Photography is the art, application and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.
Wikipedia
A Brief History of Photography and the People Who Made It Succeed
Color photography started to become famous and accessible with the release of Eastman Kodak’s “Kodachrome” film in the 1930s. Earlier that, almost all the photos were monochromatic – although some of the photographers were toeing the line between chemists and alchemists, had been using specialized techniques to capture color images for decades before. You’ll find some fascinating galleries of photos from the 1800s or early 1900s captured in full color, worth exploring if you have not seen them already.
These scientist-magicians, the first color photographers, are somewhat alone in pushing the boundaries of one of the world’s newest art forms. The history of photography has always been a history of people – artists and inventors who drove the field into the modern era.
So, below, you’ll find a brief introduction to some of photography’s most influential names. Their discoveries, creations, ideas, and photographs shape our pictures to this day, subtly or not. Although this is just a brief bird’ s-eye view, these nonetheless are people you should know before you step into the technical side of photography:
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
- Invention: The first permanent photograph (“View from the Window at Le Gras,” shown earlier)
- Where: France, 1826
- Impact: Cameras had already existed for centuries before this, but they had one major flaw: You couldn’t record a photo with them! They projected light onto a separate surface – one which artists used to create realistic paintings, but not strictly photographs. Niépce solved this problem by coating a pewter plate with, mostly, asphalt, which grew harder when exposed to light. By washing the plate with lavender oil, he was able to fix the hardened substance permanently to the plate.
- Quote: “The discovery I have made, and which I call Heliography, consists in reproducing spontaneously, by the action of light, with gradations of tints from black to white, the images received in the camera obscura.” Mic drop.
Louis Daguerre
- Invention: The Daguerreotype (first commercial photographic material)
- Where: France, 1839
- Impact: Daguerreotypes are images fixed directly to a heavily polished sheet of silver-plated copper. This invention is what made photography a practical reality – although it was still just an expensive curiosity to many people at this point. If you’ve never seen daguerreotypes in person, you might be surprised to know just how sharp they are.
- Quote: “I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”
Alfred Stieglitz
- Genre: Portraiture and documentary
- Where: United States, late 1800s through mid-1900s
- Impact: Alfred Stieglitz was a photographer, but, more importantly, he was one of the first influential members of the art community to take photography seriously as a creative medium. He believed that photographs could express the artist’s vision just as well as paintings or music – in other words, that photographers could be artists. Today’s perception of photography as an art form owes a lot to Stieglitz.
- Quote: “In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
Dorothea Lange
- Genre: Portrait photography
- Where: United States, 1930s
- Impact: One of the most prominent documentary photographers of all time, and the photographer behind one of the most influential images of all time (shown below), is Dorothea Lange. If you’ve ever seen photos from the Great Depression, you most likely have seen some of her work. Her photos shaped the field of documentary photography and showed the camera’s potential for power more than almost anyone else in history.
- Quote: “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
Ansel Adams
- Genre: Landscape photography
- Where: United States
- When: 1920s to 1960s (for most of his work)
- Impact: Ansel Adams is perhaps the most famous photographer in history, which is remarkable because he mainly took pictures of landscapes and natural scenes. (Typically, famous photographers have tended to photograph people instead.) Ansel Adams helped usher in an era of realism in landscape photography, and he was an early champion of the environmentalism and preservation movements in the United States.
- Quote: “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
The First Steps on Your Photography Career
In photography, the technical and the creative go hand in hand.
Remember the Ansel Adams quote from earlier? There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. If the idea behind a photo is weak, using the right camera settings won’t make it better.
Photography 