A brief history of Photography
By: Matt Spalding
Tags: Photography, Photographer, Photos, History, Photography Tips

Roger Fenton: War Photographer

Roger Fenton rose to fame in England during the “golden age” of photography in the 1850s. Originally recognized for his architecture and landscape photography, Fenton was dispatched to cover the Crimean War in 1855, thus becoming the world’s first war photographer. Because of the unwieldy nature of his equipment and its inherent technological limitations, Fenton was unable to photograph moving subjects and instead focused on posed portraits and landscapes. He chose not to photograph dead or injured soldiers.

Crossing the Niagara

On June 30, 1859, William England, chief photographer with the London Stereoscopic Company, gathered with 5000 other spectators to watch Jean Francois Gravelet (performing under the name Charles Blondin) attempt to cross from Canada to the United States by walking a tightrope suspended above the Niagara River. England captured Blondin’s successful 1100-foot (335-meter) trek across the river; his stereoscopic images were among the first to be licensed for international commercial use.

Stark Realism

Reinhold Thiele is often cited among the founders of photojournalism, having covered major events in Britain including the opening of the Tower Bridge and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1899, the London Daily Graphic commissioned Thiele to cover the Second Boer War. Many of the photographs made by Thiele were considered so graphic that the newspaper refused to run them.

35mm

German engineer Oskar Barnack had a problem: he was an avid amateur photographer who had become disillusioned by the weight of the photographic equipment of the time, an issue that became increasingly significant in light of Barnack’s failing health. His goal was to design a small, portable film camera. 35mm film was already in regular use for motion pictures; in 1913, Barnack developed the prototype of a camera designed to make use of 35mm film for the purpose of still photography. In 1925, the Leitz camera company began marketing the first portable 35mm camera under the trade name Leica. Cameras could now be taken anywhere and photography became even more accessible to the general public.

Instant Gratification

In 1947, American physicist Dr. Edwin Land invented a one-step process for developing and printing photos by applying the principle of diffusion transfer, which reproduces the image captured by the camera’s lens onto a photosensitive surface serving as both film and photo. 57 of Land’s cameras went on sale before Christmas 1948 and thus the Polaroid instant camera revolution was born, with Ansel Adams as one of Polaroid’s greatest proponents.

The Decisive Moment

Widely considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work revealed the lofty potential of street photography. In 1947, after escaping a German POW camp four years prior, Cartier-Bresson teamed up with four other photographers, including famed wartime photojournalist Robert Capa, to form Magnum Photos — one of the world’s premier photo agencies. His 1952 book The Decisive Moment is a powerful testament to “the photographer with a heart” and an amazing record of 20 years’ worth of work from one of the world’s greatest documentary photographers, who was intent on revealing both tragedy and triumph in all its forms. Cartier-Bresson documented the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Revolution, and George VI’s coronation; he captured such personalities as Truman Capote, Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Sartre, and Che Guevara.