Camera obscura and Pinhole photography

Pinhole photography refers to the lensless technique of photography, utilising the most basic components of the medium, with a lightproof box, a tiny aperture and light-sensitive material. The images produced by these cameras are always wide-viewed and they have an almost infinite depth of field – owing itself to the small aperture.

The earliest known record of these devices comes from the Fifth Century BC, by the Mohist philosopher Mozi. Essentially this is the same concept as that of the camera obscura, only with the use of photographic film or paper.

Nicéphore Niépce and Heliography

Before this, in 1813, lithography was a popular hobby in France and Niépce found himself unable to obtain proper lithographic stone locally. He subsequently began experimenting with sheets of pewter, coating them in light-sensitive substances to capture engravings with the use of sunlight.

This was the beginning of many years of experimentation with various light sensitive materials on pewter eventually culminating in the final successful image, created using bitumen of Judea, a kind of asphalt which hardens on exposure to light. 

Louis Daguerre and his Daguerreotype

Louis Daguerre (1787 – 1851) was a French painter who managed to greatly reduce the exposure time of heliographic production following Niépce’s death in 1833 through discovery of a chemical process that made the invisible image formed on brief exposure visible.

These experiments and Niépce’s initial findings led to the creation of the Daguerreotype, which is viewed as the first successful form of photography.

Robert Cornelius and Self-portraiture

Henry Fox Talbot and his Calotype

He used a sheet of paper coated in silver chloride in a camera obscura that when exposed to light became dark; resulting in the areas hit by light being dark, creating a negative image. The feature which led to his revolutionising of exposure time was his discovery of gallic acid, which allowed him to accelerate the development of the image. This discovery was made in 1840, and he named his process the ‘calotype‘. 

The production of negatives was a real point of progress on the Daguerreotype, as this allowed the repeated reproduction of the image through a simple process of contact printing, as opposed to a singular positive image on metal which could not be reproduced. In 1842, he was awarded a medal by the British Royal Society for his revolutionary discovery.

Julia Margaret Cameron & Pictorialism

Cameron received her camera late in her life, in 1863, as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law and began photographing as an amateur. Despite this she immediately viewed the activity as a professional one, ‘vigorously copyrighting, exhibiting, publishing, and marketing her photographs. Within eighteen months she had sold eighty prints to the Victoria and Albert Museum, established a studio in two of its rooms, and made arrangements with the West End printseller Colnaghi’s to publish and sell her photographs.’

She was certainly one of the pioneers in the endeavour to establish photography as an art form, with her portraits of friends, family and household staff emulating the romanticism and magic found in the painted portraits of the time.

However her apparent success was not celebrated by all who viewed her images; ‘The Photographic Journal, reviewing her submissions to the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of Scotland in 1865, reported with a condescension that infuriated her: “Mrs. Cameron exhibits her series of out-of-focus portraits of celebrities. We must give this lady credit for daring originality, but at the expense of all other photographic qualities. A true artist would employ all the resources at his disposal, in whatever branch of art he might practise. In these pictures, all that is good in photography has been neglected and the shortcomings of the art are prominently exhibited. We are sorry to have to speak thus severely on the works of a lady, but we feel compelled to do so in the interest of the art.”’

Many of her models complained of discomfort when being photographed, with the apparently interminable exposure irritating them as they found it very difficult to sit still for such a long time. One said this of the experience;

“The studio, I remember, was very untidy and very uncomfortable. Mrs. Cameron put a crown on my head and posed me as the heroic queen. … The exposure began. A minute went over and I felt as if I must scream, another minute and the sensation was as if my eyes were coming out of my head; a third, and the back of my neck appeared to be afflicted with palsy; a fourth, and the crown, which was too large, began to slip down my forehead; a fifth—but here I utterly broke down, for Mr. Cameron, who was very aged, and had unconquerable fits of hilarity which always came in the wrong places, began to laugh audibly, and this was too much for my self-possession, and I was obliged to join the dear old gentleman.”

Overall, within her 12 year photographic career, she produced some 900 pictures, documenting many public figures of the time (e.g. Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning) and providing valuable insight into Victorian society.

Henry Mullins and the Carte-de-Visit

Cartes de visite where Mullins’ speciality, being small images that were the size of a business card, popular for their portability and ease. The majority of the archived images taken by Henry Mullins are in this form.

Bibliography