Invention of Photography

Age of Enlightenment

Scientific experiments were offered as fascinating shows to the public in the mid-eighteenth century.  In Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting ‘A philosopher giving a lecture at the orrery’ (1765), we see the demonstration of an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system that was used to demonstrate the motions of the planets around the sun – making the universe seem almost like a cloak.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

   

In the centre of the orrery is a gas light, which represents the sun, the arcs represent the orbits of the planets. Wright concentrates on the faces of the figures to create a compelling narrative. With paintings like these, Wright invented a new subject: scenes of experiments and new machinery, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution (think cities, railroads, steam power, gas and then electric light, factories, machines, pollution). Wright’s fascination with light, strange shadows, and darkness, reveals the influence of Baroque art.

Enlightenment

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century a shift in thinking occurred. This shift is known as the Enlightenment. Some important figures of the enlightenment were Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire. It is helpful I think to think about the word “enlighten” here – the idea of shedding light on something, illuminating it, making it clear. The thinkers of the Enlightenment, influenced by the scientific revolutions of the previous century, believed in shedding the light of science and reason on the world, and in order to question traditional ideas and ways of doing things. The scientific revolution (based on empirical observation, and not on metaphysics or spirituality) gave the impression that the universe behaved according to universal and unchanging laws (think Newton). This provided a model for looking rationally on the human institutions as well as nature.

Reason and Equality

Rousseau, for example, began to question the idea of the divine right of kings. In ‘The Social Contract’, he wrote that the king does not, in fact, receive his power from God, but rather from the general will of the people. This, of course, implies that “the people” can also take away that power! The Enlightenment thinkers also discussed other ideas that are the founding principles of any democracy - the idea of the importance of the individual who can reason for himself, the idea of equality under the law, and the idea of natural rights. The Enlightenment was a period of profound optimism, a sense that with science and reason - and the consequent shedding of old superstitions – human beings and human society would improve. You can probably tell already that the Enlightenment was anti-clerical; it was, for the most part opposed to traditional Catholicism. Instead, the Enlightenment thinkers developed a way of understanding the universe called Deism – the idea, more or less, that there is a God, but that this God is not the figure of the old testaments, actively involved in human affairs. He is more like a watchmaker who, once he makes the watch and winds it, has nothing more to do with it.

Joseph Wright’s paintings as mentioned earlier illustrated the wonder and horror of science as it was known in the 18^th century. He painted portraits of intellectuals, industrialists, and an assortment of wealthy clients. But the work he is perhaps best known for centre’s on a dying bird.

                             
The painting depicts a travelling scientist who demonstrates the formation of a vacuum, a lesson provided at the expense of a cockatoo. The bird lay’s in the glass globe at the top of the painting as the scientist withdraws air from the globe using an air pump. If the sight of a dying bird is not enough to generate a response from onlookers, a bowl containing a skull glows in the candlelight that illuminates the scene. The demonstration, conducted before a group of men, women, and children, inspires a gamut of reactions from fear to disinterest, as shown in the eyes of the onlookers.
Wright’s artistic inclinations were shaped during his boyhood in Derby, a small town that would become an epicentre of the industrial revolution in central Britain. As an adult, he was drawn to an impressive circle of friends that included scientists, artists, and industrialists. This combination of influences resulted in dramatic paintings that captured the mood of progress and possibility in Britain in the 18^th century. Through study it is evident that Wright’s paintings were in keeping of his time and probably intended to represent concepts of physics, astronomy, and chemistry.
Enlightenment and Empiricism

Major thinkers during the enlightenment encouraged the use of ‘reason’ and ‘science’, in order to rid the world of barbarism and superstition. Enlightenment thinking led to the development of  two similar philosophies:

Rationalism:  Through thought alone, human knowledge can be attained.
Empiricism: All human knowledge must be based on sensory experience and nothing else.
If all knowledge comes directly from our senses, everything that can be known is measurable.
Enlightenment thinkers used ‘experience’ – careful observations (scientific observation) – to explain everything.
The scientific method became the source of authority – the way to answer any/all questions.
Can you understand the world, and everything in it, strictly through an ‘empirical’ point of view? Enlightenment thinkers said yes.
Everything is essentially mechanical, and thus can be understood by taking things apart in order to identify objective, universal “laws”.

Music and Enlightenment

Because of the focus on reason over superstition, the enlightenment cultivated the arts. Emphasis on learning, art and music became more widespread, especially with the growing middle classes. Areas such as literature, philosophy, science, and the fine arts increasingly explored subject matter that the general public in addition to the previously more segregated professionals and the patrons could relate to.
The music of Joseph Haydn in particular his symphony 'le Matin Adagio'- Allegro circa 1761 (metaphor of the birth of Enlightenment) was considered as being one of the most in line with the enlightenment ideas.


Georg Friedrich Brander (1713 - 1785)
Brander was German, and published a book, 'Beschreibung dreyer camerae obscurae' in which he illustrated a 'desk' camera obscura capable of allowing the ease of large drawings. The apparatus which one could actually sit at was at least 4ft high with an extended aperture, which appears to be of equal length. The artist would sit like as to write a letter and see the subject before him through the aid of a 45 degree mirror within the camera. Brander was a student in mathematics and physics at Nuremburg and later wrote several books on the camera obscura. he edited 'Beschreibung dreyer camerae obscura' twice, in 1755 and 1792.

Regnier Gemma Frisius - The most influential dutch mathematician of the 16th Century pioneered the use of the pinhole camera, which he used to study the solar eclipse of 1544. Light entering his closed darkened laboratory through a small hole in the door cast an image onto a screen or wall opposite the hole. Johannes Kepler first used the term "camera obscura" from camera, Latin for "room" and obscura, Latin for "dark" to describe such instruments in the early 17th century. The camera obscura allowed astronomers to make solar observations without damaging their eyes. 16th century descriptions by Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvius, and Girolamo Cardano in Italy and by Erasmus Reinhold and Gemma Frisius in Northern Europe make it difficult to assign exact dates or authorship to the construction of the first camera obscura, but references in Giovanni Battista della Porta's Magiae naturalis of 1558 indicate that by then the device had become familiar to scientists, magicians, and artists.

Jan Vermeer - Soldier and laughing girl - 1658, oil on canvas

                                                                                                           

Vermeer brought his figures extremely close to the picture plane. He heightened the contrast of scale between the two figures and intensified contrasts of light and colour. The effect is comparable to that seen in a wide-angle lens or convex mirror. Vermeer may have become interested in optical devices through an association with Fabritius, and apparently sought to capture the expressive character of their images in this work. A second reason for suggesting that Vermeer used the camera obscura has to do with the maps that he shows hanging on the wall in a number of paintings. These are real maps, printed on sheets of paper that were pasted together onto canvas backings. If you look at the actual copy of the map of Holland shown in 'Soldier and laughing girl' it is immediately obvious that Vermeer has copied it extremely faithfully - but was this done through the use of a camera obscura?

By the 17th century the camera obscura had emerged as a necessary tool for the workings out of new concepts of pictorial representation, in which artists and drafts men depicted objects and space as if seen from one position and one point in time. From the 17th to the 19th century, the camera obscura underwent continual improvement. Better lenses sharpened the image, and mirrors corrected the inversion and projected the picture onto a more convenient surface for drawing. Portable models were popular among European geographers as well as artists, including a tent like demountable version by Athanasius Kircher illustrated in his 1646 treatise on light as a suitable instrument for drawing the landscape. That scientists and artists regarded it as both a device for aiding graphic representation and a means of ascertaining basic truths about nature is apparent from Dutch philosopher Constantijns Huygen's description of the camera obscura image as "life itself, something so refined that words can't say", while others of the 17th century remarked on its ability to produce a "picture of inexpressible force and brightness...of a vivacity and richness nothing can excel".

During the 18th century, fantastic literary and graphic explanations about phenomena caused by light rays appeared, among them an illusion in Tiphaigne de la Roche's fictional work 'Giphantie' to a canvas as a mirror that retains images that light transmits, and a visual representation of this concept is seen in an anonymous engraving, 'The Miraculous Mirror'. Actual camera obscurae, used by artists to improve the accuracy of their depictions, were shown on occasion in portrait paintings, as though suggesting that the portrait was a truthful image of the pictured individual.
The chemical components necessary for photography were not recognised until 200yrs after the camera obscura was first conceived. from antiquity to the Renaissance, the mystery surrounding organic and mineral substances and their reactions to light and heat made chemical experimentation an inexact exercise practised mainly by alchemists. In the 17th century, more accurate observations led to the identification of silver nitrate, silver chloride, and ferrous salts, the first chemical substances used in the experiments that led to photography. The accidental discovery in 1725 by Johann Heinrich Schulze, professor of medicine at the university of Altdorf, that silver nitrate darkened when exposed to sunlight and that this change was the result of exposure to light and not heat was crucial to photography. The light sensitivity of silver chloride was the subject of experiments by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele who published his results in 1777, unaware that at mid-century an Italian, Giacomo Battista Beccaria, had discovered the same phenomenon. Scheele also established that the violet end of the solar spectrum was actinically more active in producing this effect and that the darkened material consisted of particles of metallic silver that could be precipitated by ammonia. Silver chloride was one of the many elements tested in 1782 by Jean Senebier, the chief librarian of Geneva, in order to determine the time required for various degrees of light to darken the chemical salts. He also studied the reaction of the chloride to different portions of the spectrum, foreshadowing later experiments that demonstrated that the spectrum reproduced itself in natural colours on the chloride surface.

Two 18th century English scientists, Dr William Lewis and Joseph Priestly, formed the link between the early chemical experiments and the efforts to find a way to retain an image produced by the darkening of silver halides by light.

In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood attempted to transfer paintings on glass to white leather and paper moistened with a solution of nitrate of silver, describing the resulting negative image "where the light is unaltered, the colour of the nitrate is deepest". Their early experiments demonstrated that it was possible to chemically transfer by means of light not only pictures but objects in profile such as leaves and fabrics.

The 'enlightened' British and French bourgeois in the early 19th century led to brothers Joseph Nicephore Niepce and Claude Niepce becoming involved with a series of inventions, methods of making indigo dye, a device for printing lithographs, and a process for obtaining images by the action of light. 1816, Nicephore and Claude produced an image in the camera obscura using paper sensitised with silver chloride but as all efforts to make a positive print were unsuccessful, Nicephore turned to using bitumen, an ingredient in resist varnish that hardens and becomes insoluble when exposed to light. In the summer of 1827, Niepce exposed a pewter plate coated with bitumen in the camera obscura, achieving after some 8hrs an image of a dovecote on his estate at Le Gras. Although he changed from pewter to silver-coated copper plates, and introduced iodine to increase the sensitivity of the silver surface to light, he was unable to decrease substantially the exposure time needed to obtain an image. When his researches came to a standstill, he formed a partnership with the painter Daguerre, who, independently, had become obsessed with the idea of making the image seen in the camera obscura permanent. Daguerre's fascination with this problem, and with the effects of light in general, is understandable in view of his activities as a painter of stage sets and illusionistic scenery for the Diorama, a popular visual entertainment in Paris.

In promoting The Diorama into one of Europe's most popular entertainments, Daguerre had shown himself to be a shrewd entrepreneur. He understood, as Niepce had not, that its progress and acceptance would be influenced as much by promotional skill as by intrinsic merit. Niepce's death in 1833 meant a shift in Daguerre's work. He continued his work with iodized silver plates, discarding bitumen altogether. In 1835 he hit upon a phenomenon known as latent development, resulting in the photographer not having to wait to see the image appear on the plate during exposure, but can bring it out by chemical development - mercury vapor - meaning a radical reduction in exposure time. The problem of stopping the continued action of light on the silver halides which caused the image to darken was halted in 1837 when Daguerre found a way to arrest the action of light with a bath of sodium chloride (table salt), a method he used till March 1839 when he learned about the property of hypo to wash away unexposed silver salts indirectly from its discoverer, John Herschel (British). The daguerreotype was delicate, easily damaged by fingerprints and atmospheric conditions - therefore needing the protection of being enclised in a case under glass.
                      
Hippolyte Bayard

Self portrait as a drowned man

Hippolyte Bayard (1807-1887) was a french photographer a pioneer in the history of photography. He invented his own process known as direct positive printing and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839. he claimed to have invented photography earlier than Daguerre in France and Talbot in England, the men credited with its invention.

After the French government had acquired the process, Daguerre occasionally demonstrated its methods and entered into arrangements to supply cameras and manuals of instruction, but he was considerably less active than others in perfecting his discovery. He preferred creating scenic effects on his estate in Bry-Sur-Marne and in the local church where he painted a large 'trompe l'oeil perspective scene behind the altar. Although at Bry he made a small number of daguerreotypes of family and scenery, no further discoveries issued from his workshop nor did he develop artistically between 1839 and his death in 1851.

William Henry Fox Talbot    (11 February 1800 - 17 September 1877)

Talbot was a British inventor and photography pioneer who invented the Calotype process, a precursor to photographic processes of the 19th and 20th Centuries. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent, which affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain.

            

Talbot was a true polymath, his intellectual curiosity embraced the fields of mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and botany; philosophy and philology (study of language in written historical sources); Egyptology, the classics, and art history. He published a number of books and scholarly articles on a variety of subjects. Talbot's frustration with the camera lucida (optical device used as a drawing aid by artists) led him to recollect his experiences ten years earlier with another drafting aid, the camera obscura - a small wooden box with a lens at one end that projected the scene before it onto a piece of frosted glass at the back, where the artist could trace the outlines on thin paper. The camera obscura, too, had left Talbot with unsatisfactory results, but it was not his own feeble drawings that he remembered after a decade.

In January 1834, Talbot returned home to Lacock Abbey, an amalgamation of buildings incorporating the 13th and 14th Century remains of a former abbey about 85 miles west of London. He began to experiment with the idea that a sheet of fine writing paper, coated with salt and brushed with a silver nitrate solution, darkened in the sun, and that a second coating of salt impeded further darkening or fading. Talbot used this discovery to make precise tracings of botanical specimens: he set a pressed leaf or plant on a piece of sensitised paper, covered it with a sheet of glass, and set it in the sun. Wherever the light struck, the paper darkened, but wherever the plant blocked the light, it remained white. He called his new discovery "the art of photogenic discovery."

As his chemistry improved, Talbot returned to his original idea of photographic images made in a camera. During the "brilliant summer of 1835,"  he took full advantage of the unusually abundant sunshine and placed pieces of  sensitised photogenic paper in miniature cameras - "mouse-traps" his wife called them - set around the grounds to record the silhouette of Lacock Abbey's roof line and trees. The pictures, Talbot wrote, "without great stretch of the imagination might be supposed to be the work of some lilliputian artist."


                                              
[The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey], 1835 or 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot (British), Photogenic drawing negative (1997.382.1)
                                               
Talbot worked very little on his invention between the sunny days of 1835 and January 1839, when the news arrived that Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, had invented a wholly different means of recording camera pictures with dazzling precision on metal plates. Preempted just at the moment when he was beginning to revisit his earlier experiments with an eye toward publication, Talbot scrambled to stake a claim to priority, to produce pictures that might compare favourably with Daguerre's, and to solve the problems of lengthy exposure times and fugitive prints. Well before daguerre revealed the details of his process, Talbot presented his own before the Royal Society in January and February 1839. At the time of Talbot's announcement, his "art of photogenic drawing" was clearly better suited for recording the shadows of plant specimens, lace, or similar flat objects by direct contact - pictures we would now describe as photograms - than for camera images.

Talbot new that fast, accurate and permanent means of producing photographic images in the camera was needed. On September 23, 1840, he found it! Talbot discovered that an exposure of mere seconds, leaving no visible trace on the chemically treated paper, left a latent image that could be brought out with the application of an "exciting liquid" (Gallic acid). Talbot patented this discovery in February 1841 as the "calotype" process (from Greek Kalos, meaning beautiful).

A more permanent means of "fixing" the image with hyposulfite of soda was proposed by his friend eminent scientist Sir John Herschel; "hypo" was adopted by Talbot for most prints beginning in the early 1840s and is still used today as a fixer for black-and-white photographs. Talbot travelled to Paris in May 1843 to negotiate (unsuccessfully) a licensing agreement for the French rights to his patented calotype process. At home, he demonstrated the commercial viability of his invention in his photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, 1844. In less than a decade, Talbot conceived and brought about a wholly new way of making pictures, perfected the optical and chemical aspects of photography, and learnt to use the new medium to make complex images for the botanist, historian, traveller, and artist.

Talbot spent the last twenty-five years of his life developing and perfecting  an effective photogravure process. That he should of spent so much time developing a process for printing photographs with ink rather than silver salts is not wholly surprising. Talbot's early photogenic drawings are so ephemeral that, despite their exceptional beauty, they can never be exhibited or exposed to light without risk of change. Even his far more stable calotypes fixed with hypo were inconsistent in their permanence, many deteriorating in quick order. Thus, Talbot's search for a photographic process using permanent printer's ink was a final step in the refinement of his earlier, still imperfect, invention.

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848) are regarded as the most important photographers working in Scotland in the decade following the discovery of photography in 1839. They have remained enormously influential on the development of Scottish photography right up to the present day.

Based in Edinburgh, they were amongst the first photographers in Scotland to use Talbot's calotype process - which brought the concepts of negative and positive into photographic usage.

                                               
                                                    

  Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall
This image is from the series known as the 'Great Newhaven project'.In this project the photographers used the camera to document the fishing communities living in the villages on the banks of the Firth of Forth during the mid-1840s.
They were democratic in subject matter choosing to photograph 'working people' as well as nobility/society people in Edinburgh. Their portrait specialities were adult and children's groups, but their crowning achievement was their collection of portraits featuring the daily lives of Newhaven fishing families. It was a sentimental documentary of a village that remained committed to it's moral and social fabric despite the intrusion of the industrial revolution. They produced an impressive 3,000 photographs, which were exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1844 and 1845.

Victorian overview

The Victorian Age was characterised by rapid change and developments in nearly every sphere - from advances in medical, scientific and technological knowledge to changes in population growth and location. An age that began with a confidence and optimism leading to economic boom and prosperity eventually gave way to uncertainty and doubt regarding Britain's place in the world. Today we associate the 19th century with protestant work ethic, family values, religious observation and institutional faith.

19th century families were for the most part, hard working, respectable and conformed to a religious belief system. While this life was valid, it was frequently challenged by contemporaries. Women were either Madonnas or whores, yet education and employment opportunities gave many a role outside the family.

This age saw the birth of political movements, most notably socialism, liberalism and organised feminism. British Victorians were excited by the opening up of Africa, Asia to the west, yet were troubled by the intractable Irish situation and humiliated by the failures of the Boar war.

During the Victorian heyday, work and play expanded dramatically. The national railway network stimulated travel and leisure opportunities for all, so that by the 1870s, visits to seaside resorts, race meetings and football matches could be enjoyed by many of this now largely urban society.Increasing literacy stimulated growth in popular journalism and the ascendancy of the novel as the most powerful popular icon.

The progress of scientific thought led to significant changes in medicine with notable medical breakthroughs in anaesthetics. The public faith in institutions was evident also in the erection of specialised workhouses and asylums for the most vulnerable members of society.