogee of landscape
photography during the period. Before the Civil War, relatively few exceptional images of the Western
landscape had been made. In the postwar era railroad companies and government commissions included
photographers among their teams sent to determine mineral deposits, rights of way, and other conditions that
would be suitable for settlement. Of the photographers confronting the spectacular landscape of the American
West in the 1870s and ’80s, William Henry Jackson, O’Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins produced particularly
notable work. Both O’Sullivan, who helped survey Nevada and New Mexico, and Watkins, who worked in
California and Oregon, were able to convey through their work a sense of the untamed and extraordinary
quality of the Western landscape. As a testament to the power of his images, Jackson’s photographs of the
Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone River were influential in getting public land set aside for Yellowstone
National Park. The work these and other photographers of the American West produced usually was made
available in several sizes and formats, from stereographic images to mammoth-sized works.
Landscapes in places outside the United States and Europe were

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, photograph
by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1873; in the usually portrayed by European photographers during this period.
George Eastman House Collection, However, exceptions included the Chinese photographer Afong
Rochester, New York.
Lai and the Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez, both of whom
produced excellent views of their native countries. In particular,
Lai’s serene compositions reflected the conventions of the long-
standing tradition of Chinese landscape painting.
Social documentation
The recognition of the power of photography to persuade and inform led to a form of documentary
photography known as social documentation, or social photography. The origins of the genre can be traced to
the classic sociological study issued by Henry Mayhew in 1851, London Labour and the London Poor,
although this was illustrated with drawings partly copied from daguerreotypes by Richard Beard and not
actual photos. A later effort, Street Life in London (1877), by Adolphe Smith and John Thomson, included
facsimile reproductions of Thomson’s photographs and produced a much more persuasive picture of life
among London’s working class. Thomson’s images were reproduced by Woodburytype, a process that
resulted in exact, permanent prints but was costly because it required hand mounting for each individual print.
This pursuit was continued by John Barnardo, who, beginning in the 1870s, photographed homeless children
in London for the purpose of both record keeping and fund-raising and thus fulfilled the double objectives of
social documentation: capturing theoretically objective description and arousing sympathy. The “before” and
“after” images used by Barnardo to demonstrate the efficacy of social intervention became a convention in
social documentation. It was taken up to good effect by the Indian photographer Raja Lala Deen Dayal,
especially in his documentation of the good works undertaken by the nizam of Hyderabad in the late 19th
century. In 1877 Thomas Annan began a project in Edinburgh in which he used the camera to record the need
for new housing for the working poor. He concentrated mainly on the derelict buildings and sewerage
systems rather than on the inhabitants; eventually the images were collected for their artistic merit rather than
their social use.
Social documentation became more focused in the work of Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter in New York City
in the 1880s who spent about four years depicting slum life. Employing cameramen at first, Riis eventually
learned the rudiments of the medium so that he could himself portray the living and working conditions of
immigrants whose social circumstances, he believed, led to crime and dissolution. Reproduced by the
recently developed halftone process, the photographs and drawings based on them illustrated How the Other
Half Lives (1890), Riis’s first book about immigrant life. They also were turned into positive transparencies—
slides—to illustrate Riis’s lectures, which were aimed at a largely middle-class audience, some of whom were
said to have fainted at the sight of the conditions the images documented. Able to convince the progressive
reformers of the time of the need for change, Riis’s work was instrumental in effecting slum-clearance
projects in New York.
In European countries especially, there was also an awakened

Baby in a Slum Tenement, photograph by
Jacob A. Riis, 1888–89; in the Library of interest in documenting social customs during this period.
Congress, Washington, D.C. Sometimes this meant recording those European customs that
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
were being replaced by advancing industrialization. This interest
led to the establishment of photographic archives, such as the
National Photographic Record Association, set up in the mid-1890s by Benjamin Stone, a British member of
Parliament. Left to the city of Birmingham, the collection included photographs taken by Stone and others of
vanishing local customs. Other times this led to an interest in the particularities of dress and custom of those
living in distant regions. William Carrick, a Scotsman, portrayed daily life in Russia. In addition to portraying
nature and artifacts, John Thomson, Felice Beato, and Samuel Bourne also depicted indigenous peoples in
China and India. In 1888 the journal National Geographic, which produced photographic accounts of cultures
throughout the world, was established.
Photography as art
Early developments
Photographic societies—made up of both professionals and amateurs enticed by the popularity of the
collodion process—began to form in the mid-19th century, giving rise to the consideration of photography as
an aesthetic medium. In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the present Royal Photographic Society,
was formed in London, and in the following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in Paris.
Toward the end of the 19th century, similar societies appeared in German-speaking countries, eastern Europe,
and India. Some were designed to promote photography generally, while others emphasized only artistic
expression. Along with these organizations, journals promoting photography as art also appeared.
At the first meeting of the Photographic Society, the president, Sir Charles Eastlake (who was then also
president of the Royal Academy), invited the miniature painter Sir William Newton to read the paper “Upon
Photography in an Artistic View” (Journal of the Photographic Society, 1853). Newton’s argument was that
photographs could be useful so long as they were taken “in accordance [as far as it is possible] with the
acknowledged principles of Fine Art.” One way the photographer could make his results more like works of
art, Newton suggested, was to throw the subject slightly out of focus. He also recommended liberal
retouching. (Eastlake’s wife, Lady Eastlake, née Elizabeth Rigby, was one of the first to write lucidly about
the artistic problems of collodion/albumen photography.)
In response to this desire to create photographs that would fit an established conception of what “art” should
be, several photographers began to combine several negatives to make one print. These consisted of
compositions that were considered too complicated to be photographed in a straightforward manner and thus
pushed photography beyond its so-called mechanical capabilities. A famous example of this style was by
O.G. Rejlander, a Swede who had studied art in Rome and was practicing photography in England. He joined
30 negatives to produce a 31-by-16-inch (79-by-41-cm) print entitled The Two Ways of Life (1857), an
allegory showing the way of the blessed led through good works and the way of the damned through vice.
Rejlander, who described the technique in detail in photographic journals, stated that his purpose was to prove
to artists the aesthetic possibilities of photography, which they had generally denied. The photograph was
shown in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 and was purchased by Queen Victoria for Prince
Albert.
Rejlander’s technique stimulated Henry Peach Robinson, a professional photographer who had been trained
as an artist, to produce similar combination prints. He achieved fame with a five-negative print, Fading Away,
produced in 1858. The subject, a dying girl, was considered by critics as too painful a subject to be
represented by photography. Perhaps the implied authenticity of the camera bothered them, since painters had
long presented subjects of a far more sensitive nature.
Fading Away, composite photograph Robinson became an articulate member of the Photographic
made from five negatives by Henry
Peach Robinson, 1858; in the George
Society, and his teaching was even more influential than his
Eastman Collection, Rochester, New photography. In 1869 the first of many editions and translations
York.
of his book, Pictorial Effect in Photography, was published.
Robinson borrowed compositional formulas from a handbook
on painting, claiming that use of them would bring artistic
success. He stressed the importance of balance and the opposition of light against dark. At the core of his
argument was the assumption that rules set up for one art form could be applied to another.
So long as photographers maintained that the way to photography as art was the emulation of painting, art
critics were reluctant to admit the new medium to an independent aesthetic position. Portraits, when done as
sensitively and as directly as those produced by Hill and Adamson, Nadar, and Cameron, won praise. But
sentimental genre scenes, posed and arranged for the camera and lacking the truthfulness thought to be
characteristic of photography, were the subject of considerable controversy. This debate would reach a
crescendo at the end of the century.
Naturalistic photography
Opposing the strategies advocated by Robinson, in the 1880s the English physician and photographer Peter
Henry Emerson proposed that photographs should reflect nature, offer “the illusion of truth,” and be produced
without using retouching techniques, recombining multiple prints, or utilizing staged settings, models, and
costumes. He believed that the unique qualities of tone, texture, and light inherent in photography made it a
unique art form, making any embellishments used for the sake of “art” unnecessary. This is not to say his own
photographs were purely documentary—in fact, his work in some ways mimicked the artistic effects of the
Barbizon school and Impressionist painting—but they eschewed the manipulated artistic effects of his
contemporaries. Emerson’s views, known as naturalistic photography, gained a considerable audience through
his widely read 1889 publication entitled Naturalistic Photography and through numerous articles that
appeared in photography journals throughout the 1890s.
Pond in Winter, photograph by Peter

Pictorialism and the Linked Ring
Henry Emerson, 1888; in the George
Eastman House Collection, Rochester, The ideas of Newton, Rejlander, Robinson, and Emerson—
New York. while seemingly varied—all pursued the same goal: to gain
George Eastman House Collection acceptance for photography as a legitimate art form. These
efforts to gain acceptance were all encompassed within
Pictorialism, a movement that had been afoot for some time and that crystallized in the 1890s and early
1900s, when it was promoted through a series of international exhibiting groups. In 1892 the Brotherhood of
the Linked Ring was founded in Britain by Robinson, George Davison, a leader of the Art Nouveau
movement, and others dissatisfied with the scientific bias of the London Photographic Society. The group
held annual exhibitions, which they called salons. While the members’ work varied from naturalism to staged
scenes to manipulated prints, by the turn of the century it was their united belief that “through the Salon the
Linked Ring has clearly demonstrated that pictorial photography is able to stand alone and that it has a future
entirely apart from that which is purely mechanical.” Similar Pictorialist groups formed in other countries.
These included the Photo-Club of Paris, the Trifolium of Austria, and like associations in Germany and Italy.
Unity of purpose enabled members to exchange ideas and images with those who had similar outlooks in
other countries.
Beaumont Newhall Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim Naomi Rosenblum

Perfecting the medium, c. 1900–c. 1945
The Photo-Secession
At the turn of the 20th century, one of the most influential Pictorialist groups was the Photo-Secession,
founded in New York City in 1902 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The Secession’s name was taken from
the avant-garde secessionist movements in Europe that sought to differentiate themselves from what they
considered outmoded ways of working and thinking about the arts. With the help of Edward Steichen,
Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession—popularly known as “291” after its address on
Fifth Avenue—which exhibited the work of Modernist painters and sculptors as well as that of photographers
who used a wide variety of printing processes, including gum-bichromate and bromoil printing. These
procedures required considerable handwork and resulted in one-of-a-kind prints that in their softening effects
resembled etchings or lithographs rather than photographs. Among the members of the Photo-Secession were
Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, and Clarence H. White. Between 1903 and 1917
Stieglitz published 50 issues of the beautifully printed journal Camera Work, which contained, among other
works, fine gravure reproductions of American and European photographs and halftone reproductions of
artwork by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Over the 15-year period of the Photo-Secession’s existence, the

The Steerage, photogravure by Alfred
Stieglitz, 1907; in the Art Institute of outlook of Stieglitz and individual members changed, reflecting
Chicago. the general move away from the more artificial aspects of
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
Pictorialism as the 20th century began. Increasingly,
1949.847/Photography © The Art Institute of
Chicago photographers wanted their work to look like photographs, not
paintings, and valued the qualities that were unique to
photography. Over time, 291 began to show more painting than photography, and, as Stieglitz became even
more convinced of the value of “straight,” rather than manipulated, photographic printing, several original
adherents fell away, among them Käsebier and White. The final two issues of Camera Work were devoted to
“straight” work by Paul Strand, who was the only photographer Stieglitz considered promising at the time.
Strand’s images, consisting mainly of New York views and close-up portraits (made with a 45-degree prism
lens so that the subject was unaware of being photographed), combined pure formal qualities, such as
beautiful tone and sharp focus, with intense feeling.
Blind Woman, New York, photograph by

The New Objectivity
Paul Strand, 1916. This photograph
appeared in Camera Work in 1917. In the period immediately following World War I, much
© 1971, Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand photography was characterized by sharply defined imagery,
Archive especially of objects removed from their actual context. The
clean lines and cool effects of this style—variously called the
“New Objectivity,” the “new vision,” or “Precisionism”—was a reflection, perhaps, of the overarching role of
industry and technology during the 1920s.
Strand, continuing in the direction he had unveiled in 1917, produced powerful, highly detailed close-ups of
machines and organic matter and made sparkling landscapes in Gaspé, Quebec, and the American West. His
approach changed again when he was invited to Mexico to produce educational films for the government.
There he made a series of portraits (again with the prism lens) and landscapes, which he published in 1940 as
gravure prints. Steichen, who had been in command of aerial photography for the American Expeditionary
Forces, abandoned his earlier impressionistic handling in favour of crisp, sharply focused celebrity, fashion,
and product images, which appeared in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. Others whose sharp, well-designed
images of industrial products appeared in advertising brochures and magazines included Margaret Bourke-
White, Paul Outerbridge, and Charles Sheeler.
A preference for a straight, highly detailed presentation of natural and manufactured forms also characterized
the work of California photographer Edward Weston. Using large-format (8-by-10-inch [20.3-by-25.4-cm])
equipment with lenses stopped down to the smallest aperture, Weston, whose earlier career had been in
commercial portraiture, formulated a method of “rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing
itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” Further, Weston, like Strand, did not approve of
cropping or hand work of any kind on the negative; both held that the final image should be composed in the
ground glass of the camera prior to exposure.
Several Californians, a number of whom looked to Weston as a

Dunes, Oceano, photograph by Edward
Weston, 1936. mentor, took up the concentration on organic forms and objects
© Edward Weston and the preference for using the smallest aperture of the lens to
create maximum depth of field and sharpness. Known as Group
f.64, for the smallest lens aperture, the group included, besides Weston and his son Brett, Ansel Adams and
Imogen Cunningham. After seeing Strand’s negatives, Adams decided to pursue photography as a profession,
specializing in photographing Western wilderness areas such as Yosemite National Park and the Sierra
Nevada mountain range. His dramatic photographs masterfully captured the beauty of such natural wonders,
and the popularity of his photographs helped raise awareness of the importance of preservation efforts. He
also was a teacher of great persuasiveness who advocated the exact control of tonal quality through what he
called the “zone system.”
In Europe this approach of favouring extremely sharp definition

Ansel Adams: Mount Williamson—
Clearing Storm was known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Its
Mount Williamson—Clearing Storm, outstanding proponents were the German photographers Karl
photograph by Ansel Adams, 1944. Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Blossfeldt made highly
Ansel Adams detailed and magnified images of plants, removed from their
natural habitat. Renger-Patzsch, a professional photographer in
Ansel Adams teaching Susan Ford Essen, was fascinated by the formal qualities of everyday
Photographer Ansel Adams teaching objects, both organic and manufactured. Like those of his
Susan Ford, daughter of U.S. Pres. American counterparts, his images featured strong design
Gerald Ford, outside Adams's gallery
near Yosemite National Park, California, components and stressed the materiality of substances rather
1975.
than the maker’s emotional attitude toward the subject. He too
AP Images
believed that the final image should exist in all its completeness
before the exposure was made and that it should be an
unmanipulated record. His ideas and images, published in 1928 in Die Welt ist schön (“The World Is
Beautiful”) and translated into a number of languages, exerted considerable influence on European
photography of the time. Hans Finsler, of Swiss origin and working in Germany, Piet Zwart in the
Netherlands, and Emmanuel Sougez and Florence Henri in France were among the many producing highly
defined close-ups of objects and people in a style similar to that of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
A similarly objective approach characterized the work of photographers interested in the artistic ideas
embodied in Constructivism; the movement proposed that photographs could be a means to present the
commonplace from fresh vantage points and thereby reawaken interest in routine objects and processes. This
idea, which originated in the Soviet Union and spread quickly to Germany and central European countries
during the late 1920s and early 1930s, granted greater latitude for experimentation with form. Its foremost
spokesman was Russian painter and ideologue Aleksandr Rodchenko, who employed distinctly unusual
vantage points in order to give the mundane world a new appearance. The visual ideas underpinning
Constructivism appealed to Hungarian photographer László Moholy-Nagy, who reinterpreted them during his
tenure first at the Bauhaus in Weimar, then in Dessau, Germany, and later at the School of Design in Chicago,
where they influenced several generations of American photographers.
Similar ideas were utilized by photographers in Japan, especially following the earthquake of 1923. Among
those whose imagery reflected the new sharper style, with its emphasis on form rather than atmosphere, was
Yasuzō Nojima, who gained a reputation for his incisive portraits, groundbreaking nudes, and landscapes.
Shinzō Fukuhara’s photographs, particularly his landscapes, were also highly regarded.
Experimental approaches
By 1916 abstract ideas were appealing to a number of other photographers. Photo-Secessionist Alvin
Langdon Coburn, living in England, created a series of photographs known as vortographs, in which no
subject matter is recognizable. During the late 1910s, students and faculty at the Clarence H. White School of
Photography (started by another former colleague of Stieglitz), in particular Bernard S. Horne and Margaret
Watkins, also produced works that displayed the influence of Modernist abstraction.
Between the two World Wars, an experimental climate—promoted by Constructivist ideology and by
Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus—admitted an entire range of new directions in photography. One aspect of
this experimentalism involved eschewing subject matter and instead creating photographs that more closely
resembled abstract paintings. Photographers again manipulated images, experimented with processes, and
used multiple images or exposures. Sometimes, rather than experimenting with the camera itself, they
experimented with light and sensitized paper. For a brief time this direction was allied with Dadaist ideas
about accident, chance, and the subconscious. One important exponent of photographic experimentalism was
the American expatriate Dada artist Man Ray, whose “rayographs,” photographs that appeared as series of
swirling abstract shapes, were created without a camera by exposing objects placed on sensitized paper to
light.
Cameraless photography, which came to be called “light graphics,” also appealed to Moholy-Nagy and his
wife, Lucia Moholy, who called the products of their experimentation “photograms.” Photographs made by
using this kind of manipulation of light could have completely abstract shapes or forms or feature
recognizable objects. A number of artists in central Europe also manipulated light and objects to produce
abstract images; among them were Jaroslav Rössler and Gyorgy Kepes, who eventually taught at the Chicago
Institute of Design. There Kepes was instrumental in introducing its methods to American photographers,
among them Carlotta Corpron, who produced a series of abstractions by using a device, called a light
modulator, favoured at the Bauhaus.
The manipulative strategies of photocollage and montage had considerable appeal during the interwar period
in part because—by appropriating “content” from other sources—they could deal with complex political or
psychological feelings and ideas. Czech and German artists were especially drawn to this type of
experimentation. Herbert Bayer, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch were unusually adept
in their innovative use of collage and montage to make ironic comments on a range of political and social
issues in German society. Heartfield, whose work appeared on book jackets and posters, savaged the political
thuggery behind the rise of Nazism by juxtaposing political imagery—for example, a stock photograph of
Hitler—with unexpected, provocative imagery. Höch concentrated on portraying the role of the “new
woman” emerging in the chaos of postwar German society; for example, the title of one work by Höch, The
Cut with the Kitchen Knife, suggests a female domain, yet the image shows women freed from housewifely
duties, cavorting among machinery and political figures as part of the world at large. Similarly, montage
enabled Soviet Constructivists to suggest complex ideas, as in El Lissitzky’s self-portrait, which integrates
drafting tools and geometric shapes to suggest that the artist himself was an architect of society.
Documentary photography
Working mainly in the opening years of the 20th century, French photographer Eugène Atget documented
shop fronts, architectural details and statuary, trees and greenery, and individuals who made their living as
street vendors, producing some 10,000 photographs of Paris and its environs. Unlike many of the
architectural photographers before him, Atget showed a remarkable attention to composition, the materiality
of substances, the quality of light, and especially the photographer’s feelings about the subject matter. His
work was bought mainly by architects, painters, and archivists. The visually expressive force of Atget’s work,
produced with a large-format camera, is a testament to the capacity of documentation to surpass mere record
making to become inspiring experience.
In like manner, although not as extensively, Czech photographer

Shop Window: Tailor Dummies,
photograph by Eugène Atget, c. 1910; in Josef Sudek created an artistic document of his immediate
the George Eastman House Collection, surroundings. He was particularly fascinated with his home and
Rochester, New York.
garden, often shooting the latter through a window.
Lewis W. Hine created a similarly thorough document of a subject, in his case immigrant and working-class
life in the United States. One of the first to refer to himself as a social photographer, Hine began his
documentation of immigrants at Ellis Island while still a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York.
Eventually he gave up teaching to work for the National Child Labor Committee, an organization of
progressives seeking to make the American industrial economy more aware of its effects on individual
workers. From 1908 to 1916 Hine concentrated on photographing child workers, producing thousands of
individual portraits and group scenes of underage children employed in textile mills, mines, canning
establishments, and glass factories and in street trades throughout the United States. His work was effective in
prompting first state regulation and eventually federal regulation of child labour.
Documentary photography experienced a resurgence in the

Overseer supervising a girl (about 13
years old) operating a bobbin-winding United States during the Great Depression, when the federal
machine in the Yazoo City Yarn Mills, government undertook a major documentary project. Produced
Mississippi, photograph by Lewis W.
Hine, 1911; in the Library of Congress,
by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under the direction
Washington, D.C. of Roy E. Stryker, who earlier had come in contact with Hine’s
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. work, the project comprised more than 270,000 images
produced by 11 photographers working for varying lengths and
at different times in different places. All worked to show the effects of agricultural displacement caused by
the economic downturn, lack of rain, and wasteful agricultural practices in the American South and midlands.
In this project, documentation did double duty. One task was to record conditions both on nonfunctioning
farms and in new homesteads created by federal legislation. Another was to arouse compassion so that
problems addressed by legislative action would win support. A portrait of a migratory pea picker’s wife,
made by California portraitist turned documentarian Dorothea Lange, became an icon of the anxiety
generated by the Great Depression.
Walker Evans was another photographer whose work for the

Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother
FSA transformed social documentation from mere record
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,
photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1936; in making into transcendent visual expression. On leave from the
the Library of Congress, Washington, FSA, Evans worked with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise
D.C.
Famous Men (1941; reissued 1966), a compelling look at the
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
lives of a family of Southern sharecroppers. Although
unaffiliated with the FSA, Margaret Bourke-White, formerly
one of the era’s foremost industrial photographers, also worked in the South. With her husband, writer
Erskine Caldwell, she produced You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), one of the first photographic picture
books to appear in softcover.
Documentary projects underwritten by other federal agencies also existed. One of more significant projects
was executed by Berenice Abbott. Inspired in part by Atget’s studies of Paris, she endeavoured to photograph
the many parts of New York City and to create “an intuition of past, present, and future.” She was able to
interest the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in underwriting an exhibit and publication along these
lines entitled Changing New York (1939). Other urban documentary projects were undertaken under the aegis
of the Photo League, an association of photographers of varying background and class who set out to
document working-class neighbourhoods in New York.
The German portraitist August Sander, intent on creating a sociological document of his own, generated a
portrait of Germany during this period. His focus was on the individuals composing German society,
documenting a class structure with workers and farmers on the bottom. Sander’s inclusion of types not
considered Aryan by German authorities brought him into conflict with the Nazi regime, which destroyed the
plates for a proposed book entitled Antlitz der Zeit (“Face of Our Time”).
Among the many other amateur and professional photographers who interested themselves in the
documentation of everyday life were Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who portrayed everyday life in Russia;
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who created images that offer a psychologically nuanced glimpse of Mexican life;
and Robert Doisneau and Brassaï, both of whom captured vibrant images of everyday life in Paris. Perhaps
the most extensive ethnographic documentation was that of Edward S. Curtis, who produced 20 volumes of
studies of Native American tribespeople over the course of some 20 years. The enormous interest in how
people outside Western culture appeared and behaved was a factor in the increasing popularity of National
Geographic during this period.
“Bijou” in Place Pigalle Bar, photograph

Photojournalism
by Brassaï, 1932.
Toward the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century,
Brassai—Rapho/Photo Researchers
greater numbers of magazines were published throughout the
world. The enlarged demand for photographic illustration, along
with the appearance of lighter, easier-to-use camera equipment, led to an increase in images of war for
reproduction. The Spanish-American War was documented by Jimmy Hare, the South African War by Horace
W. Nicholls, the Russo-Japanese War by Luigi Barzini, and the Mexican Revolution by Augustin Victor
Casasola. Although strict censorship prevailed with regard to the photographic record of World War I, the
prominence of picture magazines from the 1920s through the 1950s ensured the continuance of war
reportage.
A new approach to photojournalism began to emerge with the appearance of the Ermanox in 1924 and the
Leica in 1925. These two German-made miniature cameras, fitted with wide-aperture lenses, required
extremely short exposure times for outdoor work and were even able to photograph indoor scenes with
available light. The Leica had the added advantage of using 35-mm roll film that could be advanced quickly,
allowing a succession of exposures to be made of the same subject. This capability led to photographs whose
informality of pose and sense of presence were remarkable.
Owing to these developments, the photojournalist was able to perceive a significant moment in a fraction of a
second and to use the camera with such speed and precision that the instantaneous perception would be
preserved forever. This is evident in the work of the Hungarian André Kertész in Paris during the 1920s. The
Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson began about 1930 to develop the style that he later called the search for the
“decisive moment.” To him the camera was an “extension of the eye.” Preferring the miniature 35-mm-film
camera, he worked unobtrusively, making numerous exposures that usually included one in which all the
elements come together to form a compelling psychological and visual statement.
In 1928–29 two of the largest picture magazines in Europe, the

Children in Seville, Spain, photograph by
Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1933. Münchner Illustrierte Presse and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung,
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum began to print the new style of photographs. Erich Salomon
captured revealing candid portraits of politicians and other
personalities by sneaking his camera into places and meetings officially closed to photographers. Felix H.
Man, encouraged by Stefan Lorant, editor of the Münchner Illustrierte, made sequences of photographs at
interviews and cultural and social events, which Lorant then laid out in imaginative picture essays.
The example of the German picture magazines was followed in other parts of Europe and in the United
States. One was the short-lived Vu, established in Paris in 1928. An issue of Vu devoted entirely to the
Spanish Civil War contained memorable photographs by Robert Capa. In 1936 both Life and Look were
conceived in the United States, and a formula evolved in which the picture editor, photographer, researcher,
and writer constituted a team.
Among Life’s first photographers were Bourke-White, already famous for her industrial photographs made
largely for the magazine Fortune; Alfred Eisenstaedt, an experienced photo reporter for the Keystone Picture
Agency in Germany; Hansel Mieth, also from Germany, who at times worked with her husband, Otto Hagel;
and Peter Stackpole, whose photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco attracted much
attention. The concept of Life from the start, according to its founder, Henry Luce, was to replace haphazard
picture taking and editing with the “mind-guided camera.” Photographers were briefed for their assignments
and encouraged to take great quantities of photographs so that the editors might have a large selection. (The
fact that selection and sequencing were a function of the editors led to objections on the part of some
photographers, notably W. Eugene Smith, who left the employ of Life at one point in order to gain greater
control over his own work.) The visual organization of the picture story was carefully planned for maximum
reader impact. The opening photograph of the photo-essay established the situation, and as with written
narration there was a visual climax and a definite conclusion.
Initially Life and Look preferred to use pictures of great sharpness and depth. Thus, instead of unobtrusive
miniature cameras, American photographers used large-format cameras requiring slow lenses, large plates,
and additional flash light. This way of photographing was challenged by Lorant, who had left the Münchner
Illustrierte Presse after being forced to leave Germany in 1934. He eventually settled in London, where he
established the magazines Weekly Illustrated (1934) and Picture Post (1938). Staff photographers on both
magazines included old colleagues also forced from Germany, such as Man and Kurt Hutton. They and other
contributors were encouraged to develop the technique and pictorial style of taking photographs by using
available light—i.e., not using a flash. Their pictures had a remarkable naturalness that brought great reader
appeal—so much so that Life began to publish similar photographs and in 1945 hired a former Picture Post
photographer, Leonard McCombe, with an extraordinary clause in his contract: he was forbidden to use a
flash.
The photojournalistic style popularized by Life and Look influenced other activity in the field, in particular
the exhibition “Family of Man,” which was mounted by Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City in 1955. This highly popular exhibition presented over 500 photographs—mostly photojournalistic and
documentary work—alongside texts of different sizes and formats, somewhat in the manner of a three-
dimensional magazine.
Memorable groups of photographs were taken for the major picture magazines. Examples are Man’s A Day
with Mussolini, first published in the Münchner Illustrierte Presse (1931) and then, with a brilliant new
layout, in Picture Post; Smith’s Spanish Village (1951) and Nurse Midwife (1951) in Life; and Eisenstaedt’s
informal, penetrating portraits of famous Britons, also in Life. Images by Eisenstaedt of the Italian incursion
into Ethiopia and by David Seymour (“Chim”) and Capa of the Spanish Civil War made visible events
leading up to World War II. This conflict was thoroughly documented for the Western allies by military
personnel as well as by Capa, Bourke-White, Dmitry Baltermants, Yevgeny Khaldey, and Constance Stuart
Larrabee on the North African, eastern European, and western European fronts and by Smith in the South
Pacific. Heinrich Hoffman portrayed the war at home and at the front for Germany, and Yosuke Yamahata
documented the role of the Japanese army in the South Pacific.
Spanish Village, photograph by W.

Colour photography
Eugene Smith, 1951.
The Autochrome process, introduced in France in 1907 by
W. Eugene Smith
Auguste and Louis Lumière, was the first practical colour
photography process. It used a colour screen (a glass plate
covered with grains of starch dyed to act as primary-colour filters and black dust that blocked all unfiltered
light) coated with a thin film of panchromatic (i.e., sensitive to all colours) emulsion, and it resulted in a
positive colour transparency. Because Autochrome was a colour transparency and could be viewed only by
reflected light, however, researchers continued to look for improvements and alternative colour processes.
In 1935 Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, two American musicians working with the Kodak
Research Laboratories, initiated the modern era of colour photography with their invention of Kodachrome
film. With this reversal (slide) film, colour transparencies could be obtained that were suitable both for
projection and for reproduction. A year later the Agfa Company of Germany developed the Agfacolor
negative-positive process, but owing to World War II the film did not become available until 1949.
Meanwhile, in 1942 Kodak introduced the Kodacolor negative-positive film that 20 years later—after many
improvements in quality and speed and a great reduction in price—would become the most popular film used
for amateur photography.
Contemporary photography, c. 1945–present

Postwar developments
With the improvement in colour materials and processes, photographers became more interested in its
creative possibilities. Beginning in the 1940s, American photographer Eliot Porter produced subtle studies of
birds and nature in which colour allowed him to render an unparalleled level of nuance. Appreciated for both
their scientific and their aesthetic value, these photographs embodied the potential of colour. Austrian
photojournalist Ernst Haas first used colour in the photo-essay New York for Life magazine in 1953. Through
this and similar projects he challenged the standard of using only black and white in photojournalism, and his
use of colour added vibrancy to images of everyday life. While these and other experiments achieved some
success, it was not until later in the century that colour dominated photographic output and was incorporated
into daily newspapers.
In the period after World War II, as the United States entered a period of domestic peace and prosperity, many
photographers there moved away from documentary realities and focused instead on the intrinsic qualities of
photography; such experiments paralleled the ascendancy of the Abstract Expressionist art movement, which
similarly looked at the intrinsic quality of painting. Minor White combined ideas about photography’s
incomparable descriptive power, taken from Edward Weston, with those about its emotional expressiveness,
taken from Alfred Stieglitz. Through his long career as an influential teacher and founding editor of Aperture,
White developed the idea that a photograph should contain an inner message that might not be immediately
visible on the surface.
Other American photographers influenced by the Abstract Expressionist style of the era included Aaron
Siskind, who found formal configurations in graffiti, weathered wood and plaster, and torn billboards (what
he called the “detritus of the world”), and Harry Callahan, whose work demonstrated a highly developed
sense of linear form. Siskind and Callahan inspired a generation of young photographers through their
teachings at the Institute of Design, the school that had been started in 1937 in Chicago by Moholy-Nagy as
the New Bauhaus. Barbara Crane, Ken Josephson, and Garry Winogrand were among students who later
achieved fame. In England Bill Brandt created expressive photographs of nudes, shooting his subject matter
at such close range that the human body took on the appearance of series of patterns and abstract designs. In
Germany Otto Steinert led the Fotoform group of photographers, who created close-up views of nature that
were also nearly abstract in their effects.
By the 1960s similar styles and ideas in photography had spread to Asia, in part because photographic
magazines became widely available. Japanese photographers had been aware of Modernist currents before
World War II, but afterward they pursued them more openly. Among the important photographers of this
generation were Shōmei Tomatsu, who made vivid images on the streets of Tokyo; Eikō Hosoe, who captured
imagery evoking human sensuality; and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who was entranced by images conveying stillness
and emptiness. For a period the government in China exerted control over photographic imagery, but by the
late 20th century photographers had found some freedoms. Chen Changfen was able to indulge his interest in
colour abstractions, and Xie Hailong produced photographic documentations of problems in contemporary
Chinese society, such as the difficulties faced by rural students seeking an education.
Street photography might be considered a special aspect of documentation: the street photographer is
intrigued by the serendipitous nature of street activity, but, in contrast to the social documentarian, the street
photographer does not necessarily have a social purpose in mind. Important street photographers included
Helen Levitt, who documented subjects such as underprivileged children and young African Americans. All
her work was infused with a compelling sense of immediacy. Levitt was following the steps of Cartier-
Bresson, Brassaï, and André Kertész—the best known of the many European photographers of the 1930s–50s
who used their small cameras to capture the vitality of urban life. Roy DeCarava documented his native
Harlem and the civil rights movement; he said that he strove for “a creative expression, the kind of
penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.”
This kind of street photography, made possible by the increasing availability of light portable cameras with
fast-acting mechanisms, appealed to photographers around the world. Indian photographer Raghubir Singh,
who worked in colour, sought to reveal both the inner and outer life of his people through his street
photography.
Other social documentation in the postwar period used the medium to examine contemporary society from a
distance. Such efforts had various labels, including “social landscape.” Inspired by Swiss-born émigré Robert
Frank, who during the 1950s viewed American culture with an ironic eye, American photographers such as
Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, and William Klein were among those whose work suggested the effects of
contemporary culture on people in industrialized societies. Often utilizing 35-mm cameras, these
photographers caught seeming mundane everyday moments in works that resembled snapshots. Beneath this
seeming spontaneity lay an element of critique, however, that in some cases paralleled Pop art’s examination
of the banality of contemporary consumer culture.
Several important photographers defied categorization. In the early 1960s the photographer Seydou Keïta,
working as a commercial portraitist in Mali, allowed his sitters to arrange and costume themselves. The
resulting photographs created an extensive and compelling documentation of his country’s people. In the
same period, influenced by the mordant eye of the earlier Austrian émigré photographer Lisette Model, Diane
Arbus created challenging portraits of people living outside prescribed ideas of “normalcy,” such as
transvestites and the intellectually disabled.
Developments from the 1970s to the present
Continuing the example set by Arbus, a gritty sort of social documentation emerged beginning in the 1970s
and ’80s, when photographers such as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin documented alternative lifestyles
involving drug addiction, transvestism, and casual sex. In particular, Goldin created an elaborate series titled
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, through which she compiled an evolving record of the people she and her
camera encountered. Such direct, unflinching photographs established intimate documentary work as an
important genre in the late 20th century. Photographers such as Sally Mann and Tina Barney extended this
genre to portray intimate, sometimes unsettling images of their own families.
Goldin usually photographed in colour, which added to the harsh sense of reality in their work; this
represented a general move toward colour among photographers of their generation. William Eggleston
pushed the artistic boundaries of colour by using it to explore the banality of small-town existence; along
these same lines, Candida Höfer used colour to emphasize the tedium of institutional life. Richard Misrach
created a massive project, known as the Desert Cantos, in which he photographed desert scenes in colour,
sometimes juxtaposed against sinister elements such as nuclear sites. Barbara Norfleet, Joel Meyerowitz,
Stephen Shore, Barbara Kasten, and Franco Fontana were among the other prominent photographers of the
period who used colour expressively in landscapes, interiors, still lifes, and street scenes.
From the 1970s on, as the advent of television news began to affect the popularity of picture magazines,
many photojournalists whose work had been published in magazines began to take advantage of a burgeoning
interest in photographic picture books. These, often produced in conjunction with exhibits, comprised
photographs of newsworthy events or topics of social interest along with informative texts. Working in black
and white, Swiss-born photographer Claudia Andujar (working in Brazil) and Mexican photographer Graciela
Iturbide portrayed indigenous peoples—groups they believed were becoming marginalized by society—and
their customs. Other important figures included English photographer Don McCullin, who portrayed the
devastation brought about by wars in Vietnam and in Africa; French photojournalist Raymond Depardon,
who worked in Asia, Africa, and Europe; American Mary Ellen Mark, who photographed street performers
and prostitutes in India, depicted street children in Seattle, Washington, and spent time documenting the
inmates of a mental hospital; and Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who examined work and
workers throughout the world, exhibiting and publishing a number of books on that topic. For his ability to
make world events come pictorially alive, American James Nachtwey was three times the winner of the
International Center of Photography’s photojournalism awards. By the end of the century, the technology
used by these photojournalists had changed. Digital cameras sent images directly to computers, and programs
allowed images to be altered seamlessly, making newspaper and magazine darkrooms obsolete.
The documentation of artifacts, begun in the 19th century, continued to interest late 20th-century
photographers. Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico and American photographer Lewis Baltz concentrated
on architecture and the built environment. The German duo Bernd and Hilla Becher produced an extensive
portrayal of industrial buildings such as mine tipples and factories, which they usually displayed in carefully
planned arrangements of multiple prints. This sort of project combined traditional documentary conventions
with postmodern concepts about typologies.
Fashion photographers found their role redefined at the end of the century. As giants of fashion photography
from earlier in the century such as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon became the subjects of major museum
retrospectives, fashion and celebrity photography, initially meant to illustrate fashion magazines such as
Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, became fully recognized as an art form. Photographers David LaChapelle, Annie
Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Mario Testino, and Bruce Weber were among those whose work was esteemed
enough to be exhibited in both gallery and museum shows and published in popular monographs.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the art world was dominated by painting and sculpture, with
photography seen as a separate but not necessarily equal art form. In the 1980s and ’90s, however, as new
media such as video, performance, and installation blurred definitions of “art,” photography became one of
the art world’s most prominent media. During this period a generation of prominent photographers, many of
them American, helped break down these barriers between photography and “art.” American Robert
Mapplethorpe received a maelstrom of attention for his masterfully executed photographs, which ranged from
still lifes to portraits to, most controversially, sadomasochistic and homoerotic themes. American
photographer Cindy Sherman became an international art star for her elaborately staged self-portraits in
which she posed in a variety of stereotypical feminine roles and, in so doing, critiqued these clichés. Barbara
Kruger, also American, gained prominence for her modern-day montages, in which she juxtaposed
photographic images with text containing social critique—perhaps most famously, the phrases “I Shop,
Therefore I Am” and “Your Body Is a Battleground.” A similar use of photography in mixed-media was
pursued by American Carrie Mae Weems, who reproduced 19th-century photographs of slaves on a series of
banners and scrims, presenting them in a three-dimensional arrangement that commented on the visual
representation of African Americans throughout history.
Naomi Rosenblum
Into the 21st century: the digital age

The transformation of photography from an analog medium relying on chemically developed light-sensitive
emulsions to one using digital technologies for image capture and storage began in the late 1980s with the
introduction of the first consumer digital cameras and in 1990 the first version of Adobe Photoshop, a
program for adjusting and manipulating digital image files. Conceived as an extension of the conventional
darkroom, the program adopted many of the traditional tools of black-and-white film photography but let
photographers go even further. By giving photographers the ability to easily change the structure of an image,
and even its contents, it called into question long-held assumptions about photographic veracity or
documentary “truth value.” To some minds, it changed the very nature of the medium.
Digital photography’s full impact was not felt until the first decade of the new century. Even as late as 2001,
news events—most significantly, the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.
—were photographed primarily with film cameras. But because digital images could be transmitted and
edited much more quickly, by decade’s end nearly all newspapers and magazines had transitioned to a digital
workflow process, and their photographers were using digital cameras designed for professionals.
The transgressive aspect of digital photography was apparent even before its widespread adoption, as in 1982
when the august National Geographic magazine published an altered image of the Egyptian pyramids.
Because the magazine’s cover required a vertical image, editors used early computer software to push the
pyramids closer together than they appeared in the original film photograph. The manipulation of visual fact
for increased visual impact extends back before computers into the 19th century, notably during the Crimean
War and American Civil War, but a spate of incidents of digital alteration of news photographs in the first
decade of the 21st century created an uproar and led to the establishment of journalistic codes of ethics
intended to regulate the alteration of digital images. Several photojournalists lost their jobs after their
published pictures were found to have been digitally doctored.
Whereas photojournalists and documentarians reacted with caution to what came to be called digital imaging,
other types of photographers were generally enthusiastic about its possibilities. Many artists using
photography as their medium developed creative approaches that took advantage of the seamless mutability
of digitally altered images, extending a long history of photographic collage, double printing, and other pre-
digital forms of manipulation. Among the early adopters were Aziz + Cucher (Anthony Aziz and Sammy
Cucher), Andreas Gursky, and Loretta Lux, all of whom stretched the limits of what is believable about a
photographic image. Digital alteration also influenced the spheres of fashion and celebrity, as photographers
such as Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (working together as Inez & Vinoodh) remade the looks
of models and movie stars. Magazines began to regularly send their cover photographs to digital retouchers to
eliminate blemishes and minimize their models’ waistlines.
Arguably the most-profound impact of digital photography has been the proliferation of picture taking and
picture sharing. Since 2007, the year Apple introduced its first iPhone, so-called smartphones have become
ubiquitous, as have picture-sharing applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that enable users to
upload pictures from phone to Internet in a matter of seconds. One result has been an almost unfathomable
archive of images of mundane events and everyday places, a virtual map of the world that finds its
commercial equivalent in Google Earth, which incorporates both satellite views and Google Street View, an
assemblage of ground-level pictures of human habitation.
At the same time, commercial, governmental, and military uses of photography have expanded to include 24-
hour surveillance of public sites and businesses, the remote targeting of drone missile strikes, databases of
digital fingerprints, portraits on identification cards, and the development of face-recognition software to aid
in the identification of criminals and terrorists. Debates about the impact of the camera on civil liberties have
intensified as a result.
Photographers have reacted to digital photography’s omnipresence in a variety of ways. Some—such as

Chuck Close, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, and Jerry Spagnoli—have journeyed back to photographic
processes of the 19th century, making daguerreotypes or working with wet-collodion plates, or—like Chris
McCaw and Alison Rossiter—have taken to printing on outdated enlarging paper from the mid-20th century.
Photographic books, predicted to be made obsolete by readily viewable online images, have experienced a
resurgent popularity, not only because digital printing has reduced the cost of publication but also because
books allow photographers to control the narrative sequence and context in which their images are seen.
Others have seized an opportunity to critically reflect on the new image environment in which they live.
Trevor Paglen, for example, has photographed the light trails of spy satellites as they cross the night sky. In
addition, the convergence of still digital photographs and moving video images and the popularity of Web
design tools that allow for animation, motion control, and audio editing have produced a creative arena in
which photography is but one tool in the production of multimedia experiences. In the 21st century,
photography has been absorbed into both the contemporary art world and that of online digital
communication, blurring its formerly distinct identity but vastly enhancing its importance as a visual medium.
Andy Grundberg

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09.06.

2020 History of photography -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

This article treats the historical and aesthetic aspects of still

Inventing the medium

In 1839 Niépce’s son and Daguerre sold full rights to the

Early views of the medium’s potential

Photography’s early evolution, c. 1840–c. 1900

Development of the daguerreotype

1855, was illustrated with engravings made from daguerreotypes.

Development of the calotype

Development of the wet collodion process

The new wet collodion process was also used to produce

Development of the dry plate

Muybridge, whose early studies were made with wet plates,

Muybridge’s photographic analysis of movement coincided with

Early attempts at colour

Carjat depicted the prominent Parisian artists, actors, writers,

Cameron took up photography as a pastime in 1864. Using the

my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty toward

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the

Landscape and architectural documentation

Landscapes in places outside the United States and Europe were

In European countries especially, there was also an awakened

Pond in Winter, photograph by Peter

Beaumont Newhall Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim Naomi Rosenblum

Over the 15-year period of the Photo-Secession’s existence, the

Blind Woman, New York, photograph by

Several Californians, a number of whom looked to Weston as a

In Europe this approach of favouring extremely sharp definition

In like manner, although not as extensively, Czech photographer

Documentary photography experienced a resurgence in the

Walker Evans was another photographer whose work for the

“Bijou” in Place Pigalle Bar, photograph

In 1928–29 two of the largest picture magazines in Europe, the

Spanish Village, photograph by W.

Contemporary photography, c. 1945–present

Developments from the 1970s to the present

Into the 21st century: the digital age

Photographers have reacted to digital photography’s omnipresence in a variety of ways. Some—such as

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