The word Photography literally means ‘drawing with light’, which derives from the Greek photo, meaning light and graph. the purpose of photography is to communicate and document moments in time. When you take a photograph and share it with others, you’re showing a moment that was frozen through a picture.

The history of the camera

The history of the camera can be taken all the way back to the ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese. Even though these civilisations used a very simple version of the device, called a camera obscura, which was used to project real-life scenes on a surface or wall. Despite its very basic design. During the Renaissance, artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci used its light projections to sketch added depth to their ‘3D’ art. Although the early cameras were massively popular with artists and tourists, there was no way of ‘freezing’ an image in a photograph until the 19th century.

The first photograph was taken During the 1800s, Britain and France were almost in a sort of race to get early photographic technology off the ground. The French where the first ones to come through when Nicéphore Niépce took the first ever photo in 1827. Eleven years later, Again the French took another ‘first’ photograph when Louis Daguerre took the first snap of a human being in his pic ‘Boulevard du Temple’. Around the same time British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, developed the calotype process and with it, the first ever photo on paper.

George Eastman

Mass photography started In 1884, When an American inventor called George Eastman came up with an idea that revolutionised the photography industry. This invention was called the photographic roll – one of the first ever to be used in a camera. The easy to develop photographic process helped his company, Kodak, create the first mass-produced cameras ever sold. The portable camera was a huge hit and sold millions while continuing to be popular until the 60’s.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a Romantic painter and printmaker who was most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects.

daguerreotype

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process in the history of photography. He was named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate. Daguerreotypes always come in protective cases, they are often made of leather and lined with silk or velvet. Depending on the angle at which you view them, they can look like a negative, a positive or a mirror.

Henry Fox

Henry Fox Talbot is best known for his development of the calotype, an early photographic process that was an improvement over the daguerreotype of the French inventor Louis Daguerre. he was an English scientist, inventor, and photographer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries.

Richard Maddox

In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, he suggested suspending silver bromide in a gelatine emulsion this was an idea that led in 1878 to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatine containing silver salts.

Leap into the void

Leap into the Void is a picture which is a demonstration of freedom and liberty. It seems a blunt act of disobedience against the laws of physics and human nature. Klein leaps from a rooftop freely into an open space, looking unconcerned and unmoved to the immanency of his fall. There was originally 2 pictures where one shows the tarp underneath which was there to break his fall, and another of the bare street. Klein merged the images together to create the illusion that he was falling into nothing.