Color photography whether sports or wedding like Elopement Photographer on Maui started to become popular and accessible with the release of Eastman Kodak’s “Kodachrome” film in the year 1930s. Before that, almost all photos were monochromatic – although a handful of photographers, toeing the line between chemists and alchemists, had been using specialized techniques to capture color images for decades before. One’ll find some fascinating galleries of photos from the 1800s or early 1900s captured in full color.
These magicians, the first color photographers, are hardly alone in pushing the boundaries of one of the world’s newest art forms. The history of photography has always been a history of folks – artists and inventors who steered the field into the modern era.
So, below, you’ll find a brief introduction to some of photography’s most important personalities. Their discoveries, creations, ideas, and photographs shape our own pictures to this day. Although this is just a brief 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
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 simply 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, essentially, 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 really made photography a practical reality – although it was still just an expensive curiosity to many people at this point. The first time you see a daguerreotype in person, you may be surprised just how sharp it is.
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 in history, and the photographer behind one of the most influential images of all time, is Dorothea Lange. If you’ve ever seen photos from the Great Depression, you’ve seen some of her work. Her photos shaped field of documentary photography and showed the camera’s potential for telling powerful stories perhaps more than anyone else.
Quote: “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
