by Jerry A. Sierra, FLASHES, March, 1989
FOR A LONG TIME ARTISTS, SCHOLARS AND INTELLECTUALS knew that a pinhole on the wall of a dark room produced an upside down image on the opposite wall. Aristotle wrote of this strange and fascinating phenomena, describing his use of such a device to observe a solar eclipse.
Other scholars of the time, such as Alhazen, Reinhold, and Gemma Frisius, referred to the Camera Obscura [CO] and its applications to astronomy. But it was Leonardo Da Vinci who years later wrote the first detailed descriptions of the CO in several of his works, including the now priceless Codex Atlanticus. Unfortunately his notebooks were not published until recently.
Sometime later, in the 1420s, an Italian architect called Filippo Brunelleschi made a wonderful discovery: perspective, (the means by which the illusion of three- dimensions is created on a two-dimensional surface), the second step in the long journey that lead to photography as we know it today.
The use of an optical lens to replace the pinhole on a CO was described by Giovanni Battista della Porta in his book Natural Light, published in Naples in 1558. Over one- hundred years went by before a German by the name of Johann Zahn made a camera obscura that was 23 inches long. The image in Zahn's camera, made in 1685, was turned rightside up by a mirror, and took shape on a translucent glass.
Many of the cameras made at the time appeared in a variety of shapes and sizes, often looking like chairs, books, and futuristic machinery. But there was still no way to record the images formed in the ground glass, and our concept of film was about 140 years away.
By the 18th century, painters Canaletto & Bernardo Belloto used a CO that was starting to look and feel more like a camera: various lenses allowed them a choice in framing their subjects (mostly recreations of reality, anticipating photography's function) giving them clear, sharp images on a ground glass. They would trace these images, to create the feeling of perspective, and transfer the lines onto their canvases.
When Johann Heinrich discovered that silver salts darkened when exposed to sunlight (Germany, 1727), a need for a chemical that could be stabilized already existed among artists and scholars.
In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood had some success using chemicals to produce images. By casting a shadow on a chemically treated surface, he created a photographic-like image that, unfortunately, disappeared when exposed to light.
Credit for the first official photograph belongs to Joseph Nicephore. In the summer of 1826 he inserted a polished pewter plate, treated with bitumen of Judea (used in lithography), into a CO and exposed it for over eight hours to the scene outside his window. He went on to do this a number of times, producing different points of view.
Thirteen years later photography was officially born, with most of the credit (and financial rewards) going to an entrepreneur by the name of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. There were others who deserved more credit than they received, such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard, but that's a different story.
Articles by JAS
Archive