The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason 

The Enlightenment was a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe and the American colonies. Religion and superstition was challenged, reasoning and evidence took its place. An English landscape and portrait painter, Joseph Wright of derby exhibited records of science and religious values in the age of enlightenment. Paintings such as ‘an experiment on a bird in the air pump’ show empiricism. Repetition and experimentation were used as proof of evidence.  

Joseph Haydn’s symphony ‘le matin’(1761) can be seen as a metaphor for the awakening of man. The piece begins slowly building in tempo as if to say man has become aware. The enlightenment ignited a fire of experimentation; a huge array of invention came into being. One of these being the camera obsura, this invention projected an image from the outside world into a darkened room. (Dark room derived from this). A table camera obsura was another variant of this, where an image was captured and seen on a glass table top. The camera obsura also had an influence on painting as it produced relatively correct proportion and scale, this was proven as experiments were done and buildings within some of these paintings still exist. The invention also gave proof of perspective which prior to the obsura was speculation and theory.

Photography was born in the era of classicism back to ancient Greek and roman sources. The tarnishing of sliver was observed since ancient times. In 1727 german scientist obsevered sliver salts darken when exposed to the sun. In 1777 a Swedish chemist discovered that nitrogen darkens quickest in blue light. Later in 1802 joseph wedgewood reports success at producing images on leather by impregnating it with sliver. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was seen as the first person to fix a photographic image. A man called Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre brought the invention from Nicéphore Niépce later experimenting and evolving the process, subsequently producing the daguerreotype method.  Boulevard du Temple, a partisan was taken by Daguerre in 1938 which was the first ever photograph of a human being.

Unbeknownst to either inventor, Daguerre's developmental work in the mid-1830s coincided with photographic experiments being conducted by Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot’s paper process was called the calotype method and his first negative was produced in 1835 which was named the lattice window. The name photography was created in 1839 meaning drawing with light.