The photograph was the ultimate response to a social and cultural appetite for a more accurate and real looking representation of reality, a need that had it's origins in the Renaissance", Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography.
During the 16th Century, Artists became much more involved and interested in exploring the reality of nature. Leonardo Da Vinci, an Italian Renaissance polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture etc, was particulary well known for his anatomical drawings.
The Camera Obscura
In order to acheive such realism, artists deveoped various instruments to assist them in their quest for a perfect perspective. The main instrument involved in this quest was an invention named the 'Camera Obscura' (Shown Below). It was a a dark room in which an inverted image was projected onto the a surface through a small hole in the wall.
As the Industrial revolution transformed society in the 1800's, with mass production becoming extremely popular, scientists and artists endeavoured to reproduce reality in a fixed form. In 1827, the french scientist, Joseph Niepce was successful at fixing the first projected image from his window in Le Gras, Southern France.
Louis Daguerre worked with Niepce in the quest to fix the projected image. Louis Daguerre was a French painter of stage sets from the Diorama, the main entertainment sector in Paris .
The Daguerreotype - By Louis
Daguerre
In January, 1839, Daguerre officially annouced his new invention of the Daguerreotype. It was a type of photograph that was reversed and monochromatically printed onto a metal plate. However, there were many problems with the Frenchman's new invention:
- It required long exposrues and this meant that any sort of movement resulted in a blurred photograph.
- It was also a one off image that was extremely delicate as the mirror surface could easily be scratched.
The Calotype - By Henry Fox Talbot
Around the same time as the Daguerreotype, British Scientist, Henry Fox Talbot developed another type of photograph called the Calotype. It had one advantage over the Daguerreotype in which it could reproduced several times.
Talbot's initial photographic experiments involved producing photographs , or what he referred them to as, ''Photogenic Drawings''. The first Calotype images produced was the ''Latticed Window'' in 1835.
CC2 - pictorialism,
Successionism,
straight photography
Impressionism
The invention of the camera meant that artists lo longer had to depict thew world in a realistic way. The impressionists focused more on capturing the changing qualities of light and atmosphere. In 1874, French Impressionists hold first group exhibition.