Before Photography

Photography did not arrive in a single flash of invention. It emerged slowly, over centuries, from the accumulated understanding of optics, chemistry, and a very human desire: to hold on to what the eye could see. Long before anyone figured out how to fix an image permanently, people understood that light passing through a small opening could project a picture of the outside world onto a wall. The story of photography begins not in a laboratory but in a dark room — quite literally.

The Camera Obscura

The basic optical phenomenon behind all photography — the camera obscura — has been known for well over two thousand years. The Chinese philosopher Mozi, writing in the fifth century BCE, described how light passing through a pinhole into a darkened space produces an inverted image on the opposite wall. Aristotle, around 350 BCE, noticed that sunlight filtering through gaps in foliage cast crescent shapes on the ground during a partial solar eclipse, each gap acting as a tiny pinhole projector.

But the most systematic early study of the camera obscura came from the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham (known in the Latin West as Alhazen), who worked in Cairo in the early eleventh century. His monumental Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manazir), completed around 1021, contained the first clear description of the camera obscura as a deliberate experimental apparatus. Ibn al-Haytham used dark chambers with small openings to study how light travels in straight lines, how images form, and how the eye itself works. He demonstrated that light does not emanate from the eye, as Greek thinkers had proposed, but enters it from external sources — a foundational insight that underpins all of optical science.

By the Renaissance, the camera obscura had become a practical tool. Artists discovered that projecting a scene onto a surface made it far easier to trace outlines accurately. Giovanni Battista della Porta popularized the device in his 1558 work Magia Naturalis, recommending it for drawing. By the seventeenth century, portable camera obscuras — wooden boxes with a lens at one end and a translucent screen at the other — were common artist's aids. Johannes Vermeer is widely thought to have used one, and the uncanny optical quality of his paintings lends weight to that theory. The camera obscura gave artists a projected image, vivid and detailed. The one thing it could not do was make that image stay.

The Desire to Fix the Image

For centuries, the camera obscura remained a tool for observation and tracing, not for permanent image-making. The missing ingredient was chemistry: some substance that would change when struck by light and hold that change. The search for such a substance would consume experimenters for decades.

Johann Heinrich Schulze, a German professor, made a crucial early discovery in 1727. He found that a mixture of chalk and silver nitrate darkened when exposed to light. This was the first clear demonstration that a silver compound could record an optical impression. But Schulze had no way to stop the process — his images continued to darken until they were uniformly black. He had proven the principle without solving the problem.

The first person to come genuinely close was Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous English potter Josiah Wedgwood. Around 1800, working with his friend Humphry Davy, Wedgwood placed objects and botanical specimens on leather or paper coated with silver nitrate and exposed them to light. He succeeded in creating silhouettes — what we might now call photograms — where the areas blocked from light remained pale while the exposed areas turned dark. He even tried placing the coated material inside a camera obscura, but the lens of the day gathered too little light and the silver nitrate was too insensitive to form a visible image within any practical exposure time. Worse, Wedgwood could not fix his silhouettes: as soon as they were brought into daylight to be viewed, the unexposed areas darkened too. He could only examine them by candlelight, and even then they faded within months. Humphry Davy published an account of these experiments in 1802, candidly admitting failure on the fixing problem. Wedgwood died in 1805, at just thirty-four, without having solved it.

Nicéphore Niépce and the First Photograph

The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a retired French army officer with a passion for lithography. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, living on his family estate near Chalon-sur-Saône, was experimenting with ways to reproduce images using light-sensitive coatings on stone and metal plates, a process he called héliographie (sun-writing). His goal was initially practical — he wanted to transfer drawings onto printing plates without the skill of an engraver — but he soon turned to the far more ambitious challenge of capturing the image projected by a camera obscura.

In the summer of 1826 or 1827 (historians debate the exact date), Niépce placed a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea — a naturally occurring asphalt that hardens when exposed to light — inside a camera obscura pointed out the window of his upper-floor workroom at Le Gras. He left it there for an extraordinarily long exposure, likely around eight hours or more. When he washed the plate with a solvent of lavender oil and white petroleum, the unexposed (still-soft) bitumen dissolved away, while the light-hardened areas remained. The result was a faint but unmistakable image of the buildings, courtyard, and rooftops visible from his window.

This plate, known as View from the Window at Le Gras, survives today in the Gernsheim Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It is the oldest surviving photograph made with a camera. The image is ghostly and indistinct — the long exposure means sunlight appears to illuminate both sides of the courtyard, since the sun moved across the sky during the hours the plate was exposed — but it is undeniably a photograph of a real scene, made by light alone.

The Daguerreotype

Niépce's process was impractical for any but the most patient experimenter. Exposure times of many hours made it useless for portraiture or anything involving movement. He knew he needed a collaborator with stronger chemical knowledge, and in 1829 he entered into a formal partnership with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a Parisian painter and showman best known for the Diorama, an elaborate theatrical spectacle that used enormous translucent paintings and controlled lighting to simulate scenes of travel and catastrophe.

Niépce died in 1833 without seeing the work completed. Daguerre continued alone and, after years of methodical experimentation, arrived at a fundamentally different process. Instead of bitumen, he used a polished silver-plated copper sheet, sensitized by exposure to iodine vapor, which formed a thin layer of light-sensitive silver iodide on the surface. After exposure in the camera, the plate was developed over heated mercury, whose vapor amalgamated with the silver in the exposed areas to form a visible image. The unexposed silver iodide was then dissolved away with a salt solution (later replaced by sodium thiosulfate, or "hypo," on the advice of the astronomer John Herschel), leaving a permanent image.

The daguerreotype was announced to the world on January 7, 1839, at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, and the technical details were published on August 19 of that year. The French government purchased the rights and declared the invention "free to the world" — except in England, where Daguerre had shrewdly patented it. The date of August 19 is now celebrated as World Photography Day.

The results were astonishing. A daguerreotype, viewed at the right angle, reveals detail of almost hallucinatory sharpness. Faces emerge from the polished silver with a three-dimensional presence that startled contemporaries. Samuel Morse, who saw daguerreotypes during a visit to Paris, described the detail as surpassing anything he had imagined possible. The process had a practical exposure time of around fifteen to thirty minutes in bright light — still challenging for portraits, requiring subjects to sit rigidly still with their heads clamped in place — but improvements to lens speed and plate chemistry soon brought exposures down to under a minute.

By the early 1840s, daguerreotype portrait studios were opening in cities across Europe and the United States. The demand was enormous. For the first time in human history, ordinary people could have their likenesses recorded with perfect accuracy, without the expense of a painted portrait. Daguerreotypes were treasured objects, housed in hinged cases lined with velvet, small enough to carry in a pocket.

Talbot and the Calotype

While Daguerre was refining his metal-plate process in Paris, an English polymath named William Henry Fox Talbot was independently pursuing a different approach. Working at his country estate, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, Talbot had been experimenting since 1834 with paper coated in silver chloride. He placed botanical specimens, lace, and other objects directly on the sensitized paper and exposed them to sunlight, producing what he called "photogenic drawings" — the same basic idea Wedgwood had tried thirty years earlier, but Talbot managed to partially fix his images using a strong salt solution.

When news of Daguerre's announcement reached England in January 1839, Talbot rushed to establish his own priority, presenting his photogenic drawings to the Royal Institution on January 25, just weeks after Daguerre's announcement. Over the following two years, he refined his process into what he patented in 1841 as the calotype (from the Greek kalos, meaning beautiful). The crucial innovation was chemical development: instead of exposing the paper until a visible image appeared (which took a very long time), Talbot discovered that a much shorter exposure produced an invisible latent image that could be amplified by chemical development using gallic acid. This reduced exposure times dramatically.

The calotype had one profound advantage over the daguerreotype: it produced a paper negative. Light areas in the scene appeared dark on the paper, and dark areas appeared light. By placing this negative in contact with a second sheet of sensitized paper and exposing it to light, Talbot could produce a positive print — and he could produce as many copies as he wished. This was the negative-positive process, and it is the fundamental principle that would underlie virtually all photographic practice for the next century and a half, right up through the film in your TLR camera.

Talbot's images lacked the mirrorlike sharpness of daguerreotypes. The paper fibers diffused the light passing through the negative, producing a softer, more atmospheric quality. Some found this appealing; others thought it inferior. But the ability to make multiple prints from a single exposure was a decisive advantage. Talbot published The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs, each print made from a calotype negative and pasted in by hand.

Wet Plate Collodion

The next great leap combined the best features of both processes. In 1851, an English sculptor and photographer named Frederick Scott Archer published the details of the wet collodion process. Collodion — a syrupy solution of gun-cotton dissolved in ether — was poured over a clean glass plate, then dipped in a bath of silver nitrate to form light-sensitive silver iodide within the collodion film. The plate was loaded into the camera and exposed while still wet. After exposure, the plate was developed immediately with pyrogallic acid, then fixed with hypo.

The results were remarkable. Glass negatives produced images nearly as sharp as daguerreotypes, because light passed cleanly through glass without the diffusion caused by paper fibers. And like calotypes, they were negatives from which any number of positive prints could be made. Exposure times were short enough — often just a few seconds in good light — to make portraiture comfortable and even capture street scenes with moderate activity. The collodion process also produced beautiful positives when underexposed and backed with dark velvet or lacquer: these were sold as ambrotypes (on glass) and tintypes (on japanned iron), cheap alternatives to daguerreotypes that became enormously popular.

The wet plate era transformed photography from a novelty into an industry. Portrait studios multiplied. Landscape photographers carried enormous plate cameras and portable darkrooms into the field on mules and wagons. The limitations were formidable: collodion had to be freshly prepared, and the plate had to be exposed, developed, and fixed before the coating dried, typically within ten to fifteen minutes in warm weather. This meant every photographer needed a darkroom within arm's reach. Traveling photographers used converted wagons, tents, or even wheelbarrows fitted with chemical supplies.

Photography Goes to War

The wet plate process was just mature enough by the 1850s to document the world's conflicts. Roger Fenton photographed the Crimean War in 1855, hauling a converted wine merchant's wagon fitted out as a portable darkroom across the battlefields. His images were the first extensive photographic war reportage, though he deliberately avoided scenes of death and destruction — his mission was partly propagandistic, aimed at countering newspaper reports of military incompetence.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) produced the most extensive photographic documentation of any nineteenth-century event. Mathew Brady, already a successful daguerreotype portraitist in New York and Washington, organized teams of photographers — including Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan — who followed the Union armies and captured scenes of camp life, fortifications, and, unflinchingly, the dead on the battlefield. Brady's images, exhibited in New York under the title "The Dead of Antietam" in 1862, brought the reality of war home to civilians in a way no painting or written dispatch ever had. A reviewer for the New York Times wrote that Brady had done something to "bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war."

These Civil War images were made on wet collodion plates under extraordinarily difficult field conditions. Photographers mixed chemicals in tents while artillery thundered nearby. Plates had to be coated, exposed, and developed within minutes. The results — crisp, detailed, hauntingly immediate — demonstrated both the power and the practical limits of the wet plate process. Photography could now document the world with unflinching precision, but it required a level of technical labor and logistical support that restricted it to professionals and dedicated amateurs.

The Stage Is Set

By the 1870s, photography had come an extraordinary distance in barely four decades. From Niépce's ghostly pewter plate to the crystalline clarity of wet collodion glass negatives, from eight-hour exposures to fractions of a second, from a lone experimenter's curiosity to a global industry — the transformation was staggering. But photography was still, fundamentally, a professional's medium. The wet plate process demanded specialized knowledge, bulky equipment, and constant access to chemicals and a darkroom.

What photography needed next was simplicity. It needed a way to separate the act of making the exposure from the act of developing the plate — to let someone prepare a light-sensitive surface, store it for days or weeks, use it when the moment was right, and develop it at leisure afterward. It needed, in short, the dry plate. That development, and the commercial revolution it triggered, would make photography truly portable and ultimately personal — and it is the subject of our next lesson.