What’s so great about photography?

‘Photography is a magical thing.’

Jacques-Henri Lartigue.

The brilliant thing about photography is that anyone can take pictures and every photographer has the chance to create images in his or her own unique way. Photography is a potent and powerful force, able to tell huge stories in single images. Its diversity and possibilities are immense, and it is constantly evolving in exciting new directions. Photography is a very young medium and is now developing very, very fast. It has been around for such a short time compared to other means of artistic expression and it has so much more potential still to be explored.

‘Photography is so young, we are still at the cave-painting stage. Maybe in another 500 years we’ll reach photography’s Renaissance.’

Michael Hoppen, photographic collector, curator and dealer.

Photography’s breadth is amazing. It feeds many aspects of communication including design, advertising, newspapers, magazines and the internet. The camera is increasingly used by artists to express their vision. Some photographers take pictures with extremely expensive cameras, but you can also make your own camera for next to no money at all. You don’t even need a camera to produce images. The key to creating great pictures is not the equipment you use; it’s about finding your own way of seeing things using photography. That’s what all the photographers featured in this book have done.

It’s thrilling when the results of your photographic experiments exceed your hopes. To stand in the darkroom and watch your pictures slowly appear from sheets of white paper is a magical experience. With its flashes of light, chemicals and formulae, photography is a kind of sorcery. Photography is the magic medium; people say that a particular photograph ‘conjures up’ memories or emotions for them. The fact that photographs can stop time by preserving moments that have now passed is itself extraordinary.

What is this book about and who is it for?

This book aims to be clear, easy to read and easy to apply. It explores the themes that have obsessed and driven photographers and takes an eyeopening look at the many wonderful things that can be done by creating and manipulating pictures. It looks at where photography has come from, at the modern medium and its future direction. It aims to inspire experimentation and exploration, give an overview of careers and education in photography, and be an essential creative resource and reference book.

Why is it called photography?

‘Photo’ comes from the Greek word phos. The ancient Greeks named the brightest star Phosphorus; phos meant ‘created by light’. The combining form ‘-graph’ comes from the word graphic, meaning sharply defined. Photographs are clear images created by light.

What makes a photograph?

Creating a photograph involves the consideration of lighting, focus, colour, contrast, quality and what can be seen sharply. Controlling these elements is what makes an image photographic.

This book is for people thirsty for knowledge about photography but bemused and bewildered by the more technical and theoretical books on the subject. As a starting point for many photographic adventures, this book is for people who want to learn more about photography in an active way. Nothing beats doing.

The mix that makes photography

Photography is a cauldron in which many different elements are mixed – chemistry, physics, optics, computers, electronics, commerce and, of course, creativity. Photography has always involved chemistry. Many experiments were needed to find the formula to make successful photographs. Today much home photography is still sent to the chemist for processing or printing, and professional photographers still take their pictures to the ‘lab’.

Chemistry provides the active ingredients for film-based photography, which when carefully measured and controlled can ensure consistent and successful results. Electronics and computers have helped cameras and digital photography to evolve. Commerce ensures that photography is a medium developing much faster than other creative media, both technically and creatively. Manufacturers employ scientists and engineers to ceaselessly invent new ways of taking pictures, aiming to make us desire the latest equipment. Grand claims are made at every new product launch, predicting that the future direction of the medium has been found. In reality, photographers have an ever-expanding choice of tools and can pick materials and techniques from any stage of photography’s progress to create their pictures. You can choose ancient processes such as cyanotypes or the very latest digital technology. Better still, you can combine the two. The final element in the mix is creativity. Only when creative minds explore the possibilities of all the materials invented by scientists and manufacturers can wonderful images be made.

Photography in the digital age

Digital photography is not just about taking pictures with a different type of camera. It involves combining digitized images with the power of the computer. These images can be produced not only from digital cameras but also from film negatives, slides and prints, which can all easily be digitized using scanners. A scanner simply converts an image into a form understood by a computer. Digital images can be edited and manipulated on the computer. They can then be printed, attached to emails and disseminated via the internet. Digitization has caused a sea change in photography, altering forever the way we think about photography and use cameras.

Digital cameras now outsell those that use film. Today it is possible to be a photographer without ever buying a roll of film, going into a darkroom or visiting a photo lab. But to limit oneself in this way would be to miss the opportunity of exploring to the full the joys and possibilities of the medium.

The structure of this book

Loading… is an introduction to photography and how we see, and a motordrive through the early history of the medium up to the pivotal date of 1900, at which point the camera came into the hands of everyone.

The big picture looks at the subjects and themes that have fascinated and driven photographers, and examines how they have evolved. Much of the power of photography is directly attributable to the passion with which the portrait, the self-portrait, the city shot, the landscape, the still life, the body, fashion and storytelling have been explored by photographers intent on finding fresh approaches. The Big Picture also looks at advertising and propaganda pictures, photomontage, sequence and the manipulation of images.

The bridge examines creativity and inspiration, and forms a link between the subjects of photography and how to take pictures.

This is a camera, now go out and take some pictures examines the ways in which photographs are created and the tools used in the process.

So you want to be a photographer? looks at careers in photography.

The bible is a help and reference section.

Catching the shutter bug

Photographers are curious – curious about the world, people, places and objects. They fall in love with the process of photography. They love the materials and tools; each contributes its own particular character to a completed picture.

Photographers are also obsessive and are possessed by passions. They are visual magpies, amassing series and sequences of pictures.

Our need to hold and pass on representations of ourselves is an instinctive human desire. For thousands of years this was only possible with drawings and paintings. Photography has now made this activity easy for us all. Confronted with our fading memories and mortality, we all want to make a permanent impression on the world and to leave a record of ourselves and our lives. Photos grant everyone this wish.

‘We want to be photographers because we want to communicate. Photography gives us a direct means of engaging and speaking to an audience.’

Andrew Watson, photographer and teacher.

Derek Dawson, A Life in Pictures, 1922–2001

We record our lives in photographs taken from birth to death. These photographs are from the Dawson family albums.

Giles Revell, Scarab, 2002

The camera can see many amazing things that are beyond the power of our eyes to perceive unaided. Revell’s startling and beautiful pictures of insects (opposite) are created by painstakingly combining and enhancing many hundreds of images from a scanning electron microscope. After training as a geologist, Revell turned to photography. He exhibits the insect pictures at a massive size of up to 8 feet high.

The power of photographs

With its terminology of shooting and capturing, photography seems to offer the possibility of excitement and adventure. Photographs can be remarkably powerful tools. They can melt taboos, sway public opinion and even impact explosively on governments to cause real change.

The flicker of the television picture is ephemeral compared to the fixed image of the photograph, which provides a tangible, permanent visual experience. Photographs get straight to the heart of an issue and can crystallize instantly an event or personality. They have the power to be hugely eloquent: a great photograph can be worth tens of thousands of words.

‘Photography has image impact – a single image can say things beyond words, carrying meaning and feeling.’

Vincent Lee, photographer.

Alison Jackson observed how photos have this spellbinding effect on viewers. ‘If you take a photograph of someone, and put it beside them, you want to look at the photo, not the person.’ Moreover, cameras not only create powerful images but are also empowering: We are empowered by the camera. Depending on whose hand it is placed in, the same camera can be a tool for coldly and impartially recording a scene or for creating fantasies. The same camera can be a simple note-taker or offer a deeply personal means of expression, allowing the photographer to communicate his or her emotions. Unlike the spoken or printed word, photography is a universal language everyone can understand – nothing is lost in translation.

Photographer Nick Knight describes the camera as a ‘ticket in’, explaining: ‘I’ve been accepted into a whole bunch of situations that otherwise I would never have got near.’ As well as granting you access to places and events that you might not otherwise be invited to witness, the camera gives you a licence to behave in a certain way – to talk to strangers, to control situations, to actively seek to get a different view and to ask for things in a way that you would never usually do.

‘Having a camera around your neck gives you a good excuse to be nosy.’

Martin Parr, photographer.

The camera gives you the ability to take something permanent and satisfying from every encounter.

How does film-based photography work?

Black and white

•  If you forget to polish a silver trophy or granny’s silver teapot, you will notice that it turns black. The same chemical reaction holds the key to making photographs.

•  Silver is sensitive to sunlight: the more it gets, the blacker it becomes. Black-and-white photography works by harnessing this reaction.

•  Film and paper are coated with tiny bits of silver; when they are then exposed to light, the silver darkens according to the amount of light that falls on it, the effects being amplified by the use of chemicals.

Colour

•  Film-based colour photography also makes use of silver’s sensitivity to light, coupled with the fact that you need just three basic colours to recreate any particular shade of colour you can see.

•  Scientists established long ago that by mixing red, green and blue in different proportions, you can create all the colours of the rainbow.

•  Colour film has three different coats of silver similar to those used in black-and-white photography, but layered one on top of another. Each layer is designed to record one of the three essential colours – red, green or blue.

•  During an exposure each layer darkens according to the amount of light of the corresponding colour that has fallen on its surface.

•  In development each layer then absorbs a dye of one of the three colours again in proportion to the amount of light.

•  A bleach removes all the silver, leaving a colour image created by layers of dye left on the film, which together recreate the numerous colours seen through the camera lens by the photographer.

Is film dead?

This book embraces the whole spectrum of photography. It is wrong to say that there is ‘digital photography’ and ‘film photography’ – there is only photography.

How does digital photography work?

•  Digital pictures are made up of millions of pixels which form a believable image when our eyes merge them into continuous tones. Each pixel is a solid block of colour. The word pixel is short for ‘picture element’, each pixel being a tiny element of the whole picture.

•  When you take a picture with a digital camera, the image is divided into these tiny coloured building blocks by the camera’s sensor, which matches every part of the image with one of the many millions of different colours it can sense. This is a bit like making a painting-by-numbers picture, but with millions of different pots of paint available. You can view the pixels in digital pictures by enlarging an area until the blocks are clearly visible.

•  Every single pixel’s individual colour is recorded as a number or digit, hence ‘digital photography’. Collectively, all these numbers are used to store, show and recreate the image by rebuilding all the blocks of colour in the same sequence to reform the original image.

•  Once an image has been digitized, you can change any of the pixels to alter colour, brightness and contrast. This manipulation is achieved by changing the number of each pixel on a computer. As well as enhancing existing photographs, totally new images can be created and built by manipulating groups of pixels. Photos can be combined, colours boosted or muted and edges sharpened or softened.

There is no boundary between film-based and digital photography. Photographers combine the two in numerous ways.

‘I like combining things, taking images created with the Lomo camera and the multi-lens camera that have been made on film and then using the latest technology – it lets you bake things together, overlay things and add things.’

Fabian Monheim, photographer.

The eye and the camera

The view we see with our two eyes is roughly ovoid, with the periphery of our vision blurring the shape towards the edges. The camera lens, by contrast, produces a circular image, but the camera has been designed to select a square or rectangular section.

Our eyes and cameras have a lens that focuses the light reflected from objects. Like the camera, the eye also has a shutter – the eyelid – and a variable aperture – the pupil. Both the eye and the camera work with light-sensitive surfaces: the eye has the retina, which is covered with a multitude of light-sensitive cells, while the camera uses film or a CCD sensor.

We see in stereo. Our eyes capture slightly different views, which our brains then unify into a single whole. The tiny difference in viewpoint of each eye allows us to perceive three-dimensional depth. This is called binocular vision. Photographs are two-dimensional representations of what we see through the camera. Three-dimensional depth can be replicated with stereoscopic photographs, which are viewed through binocular viewers, and anaglyphs, which are viewed with red and green ‘3D’ glasses.

As we look around a room our eyes instinctively change focus to concentrate on the object we are looking at, giving us the impression that our eyes are never out of focus. We see selectively: when looking at an object, whether near or far, our eyes focus on it to the exclusion of everything else. The camera can focus like this but it can also give a view with everything in its vision sharply focused, from near to far – a view we can never have with our own eyes. The closest distance at which the human eye can focus is about 8 inches or 20 centimetres. The focusing range of a camera lens has no lower limit.

Our eyes have evolved to cope with incredible contrasts of bright light and deep shade. Hence, we can see everything with great clarity on the brightest of days and our eyes adjust instantly when we move from a darkened room into bright sunlight. The pupil of our eyes reacts instantly to maintain the level of light falling onto the retina, whereas the photographer must either manually or automatically vary the aperture of the camera to darken or brighten what he records. Cameras can also register events or objects that the eye cannot by using exposures of fractions of a second or many seconds, minutes and even hours.

Katrin Geilhausen, Eye (Close-up), 1995

Many photographers create their own palette of colours, as German-born photographer, illustrator and animator Geilhausen has done here (opposite). ‘The image was shot on slide film, which was then processed and used as a negative. The eyelashes of the model were painted white so that when printed in negative they would look positive. I love spending hours in the colour darkroom – it’s a slow process with lots of time in the pitch black during which new ideas stream into your head like big rainbows.’

Where has photography come from?

The ingredients of photography

Cameras today use exactly the same ingredients that the pioneers of the medium worked with – a black box with a hole in it to let in the light, a lens and materials that are sensitive to light. These elements had been experimented with for centuries before finally being successfully combined to create photographs.

Over 500 years ago, during the Renaissance, people understood that a small hole in the wall of a darkened room could act like a lens and project images of the scene outside on to the opposite wall. This effect was named ‘camera obscura’, which means dark room. This is how the camera got its name. There are many working room-sized camera obscuras in existence that can be visited today, such as in Greenwich in London. In the United States there is one called the Giant Camera, which overlooks the sea in San Francisco.

The lens and the magic black box

The light-bending power of a lens had been known in many ancient cultures. In ancient Rome, scholars with poor eyesight found they could read text by peering at it through glass globes.

Segments of a glass sphere, known as ‘reading stones’, were found to magnify letters when placed against books. By 1300 such magnifying glasses were in common use. Craftsmen in Venice – one of the centres of glass grinding and polishing – began making small discs of glass, convex on both sides, that could be worn in a frame. These were the first reading glasses. As these little discs were shaped like lentils, they became known as ‘lentils of glass’, from which we get the word ‘lenses’. The earliest illustration of these glasses dates from about 1350.

In Naples at the end of the sixteenth century a scientist and writer called Giovanni Battista della Porta experimented by placing a lens in the hole in the wall of his camera obscura. He found that the lens cast an upside-down image on the opposite wall and that it both sharpened and brightened the image. He invited friends into his camera obscura for a show. When they were seated in the darkened room he uncapped the lens and a troop of actors began to perform in the sunlight outside. On seeing tiny figures cavorting upside down on the wall, della Porta’s guests fled in panic. He was brought before the Pope’s court on charges of sorcery. Fortunately, he was able to talk his way out of it.

Minnie Weisz, Norfolk Suite Camera Obscura

Minnie Weisz uses the principle of the camera obscura to create images on the interiors of rooms that she has sealed from light with the exception of a small hole, thus producing an inverted image of the outside view. Even in today’s visually exciting times, the experience still amazes those who witness it.

Light-sensitive materials and the silver rush

It had been known for many centuries that silver salts blackened in sunlight and might hold the key to preserving images made in a camera obscura. By the early 1800s many scientists, inventors and businessmen were competing to find a formula. Some were seeking scientific and creative discovery, others financial reward. There was a desperate rush to be the first to succeed.

After much trial and error, silver chloride was found to darken in the light and silver nitrate could be coated on paper or leather to imprint the shadows cast by objects. Despite these discoveries, ‘fixing’ these images still proved impossible as they continued to react to light until the whole surface darkened and the picture was lost.

The world’s first photograph

After experimenting unsuccessfully with silver nitrate-coated paper inside a camera obscura, the French lithographer and inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce tried coating sheets of pewter with bitumen of Judea, a substance known to harden when exposed to light. One summer’s day in 1826 he slotted a pewter ‘plate’ into his camera obscura and propped it on the ledge of his attic window overlooking the rooftops, a pear tree and a pigeon house. After leaving it there for eight hours he tried washing the plate with lavender oil and found he was able to remove the soft areas that had received less light. The resulting image was fuzzy – in the eight-hour exposure period the shadows had moved across the picture with the movement of the sun – but the scene was nonetheless clearly visible.

Niépce had created a direct positive image – a photograph without a negative – which he proclaimed as ‘the first picture copied from nature’. This was the world’s first permanent photograph, in Niépce’s terminology a ‘heliograph’, or sun drawing.

The daguerreotype seizes the light

Niépce teamed up with the Parisian Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre to refine his process, finding that polished silver plates gave a better picture quality. Daguerre worked in Paris running a diorama, a thrilling and ingenious venue where, using magic lanterns, painted backdrops and sound effects, he created dramatic dissolving views, illusions of sunrises, sunsets and storms complete with thunder and lightning.

After Niépce died suddenly in 1833, Daguerre continued to experiment and develop their work, finally arriving at a practical process that he named the ‘daguerreotype’ – somewhat forgetting M. Niépce’s contribution. Daguerre declared: ‘I have seized the light, I have arrested its flight.’

The process worked as follows. A silver plate was placed in a closed box containing iodine. The fumes of iodine fused with the silver, creating light-sensitive silver iodide. The plate was then fitted in a camera obscura and exposed for up to thirty minutes. After this it contained a latent image – an image that is registered on the silver surface but isn’t yet visible.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed Window at Laycock Abbey, 1835

Although Niépce had created the first photograph, it was Fox Talbot who discovered that images could be reproduced by creating a paper negative using silver-based chemicals. From this beginning, photography continued to depend on silver and the use of negatives for the basis of the photographic process, until the advent of digital technology in the late twentieth century.

Daguerre found he could ‘develop’ this image with mercury fumes so that it could be clearly seen and that common table salt would stop the plate from continuing to react and thereby ‘fix’ the image. The process created pictures that were mirror images of the scene they recorded. As no negative existed, each daguerreotype was a unique, non-reproducible picture.

Daguerreotypes have a beautiful clarity and are surprisingly sharp, revealing great detail. The silvered surface creates an elusive image that can only be seen from certain angles. It also acts as a mirror at other angles so that viewers can see their own reflection. The daguerreotype became known as ‘the mirror with a memory’. All of this added to its magic. In 1839 Daguerre caused a sensation when he opened the doors of his studio to an excited Parisian public keen to view his photographs. He published his techniques in a seventy-nine-page manual which was an instant hit – within hours chemists and opticians shops were stormed by would-be photographers seeking the magic ingredients of photography. Daguerre was acclaimed for giving the world the knowledge of how to successfully create photographs and was granted a government pension by way of reward. Daguerreotypes continue to be created today.

Cameras travel around the world

The daguerreotype and Daguerre’s camera design became incredibly popular despite the crudity of the lens and the clumsiness and complexity of the developing process. A year after the launch, in 1840, Josef Max Petzval, a maths professor at the University of Vienna, solved some of these problems by calculating how a new type of lens could be constructed. Working with telescope-maker Peter von Voigtländer, they created a lens that admitted nearly sixteen times more light into the camera than Daguerre’s. At the same time they also made an attempt to build the first purpose-built camera – not just a modified camera obscura. It looked like a short, fat brass telescope and took circular pictures. Petzval’s lens design was to remain in use for sixty years. Thousands of lenses were produced and their design was copied throughout Europe and America.

In those early days exposures were still made by removing and replacing the lens cap, and long exposure times meant a tripod or stand was needed to keep the camera steady.

Soon the daguerreotype process had become widespread. Wealthy amateur explorers started bringing back pictures of people and landscapes from all over the world, and news pictures were being taken for the first time. Every town and city soon had its own ‘Daguerrean artists’ – the first professional photographers. By 1850 New York had seventy-seven.

Daguerreotypes were kept under glass and presented in richly decorated frames, often lined with satin, with a hinged cover and a clasp to protect the image. Daguerreotypes were often signed by the photographer as a painting would be by an artist.

Positive and negative

While Niépce and Daguerre had been experimenting with camera obscuras in France, the scientist William Henry Fox Talbot was making his own photographic discoveries in England. In 1841 Talbot announced his own process, which worked by creating paper negatives. His first successful picture was a famous postage stamp-sized photograph taken through his library windows. Talbot made his discovery by experimenting with primitive cameras he nicknamed ‘mousetraps’ – tiny wooden boxes with lenses in the front made by his village carpenter – loaded with light-sensitized paper. Talbot patented his process, calling it the Calotype – from the Greek kalos, meaning ‘beautiful picture’. Calotypes were waxed-paper negatives that for the first time allowed multiple prints of the same photograph to be made.

The popularity of daguerreotypes began to wane owing to the complexity of the process and the non-reproducibility of the images. By the early 1850s the combination of the wet-collodion process glass negative and albumen prints – evolved from Talbot’s inventions – replaced the daguerreotype as the standard method of taking and printing pictures for most photographers. This negative/positive process became the basis of photography until the arrival of the digital camera.

Enlargers

The first enlargers were made in 1857 and were known as solar cameras. They used direct sunlight to project an image from glass negatives onto sensitized paper. Until then contact printing had been the only available method of printing. By the 1860s the first enlargers using electric light had been designed.

Bellows cameras

As cameras evolved in the 1850s and 1860s, flexible leather bellows became standard, allowing the camera’s lens to be moved back and forth to focus more finely. Photographers viewed the scene through a ground-glass screen at the back of the camera, replacing it with a plate holder when they were ready to take their pictures.

Shutters

By the 1870s new types of photographic plates were being manufactured that were far more sensitive to light. However, photographers found they couldn’t accurately cap and uncap the lens for short amounts of time and so now needed a ‘shutter’ device that could reliably open and shut the lens for fractions of a second.

The first shutters were fitted in front of the lens – they were like small guillotines – and contained a sliding board with a hole in it. When the photographer released the board, it slid past the lens, only letting light through to it for the instant that the hole passed by. Shutters such as these, rigged with elastic bands, allowed Eadweard Muybridge in 1872 to photograph the movement of a horse in mid-gallop with shutter speeds of around 1⁄500 of a second. (See Sequence, p. 103.)

In 1878 the gelatin dry plate process replaced the wet plate negative. This freed photographers from the need to use wet plates, which had to be sensitized and developed on the spot. The exposure times needed for dry plates were very short so at last photographers could handhold their cameras.

George Eastman

Great progress in the technical and cultural development of photography was made by George Eastman, an inventor and industrialist who foresaw the commercial possibilities of photography and began manufacturing and marketing his photographic inventions on a massive scale.

Eastman’s first success was a roll holder which adapted the conventional wooden plate camera to take a roll of sensitized paper of up to forty-eight exposures. This was another great step forward for photographers. The fragile and heavy glass plates or metal sheets that had to be carefully slotted in and out of the back of the camera could be replaced with a lightweight roll. Photographers could work with much greater ease and take numerous photographs quickly for the first time.