08-19-2024 02:42 PM
On August 19th, 1839, at the French Legislature, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787 - 1851) was accredited with the first commercially viable photographic process: the Daguerreotype.
The French Government was given rights for Daguerreotypes in exchange for lifetime pensions for Daguerre and the son of his late coinventor Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833).
On the same day, in an act of artistic imperialism to confirm their leadership of the artistic world, the French Government gave those rights, together with complete working instructions for the Daguerreotype, “free to the world” (except for their rival, England).
There were many who claimed to have created a photographic process but really there were only a couple of other serious contenders. One of them, Henry Fox Talbot, an English gentry polymath, created photographic imagery (the Calotype) that used a negative/positive process that at the time it was held up by technical and legal issues. However, it eventually became the basis for film processing we use today.
Today, it is hard to comprehend the power of this invention. Hitherto, people would not know what their distant family or predecessors looked like, unless they could afford a portrait. The photograph made that possibility available to an ever-increasing part of society.
The announcement of the invention of photography changed the world forever. It provided not only images of loved ones, it recorded significant (and not so significant) events, gave us a much more graphical view of the world and gave millions the chance to explore their creativity.
My (in progress) presentation of the history of photography - technical
08-19-2024 05:28 PM
Trevor, thanks for the historical background of the craft. It brought to mind a book I got in the freebie bin at a used book store. Here is the title: Following The Frontier with F. Jay Haynes, Pioneer Photographer of the Old West; author is Freeman Tilden. The book has 244 photos but Haynes' son, Jack, kept an extensive file of some 25,000 prints and negatives, mostly unpublished. Haynes was also the official photographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad and the new Yellowstone Park. Keep in mind this was in the 1870s and 1880s.
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