History Of Photography

Cedalion standing on the shoulders of Orion from Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun by Nicolas Poussin, 1658, Oil on canvas

Introduction

The challenge of teaching the History of Photography is that there is an incredibly broad spectrum of material to go through, so many different kinds of photography that are practically worlds onto themselves, that I can easily spend an entire semester teaching the history of any one them, which is much more than the two 3 hour sessions I have allocated. The last session was a 16,000 year walk back in time from looking at cave paintings to the contemporary issues facing image makers today. This session is the second class of History of Photography, dealing with The Digital Revolution – and I find it only fitting that I deliver the course material, in part, through my blog. (I briefly considered Live Tweeting it on my Twitter account, but then that would compromise the value of your education (-;

Review Of Part I

There is a Latin saying: nanos gigantum humeris insidentes. It means “Though we may be dwarves compared to giants that preceded us, if we stand on their shoulders, maybe we can see a little further.” There can be no doubt that advances in technology have allowed us to see much further, much clearer, and much faster than possible in any other time in history – and this is all the more true with advances in digital technology. There is no ther time in history where we can alter the look of an image so easily with just a few clicks of a mouse. The real question is, “So what?”. The highest resolution sensors, the sharpest lenses, the most advanced image editing operations really don’t amount to much unless the resulting image itself has something to say. So in the last class, we looked at the history and motivations for image making, photographers whose images changed perceptions on both the medium of photography and their subjects, how the technology evolved, as well as touched upon contemporary issues that makes us ask the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s the point?’, and hopefully help us ask our questions into finding meaning in our own photography and the images that we see. For a brief recap of the last class;

• The human impulse to create images can be seen as far back as the cave paintings 16,000 years ago in Lascaux, France.
• Early optical devices such as the Camera Lucida and Camera Obscura. There has been some discussion that some great masters such as Carravagio used these devices – essentially making the paintings hand rendered ‘photographs’.
• The invention of light sensitive materials (which eventually evolved to film) and the limitations of early technology
• Remarkable early composites using wet plate technology such as such as Oscar Rejlander’s ‘The Two Ways Of Life’ shown in 1858.
• Alfred Stieglitz, his Galleries, and efforts to make Photography an accepted art form.
• The Pictorialist Movement (and the philosophy that photography should emulate painting)
• The Straight Photography movement with Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the f/64 Group
• Street photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson (founding member of Magnum) and Garry Winogrand
• Fashion photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn
• Contemporary conceptual photographers such as Mark Seliger and Annie Leibovitz.
• And finally finding a conceptual framework from which to find meaning from looking at images, either our own or those made by other artists, by looking at the point of view of the creator/artist, the viewer, and the technology used to create it.

Digital Technology Timeline

Even just 60 years ago, the world was a drastically different place. The next section is a time line which shows the evolution of digital technology that has radically reshaped the contexts in which we conceptualize, create, and view images today.

1947
The Transistor is developed by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Industries, winning them a Nobel Prize and initiates a revolution in the Electronics Insdustry

1951
The VTR (Video Tape Recorder) is developed at Bing Crosby Laboratories. It uses electrical impulses to record images on magnetic tape.

1956
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories experiment with the creation of ‘Silicon Crystals, giving rise to ‘Silicon Valley’

1957
Russel A Kirsch at the National Bureau Of Standards creates the first scanned photo (one of his son) with an early mechanical drum scanner.

1959
The Integrated Circuit is invented by Fairchild Semiconductor manager Bob Noyce, who later co-founds Intel corporation.

1964
Tha Mariner spacecraft transmits electronic images of Mars back to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California

1969
Wilard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Laboratories design the charged-coupled Device (CCD), which until today is used in digital cameras to record images electronically.

1972
First patent for Filmless Electronic Camera filed by Texas Instruments

1980
Sony Corporation is the first to commercially market color video cameras with a solid state image sensor, the CCD.

1981
Sony released the first Sony Mavica electronic still camera, the camera which was the first commercial electronic camera. Images were recorded onto a mini disc and then put into a video reader that was connected to a television monitor or color printer. Not really considered to be a true still camera, it was a video camera that took video freeze-frames. Instructor’s Note: With the introduction of the Nikon D90 and Canon 5D Mark II in 2008, with the ‘ground-breaking feature’ being the ability to shoot video, most would be surprised that the first digital camera was a video camera adapted to shoot stills.

1984
Canon conducted a trial of a professional color still video camera (the RC-701) and an analog transmitter at the Los Angeles Olympics. The images were transmitted back to Japan via phone lines in less than 30 minutes and were then printed in the Yomiuri Shimbun. The color electronic still video camera with a 400K pixel CCD used in the tests was the first practical application for public use.

1984
Apple Macintosh personal computer with a speedy graphical interface and a mouse

1986
Canon was the first to market a still video camera, the professional model RC-701. The RC-701 was aimed mainly at the press market. It had four dedicated interchangeable lenses and also offered an adapter for 35mm lenses. Price of the RC (RC stood for Realtime Camera) with an 11-66mm f/1.2 lens was about $3,000. The complete RC-701 system consisting of the camera, a player/recorder, a printer, a laminator, and a unit for phone transmission cost about $27,000. The CCD was 6.6mm x 8.8mm with 780 pixels horizontally. This was equal to about 300 horizontal and 320 vertical lines on a TV monitor.

1986
NIKON SVC (Still Video Camera) PROTOTYPE – This camera was built around a 2/3-inch CCD of 300 000 pixels (.3 Megapixel Camera). It allowed the analog recording of 25 or 50 images on a small floppy disk of two inches, the same one as used by the Canon Ion to be marketed in 1988. The body of the SVC was designed similar to that of the Nikon F801 film camera which was marketed two years later, Two lenses were intended for the SVC, a 6mm f/1.6 and a 10 to 40mm f/1.4. The Nikon SVC was shown at Photokina ‘85.

1988
Joint Photographic Experts Group develops and implements standards for an image compression format (JPEG)

1990
Photoshop 1.0 (Mac Version) (Instructor’s Note: which is why, along with an integrated monitor that had better QA and more consistent output, the Mac became the standard tool for desktop publishing)
Kodak Photo CD

1991
Kodak DCS 100 (1.3 megapixel $20,000)

1992
Kodak DCS 200 (includes a hard drive)

1993
Adobe Photoshop for Windows

1994
Compact Flash is introduced by Sandisk

1996
The Vancouver Sun and British Columbia Province become the first major newspapers in North America to convert from film to all digital photo capture, using Nikon N90 based 1.3 megapixel NC 2000 cameras developed by Kodak and the Associated Press.

1999
Nikon D1 – first digital camera to be designed and manufactured by a single camera company (2.7 megapixel)

2001-2003
The world transitions into digital image capture. I sell my Mamiya RZ-67 Pro II camera and purchase a Kodak DCS-760, the first true 6 megapixel camera that could be bought for less than $10,000 USD. It was this generation of camera, along with Nikon’s D1X that really drove the transition to digital capture in mainstream editorial and advertising applications. Prior to this time, asides from press images transmitted by wire, most editorial and advertising photography was photographed with either medium-format or large-format film. By first-hand experience, what really drove the sales and R&D of early digital cameras was the Advertising Industry, where advertising photographers could justify purchasing $25,000 digital backs that, at the time, had a maximum resolution of 6 or 12 megapixels.

The Curious Case Of Moving Pyramids (And Other Photoshop Disasters)

While as far back as in 1858, with Oscar Rejlander’s ‘The Two Ways Of Life’, along with the Pictorialist movement, it was shown that photographs could clearly be manipulated. However, this took a lot of work (or at least a dedicated darkroom). For the average person, and for most of the 19th century, photography was considered to be ‘an accurate depiction of truth’. The widespread use of digital cameras and image manipulation software changed this. Here are some points for discussion;

• One of the earliest controversies involving digital images was that of National Geographic’s Moving Pyramids in 1982.
• Recently, the New York Times withdrew a Photo Essay entitled ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’. The newspaper says “most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show.”
• Even more recent is the yet unresolved case where an Italian photographer claims Annie Leibovitz used his images as backgrounds for a high-profile calendar project. The issue here, of course, is not one of manipulation (it’s obvious), but rather one that is arguably as compelling – copyright.
• What is wrong with this picture?

Additional Points Of Discussion

Post modernistic attitudes towards intellectual property and copyright
Creative Commons
Stock Photography
Moores Law, Technology and Obsolescence
Internet-based image platforms (Photoshelter, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter)
Shorter attention spans

Oct 07, 2009 | Categories: Art + Tech | Tags: Ansel Adams, Avedon, Digital, Edward Weston, f/64, History, Leibovitz, Penn, Photography, Seliger, Services, Steiglitz | Leave A Comment »