Enlightenment Movement.

                The enlightenment movement, also known as the ‘Age of Reason’, started in 1766 where society started to challenge the orthodox, the Catholic Church. People started to trust the evidence of facts instead of the superstitions the Church had enforced. Empiricism means the belief based upon experience; and so the experiments could be repeated and produce the same results this built the trust of society that made people more independent and can share their own knowledge and thoughts. The Age of Reason showed humanism and an experimental view to life; by rejecting religious dogma to find the truth expresses the metaphor of enlightenment to mean to explore the environment and bring hope. In the 1750s classical music began, Joseph Haydn’s ‘Le Matin’ portrays the hope of the enlightenment movement, also the structure of Georgian houses and buildings with the balance and proportion was and extension from Ancient Greek and Roman sources just like Photography was. Joseph Wright of Darby was an artist that dictated the change of this time; with paintings about experimenting with a bird in a glass container getting the air pumped out of it as well as the teachings of the sun showed how people began to share their knowledge and the birth of something new by the symbol of light in both pieces of art.

              

Camera Obscura

                Camera Obscura means darkroom and Georg invented the first table camera obscura in 1769 where the light would travel though the lenses and hit a mirror that is positioned at 45⁰ so the image would project on to paper so the artist/ photographer could trace it a produce the picture.  

                In 1544 the renaissance was happening and people were exploring perspectives and found that it was relied upon more than a theory. The rudimentary camera obscra is a pin hole where the light travels through and projects onto a wall for the artist to trace and make the picture look like a real picture as he is taking it from a real situation. This was mostly used to view the eclipse of the sun. This was shown by Jan Vermeer; you can tell his paintings were done by using a camera obscura because of the wide angles like a camera that our eyes wouldn’t be able to see and the way it experiments with using lenses. In the Netherlands in 1646 the invented an outdoor obscura where the light passes through a pin hole in a wall and through a tracing screen to hit a wall to the artist can then trace it and create the image of an outside scene. Brunelleschi thought about the view of perspective and by aligning two mirrors facing each other and looking though the holes he had made in them he could see how his eyes and the cameras perspective was different.

Birth of photography.

                Arabian alchemists found that silver tarnishes to light; then in 1727 a German scientist found that silver goes darker in light so this supports what had been found in Arabia. 1777 the Swedish found that silver nitrate darkens quickest under blue light and slowest under red, this is why the safety light in modern darkrooms are red. Wedgwood was the first person to produce an image on leather in 1802 by impregnating the leather in silver salts.

                1839 is seen as the birth of photography even though experiments had happened before; this time was when a photograph could be captured without tracing the image that had been cast on a wall. Niepce took the first photographic image called ‘view from the window at le Gras’ in 1826 in France by using an 8 hour exposure on a steel plate. He sold his idea to Lois Jacques Mond’e Daguerre. Daguerre didn’t develop this idea he created a new one called the ‘Daguerreotype’ in 1839. These photos were achieved by using a silver coated copper plate cleaned so it looks like a mirror, iodine vapour fumes released on its surface then exposed in Mercury for 15 to 60 minutes. Hippolyte Bayard used a similar technique but using paper; his invention was bought by the French government and patented, it became free across the world apart from England and American due to wars.

William Henry Fox Talbolt thought of himself as a scientist and interested in the arts. He had used the camera Lucida to produce his art; this uses mirrors to see both the subject and the paper where the artist would copy and draw it. Fox Talbolt created the ‘Kalotype’ which is a paper process; where the paper is in sodium chloride then soaked in silver chloride and exposed in a camera obscura and fixed in sodium chloride to produce the image. By using, what he called, a ‘Mouse trap camera’ he took the first negative in 1835 called ‘latticed window’. In his book ‘Pencil of Nature’ he had taken pictures around the abbey of still life because he had to expose it for 10 minutes and so the subject had to be completely still, it was slow but accurate as the detail in the photo was very clear. He then experimented on photographic paper by placing flowers onto the paper then exposes it to light like a photogram. At the time of all this the Victorian empire was at a high and they collected information and ideas and classified them into their society; the invention of Museums showed how to show and share knowledge and the different ways to publicise pictures and news became easier to get someone’s name out and their work known.  

              Sir John Fredrick William Herschel was the inventor of the word photography; by ‘photo’ meaning light and ‘graphy’ meaning drawing.  Hill and Adamson were artists than went into photography who did portraits on commission. Some of their pictures were of noble, great and good people to show the hierarchy but also the working society to show the labour movement and the importance of the work force that pulls people together and bring them out of poverty and creates independence.