History

of
Photography

ancient times: Camera obscuras used to

form images on walls in darkened rooms;
image formation via a pinhole

16th century: Brightness and clarity of

camera obscuras improved by enlarging
the hole inserting a telescope lens

17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use

by artists and made portable.

1727: Professor J. Schulze

mixes chalk, nitric acid, and
silver in a flask; notices
darkening on side of flask
exposed to sunlight.
Accidental creation of the
first photo-sensitive
compound.

1800: Thomas Wedgwood

makes "sun pictures" by
placing opaque objects on
leather treated with silver
nitrate; resulting images
deteriorated rapidly,
however, if displayed under
light stronger than from
candles.

1816: Nicphore
Nipce combines the
camera obscura with
photosensitive paper

1826: Nipce creates a permanent image

View from Niepces Window at Le Gras.

1834: Henry Fox Talbot

creates permanent (negative)
images using paper soaked in
silver chloride and fixed with a
salt solution. Talbot created
positive images by contact
printing onto another sheet of
paper.

1837: Louis Daguerre creates

images on silver-plated
copper, coated with silver
iodide and "developed" with
warmed mercury; Daguerre is
awarded a state pension by
the French government in
exchange for publication of
methods and the rights by
other French citizens to use
the Daguerreotype process.

1841: Talbot
patents his process
under the name
"calotype".
Known also as Tintypes

1846

Associated Press

1851: Frederick Scott

Archer, a sculptor in
London, improves
photographic resolution by
spreading a mixture of
collodion (nitrated cotton
dissolved in ether and
alcohol) and chemicals on
sheets of glass. Wet plate
collodion photography was
much cheaper than
daguerreotypes, the
negative/positive process
permitted unlimited
reproductions, and the
process was published but
not patented.

1853: Nada (Felix Toumachon) opens

his portrait studio in Paris

1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era

1855-57: Direct positive images on

glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes
or ferrotypes) popular in the US.

3 million tintypes produced by mid 1800s

1861: Scottish physicist

James Clerk-Maxwell
demonstrates a color
photography system involving
three black and white
photographs, each taken
through a red, green, or blue
filter. The photos were turned
into lantern slides and
projected in registration with
the same color filters. This is
the "color separation"
method.

1861-65: Mathew
Brady and staff
(mostly staff)
covers the
American Civil War,
exposing 7000
negatives

1868: Ducas de
Hauron publishes a
book proposing a
variety of methods
for color
photography.

1870: Center of
period in which the
US Congress sent
photographers out
to the West. The
most famous images
were taken by
William Jackson and
Tim O'Sullivan.

1871: Richard
Leach Maddox, an
English doctor,
proposes the use of
an emulsion of
gelatin and silver
bromide on a glass
plate, the "dry plate"
process.

1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England

as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's
four hooves ever leave the ground at once"
bet among rich San Franciscans by timesequenced photography of Leland Stanford's
horse.

1878: Dry plates being manufactured

commercially.

1880: George Eastman,

age 24, sets up Eastman
Dry Plate Company in
Rochester, New York.
First half-tone
photograph appears in a
daily newspaper, the
New York Graphic.

First Issue
1888

1888: First Kodak camera, containing

a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100
2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.

1889: Improved
Kodak camera with
roll of film instead of
paper

1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other

Half Lives, images of tenament life in New
york City

1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera

introduced.

1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo

Secessionist" show in New York City

1906: Availability of panchromatic black and

white film and therefore high quality color
separation color photography. J.P. Morgan
finances Edward Curtis to document the
traditional culture of the North American
Indian.

1907: First
commercial color film,
the Autochrome
plates, manufactured
by Lumiere brothers
in France

1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National

Child Labor Committee to photograph
children working mills.

Dorothea Lange
May 25, 1895 October 11, 1965

1914: Oscar Barnack,

employed by German
microscope manufacturer
Leitz, develops camera using
the modern 24x36mm frame
and sprocketed 35mm movie
film.

1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will

eventually become Nikon, established
in Tokyo.

First Nikon camera:

The Nikon 1

1921: Man Ray begins

making photograms
("rayographs") by placing
objects on photographic
paper and exposing the
shadow cast by a distant
light bulb; Eugegrave;ne
Atget, aged 64, assigned
to photograph the
brothels of Paris

1924: Leitz markets a

derivative of Barnack's
camera commercially
as the "Leica", the first
high quality 35mm
camera.

1925: Andr Kertsz

moves from his native
Hungary to Paris, where
he begins an 11-year
project photographing
street life

The 35mm Camera 1927

1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch

publishes The World is
Beautiful, close-ups
emphasizing the form of
natural and man-made
objects.

Rollei introduces the

Rolleiflex twin-lens
reflex producing a
6x6 cm image on
rollfilm

Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature

1931: Development
of strobe photography
by Harold ("Doc")
Edgerton at MIT

1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies,

where three black and white negatives were
made in the same camera under different
filters

Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van

Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64
dedicated to "straight photographic thought and
production

May 25, 1895 October 11, 1965

Ansel Adams

Imogen Cunningham

Willard Van Dyke

Edward weston

Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a

60-year career photographing people

March 14, 1932 George Eastman, aged 77,

writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why
wait?"--and shoots himself.

1933: Brassa publishes Paris de nuit

1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is

making cameras and lenses in addition to film.

1935: Farm Security Administration hires

Roy Stryker to run a historical section.
Stryker would hire Walker Evans,
Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al.
to photograph rural hardships over the
next six years. Roman Vishniac begins his
project of the soon-to-be-killed-by-theirneighbors Jews of Central and Eastern
Europe.

Walker Evans

Dorthea Lange

Arthur Rothstein

Roman Vishniac

1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color

multi-layered color film; development of Exakta,
pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera

Hindenburg Explosion 1937

Nov. 23, 1936

World War II

Further Development of the multi-layer color negative

LIFE magazine covers the war with

help from Margaret Bourke-White,
Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W.
Eugene Smith

First Life color 1936

Margaret Bourke-White

Carl Mydans

W. Eugene Smith

1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David

Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum
picture agency

Man Ray

1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first mediumformat SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan
introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells
instant black and white film

1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S,

first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism
viewfinder

1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of

Man exhibit at New York's Museum of
Modern Art

1959: Nikon F introduced

Speedgraphic Camera
Standard equipment for press photographers
in the 1960s

1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing

women on the streets of New York City.

1963: First color instant film developed by

Polaroid

Instamatic released by Kodak

first purpose-built underwater introduced,

the Nikonos

1970: William Wegman begins

photographing his Weimaraners.

1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak

with a 13x17mm frame

1973: C-41 color negative process

introduced, replacing C-22

1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his

first annual photograph of his
wife and her sisters: "The Brown
Sisters"

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Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the

first working CCD-based digital
still camera
Steven Sasson holds the
prototype digital camera he
built in 1975 at the
Eastman Kodak Co.
headquarters in Rochester,
N.Y. It recorded a blackand-white image on a
digital cassette tape.

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1976: First solo show of color

photographs at the Whitney
Museum of American Art :

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1977: Cindy Sherman begins

work on Untitled Film Stills,
completed in 1980
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1977: Jan Groover begins

exploring kitchen utensils

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1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins

work on seascapes.

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1980: Elsa Dorfman begins

making portraits with the 20x24"
Polaroid.
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1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica

"still video" camera

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1983: Kodak introduces disk

camera, using an 8x11mm frame
(the same as in the Minox spy
camera)
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Richard Avedon In the

American West

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1987: The popular Canon EOS

system introduced, with new allelectronic lens mount

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1985: Minolta markets the

world's first autofocus SLR
system (called "Maxxum" in the
US)
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1990: Adobe Photoshop 1.0 released.

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1991: Kodak DCS-100, first

digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3

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1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD

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Sebastiao Salgado publishes

Workers

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Mary Ellen Mark publishes book

documenting life in an Indian
circus.
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1995: Material World, by Peter

Menzel published.
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1997: Rob Silvers publishes

Photomosaics

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1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74

megapixel for $6000, first
ground-up DSLR design by a
leading manufacturer.
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2000: Camera phone introduced

in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone

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2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt

2003: Four-Thirds standard for

compact digital SLRs introduced
with the Olympus E-1

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Canon Digital Rebel introduced

for less than $1000

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2004: Kodak ceases production

of film cameras

2005: Canon EOS 5D, first

consumer-priced full-frame
digital SLR, with a 24x36mm
CMOS sensor for $3000
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