Looking back into distant history, it is fairly clear that Man has always been a visual animal. From the ancient cave paintings of hunting expeditions, to the stone carvings of historic gods, Man has always interpreted the world primarily through his eyes. What we see has direct access to our mind, without the filtering of language or writing. In fact writing has only become the dominant form of communication in the last few hundred years. I am always reminded that many scripts are symbols that have evolved from drawings - Chinese for example. 
Images have always played a powerful role in conveying ideas, asserting power and maintaining tradition. One has only to look at some of the great art produced over the centuries to see that imagery has a very powerful effect on the viewer. When we remember, we tend to remember in images, flashing in our minds. If they are our own memories, they will be our own images. If we are remembering something we have been told or taught, we will recall the iconic images that we were given at the time. From Jesus to Che Guevara, images control our memories and thus our feelings.
Sometimes, when we study great inventions through history, they appear to have popped up out of nowhere and created a market or fulfilled a need that nobody was even aware of. Many times national cultures us these inventions - and the inventors - as examples of how clever/ resourceful their people are. In Britain inventors created the industrial revolution, in America, they conquered the land built a huge economic power. But I believe that most inventions have been created due to a specific need and that is why I think photography was inevitable.
Anyone who has tried to instruct somebody over the phone knows how ambiguous language can be and anyone who has been bamboozled by an image that could be a vase or two faces knows the limitations of language and images on their own. However when words and pictures are used together, their meaning is a lot clearer. It was natural that scientists would look for ways to illustrate their books and papers, particularly as their experiments became more complicated and the ideas behind them more complex.
Of course, scientists could have produced the images themselves - there are plenty of famous example of scientists who were also artists - or have the pictures produced for them. But that would mean they were always produced after the fact. For greater veracity, the images needed to be produced at the same time. They needed to record events as they happened with accuracy. The first attempt at this was the camera obscura. By channelling light through a lens into a darkened room and projecting it onto a flat surface, it was possible then reproduce images with great accuracy. This was the original camera and it was known about by the Greeks and Chinese hundreds of years ago.
The earliest pioneers of photography were primarily interested in chemistry and metallurgy. In the 1720s silver nitrate and chalk, when mixed together, was found to be responsive to light. A hundred years later Joseph Nicphore Nipce, a frenchman, made the first actual photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras". He captured an image of the rooftops near his house with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of oil-treated bitumen. The exposure time was 8 hours. He was later introduced to Louis Daguerre, with whom he went on to develop the process further. After the death of Nipce, Daguerre became known as the man who invented the photography and lived on a pension from the French Government.
Early progress in photography was hampered by the need for a knowledge of chemistry. The results were often unpredictable and poor and it took time to learn how to stop the sensitivity to light to prevent the picture disappearing completely. It was another twenty years before the first portrait was produced by an american. Robert Cornelius used Daguerre's process to create a self portrait. Cornelius was originally a metal polisher who became interested in photography When he was asked to produce a negative sheet for a local university. As the daguerreotype process used silver on a copper plate, Cornelius combined his knowledge of metallurgy and chemistry to try to improve the process. Robert Cornelius' self portrait is one of the first photographs of a human to be produced. He progressed and ran two photographic studios, but discovered that there was little money to be made from it at the time and so devoted his attention to his family's gas and lighting company instead.
You only have to look at popular art through the centuries to see that high drama provides fantastic imagery. Roger Fenton provided the public with a unique insight into war when he went to cover the British and French invasion of Crimea in 1855. He was sent by the British government as an official war photographer, the intention being to use the pictures in support of the war. Due to the limitations of his equipment - the long exposure times meant there were no 'action pictures' - the pictures were mainly posed. He avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers. But he also photographed the landscape , giving the public back in England an idea of what their troops were experiencing.
Only a few years afterwards that taboo was broken. The American Civil war was the first conflict to be widely photographed. Photographers like Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan followed the troops from battle to battle and recorded the carnage and death that resulted. Gardner's famous picture ' The home of the rebel sharpshooter' shocked the nation when it was published just after the war in1866. It began the tradition of war photography which, ever since, has strived to tell the hardship and misery of war.
Images have always played a powerful role in conveying ideas, asserting power and maintaining tradition. One has only to look at some of the great art produced over the centuries to see that imagery has a very powerful effect on the viewer. When we remember, we tend to remember in images, flashing in our minds. If they are our own memories, they will be our own images. If we are remembering something we have been told or taught, we will recall the iconic images that we were given at the time. From Jesus to Che Guevara, images control our memories and thus our feelings.
Sometimes, when we study great inventions through history, they appear to have popped up out of nowhere and created a market or fulfilled a need that nobody was even aware of. Many times national cultures us these inventions - and the inventors - as examples of how clever/ resourceful their people are. In Britain inventors created the industrial revolution, in America, they conquered the land built a huge economic power. But I believe that most inventions have been created due to a specific need and that is why I think photography was inevitable.
Anyone who has tried to instruct somebody over the phone knows how ambiguous language can be and anyone who has been bamboozled by an image that could be a vase or two faces knows the limitations of language and images on their own. However when words and pictures are used together, their meaning is a lot clearer. It was natural that scientists would look for ways to illustrate their books and papers, particularly as their experiments became more complicated and the ideas behind them more complex.
Of course, scientists could have produced the images themselves - there are plenty of famous example of scientists who were also artists - or have the pictures produced for them. But that would mean they were always produced after the fact. For greater veracity, the images needed to be produced at the same time. They needed to record events as they happened with accuracy. The first attempt at this was the camera obscura. By channelling light through a lens into a darkened room and projecting it onto a flat surface, it was possible then reproduce images with great accuracy. This was the original camera and it was known about by the Greeks and Chinese hundreds of years ago.
The earliest pioneers of photography were primarily interested in chemistry and metallurgy. In the 1720s silver nitrate and chalk, when mixed together, was found to be responsive to light. A hundred years later Joseph Nicphore Nipce, a frenchman, made the first actual photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras". He captured an image of the rooftops near his house with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of oil-treated bitumen. The exposure time was 8 hours. He was later introduced to Louis Daguerre, with whom he went on to develop the process further. After the death of Nipce, Daguerre became known as the man who invented the photography and lived on a pension from the French Government.
Early progress in photography was hampered by the need for a knowledge of chemistry. The results were often unpredictable and poor and it took time to learn how to stop the sensitivity to light to prevent the picture disappearing completely. It was another twenty years before the first portrait was produced by an american. Robert Cornelius used Daguerre's process to create a self portrait. Cornelius was originally a metal polisher who became interested in photography When he was asked to produce a negative sheet for a local university. As the daguerreotype process used silver on a copper plate, Cornelius combined his knowledge of metallurgy and chemistry to try to improve the process. Robert Cornelius' self portrait is one of the first photographs of a human to be produced. He progressed and ran two photographic studios, but discovered that there was little money to be made from it at the time and so devoted his attention to his family's gas and lighting company instead.
You only have to look at popular art through the centuries to see that high drama provides fantastic imagery. Roger Fenton provided the public with a unique insight into war when he went to cover the British and French invasion of Crimea in 1855. He was sent by the British government as an official war photographer, the intention being to use the pictures in support of the war. Due to the limitations of his equipment - the long exposure times meant there were no 'action pictures' - the pictures were mainly posed. He avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers. But he also photographed the landscape , giving the public back in England an idea of what their troops were experiencing.
Only a few years afterwards that taboo was broken. The American Civil war was the first conflict to be widely photographed. Photographers like Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan followed the troops from battle to battle and recorded the carnage and death that resulted. Gardner's famous picture ' The home of the rebel sharpshooter' shocked the nation when it was published just after the war in1866. It began the tradition of war photography which, ever since, has strived to tell the hardship and misery of war.
About the Author:
Andy Pinkham has worked in the photographic industry for more than twenty years. He has a particular interest in digital imagery and good cameras. Find out more about the best digital SLR cameras on his website, Camerawize and get greattips on how to improve your photography.
0 comments:
Post a Comment