Photography: Thanks for the memories

The art of photography is almost 200 years old and is now an everyday part of our increasingly visual world. The term ‘Photographie’ was first coined in 1832 by the French-Brazilian inventor, Hercules Florence, who had created a technique for capturing images using a process involving silver, iodine, mercury and salt.

However, even before this, the Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce, created the first permanent photograph. Exactly when seems unclear; some report it was as early as 1814, some say it wasn’t until 1826. But, although a huge step forward, the process was painful and not entirely successful - to produce this image required exposure to bright sunlight for almost eight hours using a derivative of bitumen and even after all this time, the image was still prone to fading.

From this point on, advances were made quickly, with many inventors experimenting and refining the process. Many believe that the most advances made in photography were made in the first 20 years after this and indeed in the late 1830s, another Frenchman named Louis Daguerre introduced the process of using silver on a copper plate to produce images - called Daguerreotype - which is still heralded as the basis for today’s Polaroid images.

In the 1840s Fox Talbot had invented the ‘caloptype method’, using paper coated with silver chloride to create a negative image that, unlike the earlier Daguerreotype method could be used to recreate positive images. This ‘calotype method’ was later refined by George Eastman, founder of Kodak, so forming the basis of chemical film as we still know it.

Kodak arguably dominated the rising popularity of photography over the coming decades, until in the post-war era cameras and photography became part of everyday life. For many years afterwards, although the technology became ever more sophisticated, both in terms of the cameras available and the quality of the resulting photographs little had changed in the fundamental principles of photography. However, this all changed in the 1990s with the dawn of the digital era.

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