HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photos are our viable archive of the past. Without them, daily life would only be recorded in words, and as many believe- a picture is worth a thousand words. Photography was only developed in the 1800s. In the 4th and 5th centuries B.C.E., philosophers like Aristotle mentioned a pinhole camera that would show images in certain ways similar to a modern photograph. Images have been projected onto surfaces for years, yet, only in the 19th century were we actually able to permanently preserve these images.
The first permanent photograph was developed in 1825 by the French inventor, Joseph Nicephore Niepce. His photographs were produced on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea. Niépce’s partner, Louis Daguerre, later discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapour before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image. Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype. A similar process is still used today for Polaroid photos. In 1832, French-Brazilion painter and inventor Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process, naming it Photographie. The daguerreotype was in popular demand among the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. People would have photographs of their families taken as keepsakes. In movies and literature, there are victorian photographs of families not smiling. People would tend not to smile because they had to stand and pose for a while while the picture was being taken. Smiling would become tiring after a while.
Throughout the 20th century, photography develops into a moremature process. Color photos and digital photography come about and aid to the quality of photos. What we know today as digital cameras were developed in the 1960s by Willard Boyle and Geaorge E. Smith at AT&T Bell Labs. Since then, more and more improvements have been added to the digital camera. With different models and pixelation- chooosing a camera today is much more of a hassel compared to getting a camera only 100 years ago.