The History of Photography - Part 1:

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was able to successfully take and record the first photo in the world with a camera obscura already 13 years prior to the event in Paris mentioned above. The  result was the famous heliographic image recorded on a tin plate, “The View from the Window at Le Gras” (French: “La cour du dolmaine du Gras”), which is still completely intact even today. When looking at an edited version of the photo, it’s much easier to recognise the opened window on the left, a pigeon house near that, and a tree in the background. In the middle there is a roof and to the right a chimney. It took eight hours in all to record the image. The light-sensitive tin plate on which the photo was recorded measured 20 x 25 cm in size.In 1829, Niépce joined together with Louis Daguerre to continue work on this concept. Niépce, however, died four years later and Daguerre ended up improving the method by himself until the rendition of the daguerreotype on the 19th of August, 1839 with the help of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre

The daguerreotype was the first practical method to permanently record images. All images produced using this method are unique thanks to how they are produced. A modified camera obscura was used and had a slot for a cartridge. This contained an iodine-metallised and silver-coated copper plate that was exposed for approximately 20 seconds. The light-sensitive silver iodide is initially invisible. After recording, the exposed plate is immediately developed using quicksilver vaporisation in a darkroom and fixated with a potassium cyanide solution. The subsequent airtight sealing behind a glass plate protects the quicksilver coating from contact and oxidation. The result is a light-resistant, laterally-inverted light grey image. As successful as this achievement of permanently recording an image was, the method also has two big downsides. The first downside of the daguerreotype is that it is a very expensive form of photography due to the use of the precious metals silver and copper, which made it only accessible to the more affluent echelons of society. Another downside is that the dangerous cyanide and quicksilver  fumes led to the early death of many photographers.

• Heliography (in 1822)
• Talbotype (also called Calotype, in 1835)
• Ambrotype (in 1850)
• Ferrotype (also called Tintype, in 1850)
• Collodion Process (in 1850)
• Wothlytype (1864)
  

After the presentation of the daguerreotype in Paris, different methods of photography were developed rapidly all over the world. Portraits of people and landscapes could now be captured more quickly than by painters. Photography also became a useful resource for painters to employ while doing their work. Edouard Manet, Courbet and Gauguin all traded in their sketchbooks for photographic methods to aid them in their painting. In the 1840’s, a photography hype came about and multiple photography ateliers began to open. During this time, an Englishman by the name of William Henry Fox Talbot began developing the “calotype” and applied for a patent. The daguerreotype and the calotype both make use of sunlight in order to create images. These two methods are, however, very different in their applications. While the method developed by Daguerre used plates made of tin (later out of glass) to capture images, Talbot used paper. Even today Talbot’s method is still in use today in a modified form.

In part 2 of this series, you can read all about the industrialisation of photography and how the photograph made the transition from plates to film rolls.