The Camera Obscura

The camera obscura, from the Latin meaning ‘dark
chamber’, was one of the inventions that led to
photography. The camera obscura has been a source of
fascination to people for hundreds of years; originally used
to observe solar eclipses safely, they were recognised as
an aid to drawing in the 15th Century, and by the 19th
Century they had become popular seaside attractions,
much as binoculars are today. Some of these seaside
cameras obscura’s still exist.

The first camera obscura was simply a small hole in one
wall of a darkened room or tent. Light passing through
the hole formed an inverted (upside down) image of the
outside scene on a white screen placed across the room
from the hole. Artists made use of the camera obscura,
realising that they could trace the outlines of buildings,
trees, shadows and animals to aid in the creation of their
paintings.

The Pinhole Camera

The pinhole has played an important role in the evolution
of the modern camera. Pinhole photography is lensless
photography – a method of capturing images using a
simple light-tight box with a single pinhole in one end.
A piece of opaque tape or cardboard can serve as a
shutter. Film or photo-paper is taped inside and the
camera secured on a stable platform or tripod, exposure
is calculated and the shutter opened. After the shutter is
closed the camera is taken in

Nicephore Niepce & Heliography

Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene.

Motivated by the growing popular demand for affordable pictures, Niépce’s photographic experiments were conducted with the dual aims of copying prints and recording scenes from real life in the camera. At his family estate in the nearby village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, he produced legible but fleeting camera pictures in 1816. Over the next decade he tried an array of chemicals, materials, and techniques to advance the process he ultimately called héliographie, or ‘sun writing.’

How did Niecpe do it?

To make the heliograph, Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in oil of lavender and applied a thin coating over a polished pewter plate. He inserted the plate into a camera obscura and positioned it near a window in his second-story workroom. After several days of exposure to sunlight, the plate yielded an impression of the courtyard, outbuildings, and trees outside.

The process of Heliography: 

1. The naturally occurring asphalt bitumen, is applied as a coating on glass or metal 
2. This chemical then hardens in relation to the light exposure available 
3. The plate is then washed with oil of lavender 
4. After washing with oil, the only area remaining would be the hardened area where the image formed. 

Louis Daguerre & Daguerreotype

In 1826, when Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the world first photograph, it took eight hours to expose. Little more than ten years later, his associate Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre devised a way to permanently reproduce an image, and his picture—a daguerreotype—needed just twenty minutes’ exposure. A practical process of photography was born.

In January of 1839, the invention of a photographic system that would fix the image caught in the camera obscura was formally announced in the London periodical The Athenaeum.

Louis Daguerre called his invention “daguerreotype.” His method, which he disclosed to the public late in the summer of 1839, consisted of treating silver-plated copper sheets with iodine to make them sensitive to light, then exposing them in a camera and “developing” the images with warm mercury vapor. The fumes from the mercury vapor combined with the silver to produce an image. The plate was washed with a saline solution to prevent further exposure.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, a street scene captured in a Daguerreotype in either 1838 or 1839. Believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least ten minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible. (Louis Daguerre)

Henry Fox Talbot & Calotype

William Henry Fox Talbot was credited as the British inventor of photography. In 1834 he discovered how to make and fix images through the action of light and chemistry on paper. These ‘negatives’ could be used to make multiple prints and this process revolutionised image making.

WHAT IS THE CALOTYPE?

In this 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. The developing process permitted much shorter exposure times in the camera, down from one hour to one minute.

The developed image on the paper was fixed with sodium hyposulfite. The “negative,” as Talbot called it, could yield any number of positive images by simple contact printing upon another piece of sensitized paper. Talbot’s process was superior in this respect to the daguerreotype, which yielded a single positive image on metal that could not be duplicated. Talbot patented his process in 1841.

Robert Cornelius & self-portraiture

A self-portrait is a representation of an artist that is drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by that artist (a selfie).

The image above was taken in 1839 by an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia named Robert Cornelius. Cornelius had set his camera up at the back of the family store in Philadelphia. 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.”

Julia Margeret Cameron & Pictorialism

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories.

Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.

Examples of pictorialism:

 On one occasion Julia printed a negative by the pioneering Swedish art photographer O.G. Rejlander, surrounding the portrait with ferns to create a photo-gram frame – a combination of an image made in a camera and a camera-less technique. It shows Cameron’s experimental nature and provides a glimpse of her photographic practice before she acquired a camera of her own.

Within a month of receiving her camera, she made the photograph that she called her ‘first success’, a portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of a family staying in the Isle of Wight where Cameron lived. She later wrote of her excitement:

I was in a transport of delight. I ran all over the house to search for gifts for the child. I felt as if she entirely had made the picture.

-Julia Margaret Cameron

From her ‘first success’ she moved on quickly to photographing family and friends. These early portraits reveal how she experimented with soft focus, dramatic lighting and close-up compositions, features that would become her signature style; pictorialism.

Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visit

Gustav William Henry Mullins (1854-1921) was a portrait photographer, patronised by Queen Victoria. Gustav Mullins was a partner in the firm Hughes & Mullins, photographers, based at Union Street, Ryde, Isle of Wight.

Cartes De Visite

His specialty was cartes de visite and the photographic archive of La Société contains a massive collection of these. Their on line archive contains 9600 images, but the majority of these are sets of up to 16 photographs taken at a single sitting. In those times even 10s 6d was a substantial sum to pay to have one’s photograph taken, and included among his subjects are many of the island’s affluent and influential people, including Dean Le Breton, the father of Lillie Langtry.

He was also popular with officers of the Royal Militia Island of Jersey, for whom it was very popular to have portraits taken, as well as of their wives and children, for the more senior and more affluent officers. The pictures of these officers show clearly the fashion for long hair, whiskers and beards in the mid-1800s.

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