Photography Time line
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
in the form of sedan chairs
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
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".
1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic
resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in
ether and alcoohol) 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
1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to
worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade
1855: beginning of stereoscopic era
1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal
(tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.
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: Edweard 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 time-sequenced 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".; Henri
Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people;
On March 14, 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.
1936: development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film;
development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
World
War II:
development
of multi-layer color negative films
Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W.
Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the
photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial
sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm
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.
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
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"
1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed in 1980
1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid
1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera
1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the
Minox spy camera)
1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called
"Maxxum" in the US)
1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD
1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics
Task:
Create
a graph in the space provided that shows the number of photographic events that
took place in each decade for the time period spanning from 1900 to 2000.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1900Ős 1910Ős 1920Ős 1930Ős
1940Ős 1950Ős 1960Ős 1970Ős 1980Ős 1990Ős
Answer
on the back of the sheet the following:
1.
In the 17 and 18 hundreds, what
dates relate to discoveries that deal with new chemical processes. Explain what they are.
2.
Explain what the developments of the 19 hundreds mostly deal with.