The invention of photography
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Was the inevitable climax of a long love affair between science and art.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle was familiar with the phenomenon of the camera obscura (literally "dark room") and the great Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci described its properties. Both knew the principle: that light entering a minute hole in the wall of a darkened room or box forms on the opposite wall an inverted image of whatever lies outside.
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Some historians have wondered why photography was not invented earlier than it was
In 1568, Professor Danielo Barbaro, working at the University of Padua, demonstrated that a clearer image could be produced if a lens was substituted for the pinhole. Gradually the camera obscura became standard equipment for artists. In 1764, Count Francesco Algarotti devoted an entire chapter in his book on painting to the value of the apparatus, pointing out that the great Italian pairiters could not have represented nature so accurately without it.
Some historians have wondered why photography was not invented earlier than it was. In 1725, the German physicist Johann Heinrich Schulze had established that silver salts are radically altered by exposure to light. The essential ingredient needed to capture the fleeting image created by the camera had been identified. But it would be another hundred years before these long understood optical and chemical phenomena were brought together to produce the miracle that we now call a photograph.
The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos
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inventa la photographic
Joseph Nicephore Niepce.
The distinction of being "the world's first photographer" fell to a French man, Joseph Nicephore Niepce. On May 5, 1816, he described his efforts in a letter to his brother: "I placed the apparatus in the room where I work, facing the birdhouse and the open casement. I made the experiment according to the process which you know and I saw on the white paper all that part of the birdhouse which is seen from the window and a faint image of the casement." Niepce regarded his experiment as "an imperfect trial," but he persisted with great diligence and ingenuity. Some believe he may have succeeded in making a permanent image in 1822, but the "heliograph," as he called it (from the Greek for "sun" or "light"), has not survived.
In 1826, he was more successful. He coated a polished pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, then treated the plate with a solution of oil of lavender and turpentine after it had been exposed to light. The exposure time was an exhausting eight hours. The result was the ghostly image reproduced here, which authorities recognize as the world's oldest existing photograph.
While Niepce never solved the problem of making multiple images, his creation of a permanent image was fundamental to the development of photog raphy. From this first, blurry photograph the visual-communications revolution could mark its shaky but felicitous beginning.
In 1933, the one-hundredth anniversary of Niepce's death, the govern ment of France erected a monument to his memory at St.-Loup-de-Varennes. The inscription on the imposing stone memorial reads simply:
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Nicephore Niepce
inventa la photographic
en 1822
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