CAMERA OBSUCURA & PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY:
Camera obscura literally means ‘dark chamber’ however it is defined as a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. The earliest known written account of a camera obscura was provided by a Chinese philosopher called Mo-tzu (or Mozi) in 400BC. He noted that light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted image of the original object.
NICEPHORE NIEPCE & HELIOGRAPHY
Joseph Nicephore Niepce who was the first to make a permanent photographic image. He was a son of a wealthy family suspected of royalist sympathies, Niépce fled the French Revolution but returned to serve in the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte. Dismissed because of ill health, he settled near his native town of Chalon-sur-Saône, where he remained engaged in research for the rest of his life.
Heliography is technique, Niepce used to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825.
Traces of solar energy are burnt into the film material using self-constructed devices and lenses with a diameter of up to one meter. Afterwards, the shots are enlarged and printed on paper or the film sheets are directly shown in light-boxes. Or, the film slides themselves are projected onto hangar-sized walls.
LOUIS DAGUERRE & DAGUERREOTYPE
Louis Dagueterre was a French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. Though the first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce of France, it was of poor quality and required about eight hours’ exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed required only 20 to 30 minutes.
Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. “Daguerreotype” also refers to an image created through this process. In contrast to photographic paper, a daguerreotype is not flexible and is rather heavy.The daguerreotype is accurate, detailed and sharp. It has a mirror-like surface and is very fragile. Since the metal plate is extremely vulnerable, most daguerreotypes are presented in a special housing.
To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treated it with fumes that made its surface light-sensitive; exposed it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting; made the resulting latent image on it visible by fuming it with mercury vapor; removed its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment; rinsed and dried it; and then sealed the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure. [FOUND FROM WIKIPEDIA]
HENRY FOX TALBOT & CALOTYPE
Henry Fox Talbot was an English chemist, linguist, archaeologist, and pioneer photographer. He 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. Talbot’s calotypes used a photographic negative, from which multiple prints could be made; had his method been announced but a few weeks earlier, he and not Daguerre would probably have been known as the founder of photography.
The Calotype technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura; those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image. The revolutionary aspect of the process lay in Talbot’s discovery of a chemical (gallic acid) that could be used to “develop” the image on the paper—i.e., accelerate the silver chloride’s chemical reaction to the light it had been exposed to.
ROBERT CORNELIUS & SELF PORTRAITURE
Robert Cornelius was an American photographer and pioneer in the history of photography. He designed the photographic plate for the first photograph taken in the United States, an image of Central High School taken by Joseph Saxton in 1839. His self image taken in 1839 is the first known photographic portrait of a person taken in the United States.
Cornelius attempted to perfect the daguerreotype, due to this around October 1839, at age 30, Cornelius took a self-portrait outside the family store. The quality of the photographic plate and the technique used required him to sit motionless for 10 to 15 minutes. He took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. On the back he wrote “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”
THE “ETERNAL RETURN”: SELF PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY AS TECHNOLOGY OF EMBODIMENT
‘In these works, the subject performs herself or himself within the purview of an apparatus of perspectival looking that freezes the body as representation and so—as absence, as always already dead—in intimate relation to lack and loss.’
In Jones’ book about self portraiture she discuss’ how people can become whomever they would like to be perceived as to the viewer of the image. A picture ‘freezes the body’ in a still image which is how the person will be represented. Cornelius was required to sit for 10-15 to get his self portraiture, which implies he created a stance to represent himself the way he would like other people to see him.
JULIA MARGERET CAMERON & PICTORIALISM
Julia Margaret Cameron is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature, she was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Cameron is best known today for her moving and sensitive portraits of eminent Victorians. A paramount example is her 1867 photograph of Sir John F. W. Herschel, in which the scientist, mathematician, and photographic experimenter looks directly at the camera, emerging from the shadows with the tousled hair and deep facial lines of a man devoted to the intellectual life.
Cameron and her pictorialist contemporaries pursued painterly compositions, subjects, and qualities, hoping to elevate photography to a high art. A representation of a person or thing in a work of art.
HENRY MULLINS & CARTE-DE-VISIT
Henry Mullins started working at 230 Regent Street in London in the 1840s and moved to Jersey in July 1848, setting up a studio known as the Royal Saloon, at 7 Royal Square. For a brief period in the 1860s he also worked in London, but judging by the collection of his photographs which is now held by La Société Jersiaise, he found plenty of willing sitters in the island prepared to pay half a guinea (promoted as “one half of that in London”) to have their portrait taken by him. His speciality was cartes de visite, it was originally a calling card, especially one with a photographic portrait mounted on it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY REFERENCING WESITES:
https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Joseph-Nic%C3%A9phore-Ni%C3%A9pce/331405
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Daguerre
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Fox-Talbot
https://www.britannica.com/technology/calotype
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cornelius
https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Henry_Mullins
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