The Birth of Photography

The Birth of Photography goes way back to the very early stages of it’s development, in 1565 it was found that certain silver salts turned black when open to an element, which at this time they believed to be air. It wasn’t until mid 1720’s when they discovered it was in fact light that reacted with the salts to turn them black; this led to numerous amounts of unsuccessful trials at capturing images in a lasting, photochemical form. Many scientists, amateur inventors and artists passionately pursued developing this form throughout the 29th century. A French scientist, Joseph Niepce was the man who made this process a success. He took an eight-hour exposure of what is believed to be his courtyard outside his house and created the first paper negative in 1816. It took another three years before a fixing agent was discovered for this process and the term ‘photography’ was born. It was hundreds of years till photography had reached this stage but over the next 80 years progression in photography was dramatic. Different techniques were tried and tested but most common was the black-and-white method, which dates back to the birth of photography. “In this ‘gelatin silver’ technique, a sheet of paper is coated with a mixture of white pigment and gelatin, then with a gelatin / silver-salts solution. It is exposed to light through a negative and developed in a chemical solution.” (Wheeler, 2002, p.9)

There are many achievements and progression in photography that are very important to its history these include; light-mixing tests that were constructed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861 and the development of colour photography by George Eastman, who is the founder of Kodak and the high increase of photojournalism i...

... middle of paper ...

...image was found to be altered. (Fig. 6) was widely dispersed by email in 2001, the photograph is of a great white shark leaping out the water to take a bite of a soldier, nevertheless like the previous photo this was also proven fake. These examples show Similarity to the pre-digital era where photographers had no interest in documenting reality, but now it’s amateurs and professionals alike, whom will take a documentary photograph and manipulate it to conjure fantasies or imaginary scenes. Except unlike pre-digital, photojournalism has developed and no longer is manipulation tolerable in this sector, and it is the general public that has set this, people are searching for truth in photography, but trying to break up the truth from fabrication is difficult and pranksters and even journalists are proving that time and time again, we can't believe everything we see.