Minisode 7: Early Photography

Ahoy hoy! A new minisode is upon thee: the early history of photography! Come for the history, stay in spite of the science (or vice versa). Episode 38 will follow in about 3 weeks. Until then, your girl is headed on vacation.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango.

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Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I have my PhD in art history, which I use to do this podcast and tell you stuff about things. Today I'm going to do that in the form of a mini sode, which I categorize as any episode under 30 minutes. This mini sode is related to episode 38, which I have not recorded yet. That is because I am leaving on a vacation tomorrow. And for the next two weeks, I plan to be up to my eyeballs in German and Austrian beers, hot pretzels, and Christmas markets. While I am wildly excited about that, I wanted to get an episode out before I left. So here I am with a mini sode. I'm not going to say what episode 38 is about specifically, but I will say that it concerns a very peculiar offshoot of photography in the mid to late 19th century. I'm using this mini sode to lay the groundwork so that I don't need to explain the rather complicated world of early photography in that episode. You can look forward to that episode in about three weeks. That does bring me to a bit of a warning that there is a lot of science in this episode. I talk a lot about chemicals, metals, the physics of light, and multi-step processes that bring all of those things together to produce a photograph. It gets a little complicated, but just stick with me. We are in it together, and together we shall science. That is what brings us here, to the part where I tell you stuff about the early developments of a technology that we all know and love. The early history of photography, and how the heck it worked. All in a flash. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that photography is one of the greatest technological inventions of all time. It's up there with the wheel, printing, telephones, sliced bread, electricity, boxed mac and cheese, penicillin, contraceptives, Dolly Parton, glasses. Like these things in their respective time frames, the invention of photography in the 1800s was an absolute game changer. This game changer of a technology, though, was hundreds of years in the making. You could even argue that the very earliest developments in photography happened thousands of years before the first photograph was ever produced. That is because photography is heavily indebted to the study of optics, which is to say the physics of sight, which have fascinated humans around the world for a very long time, from the ancient Assyrians to the Greeks and the Romans. There was a renewed interest in optics during the Middle Ages, specifically during the Islamic Golden Age, a period of about 500 years between the 8th and the 13th centuries. During that time, there was one guy in particular who built on the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans and all of the rest to better understand how vision works. That man is Hassan ibn Al-Hythem, who lived in present-day Iraq in the 11th century. One of the major contributions that Al-Hythem made was to our understanding of something called a camera obscura, a contraption that is absolutely critical to photography. In Latin, camera obscura translates to dark room or dark chamber, which is exactly what a camera obscura is. It is a room or a box that is totally dark except for a small pinhole in one of the walls. This setup creates a phenomenon called a projection. This is created thanks to the properties of the light traveling through the pinhole, which projects an inverted image onto the far wall of whatever is happening on the other side of the wall with the pinhole. To use a very practical example of what this looks like, envision a yard where there is a shed next to a tree on a sunny day. You go into that shed and use your dad's power tools to drill a hole in the wall facing the tree. You then shut the door, enclosing yourself in the darkened space of the shed. Congratulations, you've just made yourself a camera obscura. If you did this correctly, you should now see an inverted image of the tree projected onto the wall opposite the pinhole. It's probably a little blurry, whatever, it's there. This phenomenon occurs because the sun is sending down rays of light that are bouncing off of the tree. If you were standing outside, those light rays would get scattered willy-nilly, illuminating everything, with the exception of the rays that are going through the pinhole you made. Those light waves travel in a straight line through the pinhole into the dark shed and bounce off the far wall, producing the upside down image of the tree. Now why is it upside down? It's upside down because, as I said, light travels in straight lines. So the light rays coming off the top of the tree are traveling at a downward angle through the pinhole. The light waves bouncing off the bottom of the tree are traveling through the pinhole at an upward angle. If you're still confused, don't worry. All you really need to know is that the camera obscura controls light in such a way that whatever is outside of the box gets projected onto the far wall of the camera obscura, creating an image. You can take your camera obscura to the next level by introducing a lens into the mix. Just as they do on modern cameras, lenses manipulate light by refracting it. In other words, they alter the angle at which light is traveling, because light travels through materials at different speeds. When that speed change happens, it alters the angle of the ray, aka refraction. I think most people were probably introduced to this idea through the old pencil and water demonstration. If you partially submerge a pencil into water and then look at it, the pencil will look crooked, because the light entering the water is being refracted. It's hitting the submerged part of the pencil at a different angle than the dry part of the pencil, resulting in this optical illusion of the pencil being bent or broken. The most common lens in the world are the ones we have in our eyeballs, which are constantly refracting light. If your eyeballs are really good at that, you will have great vision. Congratulations. For those of us with not so great vision, hello, it's me. We need additional lenses in the form of glasses or contacts to correct that refraction. Introducing a lens into the camera obscura meant that whoever was experimenting with this contraption could better manipulate the lights, which they often did to create sharper, more focused projections. The camera obscura forms the foundation on which photography is built. There is a reason we still call cameras of cameras. But the camera obscura alone is not able to capture images. It only projects them. When the light is gone, so is the image. That brings me to the second critical component of early photography, the thrilling world of chemical reactions. If you thought we got sciencey before, hold on to your britches, because we're about to get real sciencey now. In the 18th century, a German polymath, meaning that he was good at basically everything, which is annoying, a German polymath named Johann Heinrich Schulze accidentally discovered slash produced light-sensitive chemicals, which he then used to make images. This all came about because Schulze was trying to create a substance that glowed. Why was he trying to do this? I don't know, but he was. He attempted to do this by combining chalk and silver nitric acid, but instead of glowing, the literal opposite happened. The substance darkened when exposed to light. Despite this being a failure, Schulze decided to have some fun with it. He put this mixture in a glass bottle, put some stencils on the outside of it, and stuck the bottle out in the sun. Anything the light touched, it darkened, but the spots where the stencils were remained their original color. The visual effect, however, was temporary and faded very quickly. In other words, the images that Schulze created were not fixed. That is what often happens when you're working with light-sensitive chemicals, because, hey, we need light to see things. And so if the chemicals you're using are reactive to light, even the bits that didn't darken originally would eventually do so. There's no way to stop that process. At least, not yet. While some people claim that Schulze was the world's first photographer, I think that attribution only holds true if you're sticking with the strictest definition of the word photography. Photo meaning lights and graphy meaning drawing. Drawing with the light. In that respect, yeah, I guess Schulze was a photographer, but let's be real, he wasn't a photographer, photographer. Even so, his efforts and discoveries provided a crucially important piece in the development of photography, which combines the effects of a camera obscura and light-sensitive chemicals. The first person that we know of to put these two pieces of the photography puzzle together was a French man named Nietzschefor Nieps. As early as 1816, Nieps had figured out how to capture an image, which he did by placing a piece of paper coated in silver chloride inside of a camera obscura, which at this point was a little fancier than it was in the past, taking the form of a hinged box with a lens on it. Nieps created his image by putting that piece of coated paper on the inside of the box, so that the light traveling through the lens was projected onto it. The chemicals on the paper then reacted based on how much light was hitting them. While Nieps succeeded in producing an image using this method, that image still didn't stay. But Nieps kept at it, and he started to make strides in the early 1820s, when he expanded his studies to include materials that reacted to light in any way, not just visually, but also physically. For example, he discovered that bitumen, or asphalt, which I never knew had applications beyond road construction, but here we are. He discovered that bitumen hardens when exposed to light. Nieps eventually produced a thin tar-like solution using bitumen powder, which he would then apply in a thin layer over a plate of pewter. He then put that coated plate in the camera obscura and aimed it towards his window. After a day or maybe a few days, he took the plate out and submerged it in a solvent. That solvent broke down any of the bitumen that hadn't hardened, leaving behind a negative image of the rooftops outside of his window. In these negative images, light things register as dark and dark things register as light. That's what I mean when I say negative. The nature of the reflection on this plate, though, are such that if you hold it at just the right angle, the negative image becomes a positive image. I think that this might be due to a kind of varnish that was applied to the plate, but I am admittedly a little bit hazy on specifics. While not super clear or super striking, this image of the rooftops outside of Nieps's window remains the first known fixed photograph ever taken. We still have that photograph today, and you can see it on display at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Throughout the 1820s and the 1830s, Nieps continued to tinker with his processes and eventually figured out how to produce fixed positive images, like legit ones that you didn't have to tip just so to make out the image. In order to do this, Nieps carried out much of the process just like he did with his earlier images, but instead of pewter plates, he used silver ones. The first part of the process was very similar to what he had done before. He coated the silver plate in bitumen, he exposed it in the camera obscura, and he dissolved any unhardened bitumen from the plate, producing a negative image. Nieps then took that negative image and exposed it to iodine vapors, which oxidizes or blackens silver. These vapors, however, didn't touch anything still covered in the bitumen, which acted as a protective coating between the iodine vapors and the silver. After doing that, Nieps dissolved the remaining bitumen, revealing the unblackened silver beneath, thereby producing a positive image. If that confused you, and it probably did because it confused me for a heck of a long time, I will refer you to some very helpful videos on YouTube that were produced by the Nieps House Museum. Those videos show Nieps's process in full. The videos themselves are completely silent, which was a very weird choice on their part, but seeing the process in action is very, very helpful in understanding how all of these components work together to produce an image. In the late 1820s, Nieps makes a friend, a man by the name of Louis Daguerre. Deguerre was already a well-known artist, specifically for his work in theater, for which he did stage designs and other stuff. Today, however, Daguerre is primarily known for his work in photography. Obviously, that's why we're talking about him. In fact, he's far better known for photography than Nieps, which is kind of a bummer for Nieps, who literally taught Daguerre everything he knows about the process. Deguerre came to photography through his work in theater. He was specifically experimenting with how the camera obscura might assist with set design and production. One thing led to another, and he was put in contact with Nieps. After a little back and forth, the two entered into a partnership in 1829. Nieps shared his process with Deguerre, and Deguerre, in return, attempted to build a more effective camera obscura for Nieps to use. They even worked to document their processes in writing, which was a good thing, because unfortunately in 1833, Nieps suddenly had a stroke and died, which is very sad. To make a sad thing even sadder, it turns out that he had spent all of his money on his quest to figure out photography, to the point that he was completely financially ruined. Daguerre, however, would go on to earn a pretty pretty penny carrying on the work that Nieps had started. That said, it would take Daguerre years to accomplish that feat. Daguerre's primary focus, pun intended, was to reduce the time it took to expose the plates used in the camera obscura. And when I say exposure, I am referring to the period of time that the coated plate is in the camera obscura, soaking in all of those light rays, which are producing a chemical reaction with whatever is coating the plate. At the time that Nieps died, exposure times needed to produce legible images hovered at about one hour. While an hour is still a long time, it was a fraction of the exposure times that Nieps had started with. For example, the first photograph he made of the rooftops outside of his window probably took between eight hours and three days to expose. So an hour is nothing compared to that. Daguerre wanted to slash exposure times even more. He also wanted to figure out a method that didn't require so many additional steps after exposure. So Daguerre started to experiment, not just with the chemicals and materials used on the plate, but with the camera obscura in and of itself. It's this combination of machine and chemical physical experimentation that results in the kind of photography known as, what else, the Daguerreotype. For non-specialists, the process to make a Daguerotype will sound very similar to that which Nieps used. You can at least see the ghost of Niepsa in the process. That method goes a little something like this. Deguerre would take silver-plated copper plates that were very polished. Those plates were then treated with iodine and retreated with bromine, producing a layer of bromo iodide of silver. In other words, these chemicals would have a party on the silver copper plates and produce a highly light-sensitive surface. Daguerre would then use some kind of light-proof contraption to transfer the plate into the camera so that no light touched it. Once the plate was safely inside the camera obscura, Daguerre removed the lens cap from the camera, starting the exposure. Thanks to improvements to both the process and the camera, full exposure took only 10 to 20 minutes. Once the plate had been exposed, Deguerre would operate in total darkness. He would remove the plate from the camera and place it over a medieval-looking contraption that heats mercury to produce vapor. These mercury vapors would have some kind of chemical reaction with the plate, and from that reaction the image would develop. Watching videos of this process, it literally looks like magic. The image that appeared, however, had to be fixed before it could be exposed to more light, because that bromo iodide coating the plate was still light-sensitive. Daguerre bathed the plate in some kind of solution that washed away any remaining bromo iodide, the light-sensitive stuff. In the final and perhaps fanciest part of the process, Daguerre placed the plate over a heated solution of gold chloride. More chemical reactions ensue that not only develop the tones of the image, which is to say the visual contrasts present in the image, but it also hardened the plate. So this final step ensured not just the crispness of the image, but the physical integrity of the plate itself. In summary, chemicals plus plate plus light plus more chemicals equals pretty damn good photograph. Oh, excuse me, Daguerotype. Given that exposure times of Daguerotypes were still about 10 to 20 minutes, the most popular types of photographs were things like landscapes and still lives, aka things that didn't move. Because if things moved during exposure time, they either wouldn't register on the plates or they would appear super blurry. Case in point, one of Daguerre's best known photographs is a view of a Parisian boulevard taken from a high-up vantage point. In the resulting image, there's no hustle and bustle, despite it being a super busy street, because most people and things were moving way too fast to register during the exposure. The exception to that is a tiny figure of a man getting his shoes shined on the sidewalk. Now that makes sense, as one can't move around much if they're getting their shoes shined. That makes this the first known photograph of a person. Doesn't matter that he's a little stick dude, it still counts. It's because of that very reason that Daguerre never thought Daguerreotypes could be used to produce portraits. Because how the heck was someone going to sit nice and still with their eyes open for the time required to expose the plate? While he was correct in theory, that's super hard to do, portrait photography eventually did take off. This would not be a very comfortable process, and in some cases it even involved braces that held people in place for long periods of time. For those of you who follow the podcast's Instagram, the post announcing this mini-sode uses the first or one of the first ever known portrait photographs to survive. And Homie straight up looks like he's about to cry, probably because he's one, super uncomfortable, and two, hasn't blinked in a hot minute. If photography in general was a transformational development, then portrait photography was something even greater. For the first time in history, people and what they actually looked like in real life were recorded. Yeah, I guess you could argue that painted portraits came close, but I think we can all agree that this was something different. Not only was this wild in and of itself, but it also had broader implications, and very human ones at that. Imagine not having any photographs of people you love, or relatedly, because hopefully you love yourself, not having any pictures of you from key moments in your life. That's really hard to imagine. Making it even harder to imagine what it was like for people when it actually became a possibility. Now, whether or not you could afford to have your photograph taken was something else, but at least the possibility was there. On August 19, 1839, Daguerre presented the Daguerreotype process to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. He shared it with the world, making it a commercially available process. Soon after, photographic studios were opening in urban centers all over Europe and North America. There was, however, another photographic process that was invented around the same time, one known as the calotype or the Talbot type, after its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot. While the photography historian would probably punch me in the face for saying this, the process used to make a calotype wasn't super different from the one used to make a Dagu type. Instead of using copper plates, Talbot instead used paper, which he treated with light-sensitive chemicals before exposing it in the camera. He then developed the image and fixed it using various chemicals and solutions. While Degurotypes resulted in a positive image, they couldn't be reproduced. You had one plate with one image, and if you wanted another one, you had to do the process all over again. But in Talbot's case, the image developed was a negative, but that negative could be used multiple times to produce positive images, thereby producing the first ever photographic prints. You could do that by taking another sheet of paper, treating it with the same light-sensitive chemicals, and placing the negative over it in a contraption known as a printing frame. So in this situation, you've got the fresh paper, chemical side up, over which you place the negative, image side down. You would then put that in the printing frame, which had a glass window in it, so essentially it'd be like a wooden plank, the fresh chemicalized paper, chemical side up, the negative, image side down, and a sheet of glass. If you put that out in the sun, the light would shine through the negative, and it would hit the freshly chemicalized paper on the other side, creating a negative of the negative, aka a positive. This process is known as contact printing, and one negative could be used to make dozens of positives. In the late 1830s and 1840s, though, the calotype was not as popular as the Daguerotype, for a couple of reasons. First, the image quality wasn't good. It tended to be greenier, less detailed, etc. Second, calotypes didn't become commercially available until 1841, three years after Daguerreotypes. And perhaps most important, third, Talbot patented the calotype process, which required anyone who used it to pay him a fee, and he would sue the beans out of anyone who used it without paying him that fee. Louis Daguerre had also patented his process, but he only did so in England. In France and basically anywhere else in the world, people didn't have to ask permission or pay a fee to practice Deguerotyping, with the exception of France's longtime historical frenemy, England. And before you worry about Daguerre and his lack of royalties, don't worry. He got a big fat pension from the French government every year for the rest of his life. Fun fact: the person credited with bringing photography across the pond to the US was none other than Samuel Morse. Yes, Morse, the guy who invented Morse code, and even more impressively, the device on which Morse code is sent, the telegraph. Morse himself became a photographer and taught others the craft. He was even one of the first to produce photographic portraits. And he worked with other photographers to make advances that minimized exposure times to just one minute. The next major development in photographic types, and the final one that I'll talk about, came in 1851, when Frederick Scott Archer introduced the wet collodion process. Sounds scrumptious. This process, the wet collodion process, achieved the visual detail and finesse of the Daguerotype with the easy reproducibility of the calotype. Archer did this by using glass plates rather than metal or paper ones. The wet part of the process name refers to the fact that the plate was literally wet with various chemicals when it was put into the camera. The photographer had to develop the image before this filmy, chemically coating dried. Once again, there's a very helpful video on YouTube showing this process. The wet collodion process resulted in a negative on the glass plate. Once the image was fixed, you could use that glass plate to produce positive prints on either paper or metal plates using contact printing, which I described previously with the calotype. When done on paper, this was called an albumin print, after the chemical used to produce it. When done on metal, it was called a tin type, despite no tin actually being involved. Tin types could also be produced directly by coating the metal in Collodion instead of using the glass plate as an intermediary. And then there was something that they would do in developing the image that changed it from a negative to a positive. You can actually see this happen in those videos, and again, it's like magic. One second you have a negative, you pop it in some mystery solution, and before your eyes, the positive image forms. It is so cool. Of course, if you produce a tin type that way, the image is singular. It cannot be reproduced, but it is pretty durable, which is good. What isn't so durable is glass. But there was a super cool way to turn those glass negatives into positives. You could do that by just putting the negative over a dark backing, creating a positive image that you could frame. This combo was called an amber type. It allowed you to not only enjoy the image, but also to keep the negative in case you wanted to make a contact print. Just don't drop it. By the 1860s, the wet Collodian process basically put the Daguerreotype out of business. You know what also happened in the 1860s? The American Civil War, during which thousands of tin-type portraits specifically were produced, allowing soldiers to take portraits of loved ones with them to the war, but more importantly, it also allowed soldiers to send portraits of themselves back home. The vast majority of those soldier portraits were made with the one-off process described earlier, by which the wet collodion was applied directly to the metal plate. And that makes sense because glass is pretty fragile and it's not really great to have that out on a battlefield. But that begs the question: how did all of these soldiers have access to photography studios? Easy. Photographers literally took their business on the road by creating mobile studios that would travel around to different troops so that the soldiers could get their photographs taken and send the tin types back to their loved ones. The wet collodian process is typically considered the last major development in early photography, and it stayed extremely popular for a solid two plus decades, that is, until a dry method was found in 1875. With that, photography moved into a new phase of its evolution, marking the end of early photography as the world had come to know it. Despite the changing means and methods for creating photographs over the course of the 19th century, the idea of photography remained relatively unchanged. By that I mean that photography was largely considered documentary and scientific, rather than artistic in nature. Many art critics wrote off the technology completely, at least in terms of its ability to create art, given the place of a mechanical device, the camera, at the heart of the process. To these art critics, a mechanical device was incapable of producing art, even if a human was literally behind the camera. Some photographers took issue with this, but others didn't really give a fig because they didn't consider themselves to be artists. They were engineers, they were chemists, they were technologists, and so for this early period, photography was very much considered more science than art, and it was credited with documenting the world as it was, or at least as it appeared to be. After all, seeing is believing. Or is it? But for that, you'll have to wait for episode 38. That is all I have for you on the early history of photography. As I do with all mini sodes, I'm just gonna cut it off here for the sake of time. But if you would like to see the sources that I used to write the episode, you can go to the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. I will also post relevant pictures there for you to enjoy. I will be back with a brand new full-length episode in about three weeks. Yes, I know I always say that, but it's actually gonna happen this time. It is entirely written, it just needs to be recorded. But I will do that after vacation. For now, I'm just going to bid you adieu because a girl's got a plane to catch. And remind you, as always, to look at something beautiful today. A la próxima Michi. Bye, okay.