Brief History of photography

In his Book of Optics, the scholar Ibn al-Haytham described how light passing through a small opening projects an inverted image of the outside world into a darkened space. Artists later used camera obscura rooms and portable boxes to study perspective and trace scenes. It was an optical foundation for photography, though it did not itself record an image.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the earliest surviving permanent camera photograph from an upstairs window at his estate in Burgundy. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea and exposed it in a camera obscura for many hours. Light hardened the bitumen unevenly; washing away the softer areas left a lasting image, now known as View from the Window at Le Gras.

Louis Daguerre's process made exceptionally detailed photographs on silver-plated copper. The plate was polished, sensitised with iodine vapour, exposed in a camera and developed with mercury vapour before being fixed. Announced publicly in 1839, the daguerreotype brought portrait photography into reach, although each image was a unique, delicate object rather than a reproducible negative.

William Henry Fox Talbot introduced the calotype, a paper-negative process. Silver iodide paper was exposed in a camera, developed to reveal a latent image and made translucent with wax or oil. The negative could then produce multiple positive prints on sensitised paper—a key step toward photography as a reproducible medium, though its paper fibres gave images a softer appearance.

Frederick Scott Archer's collodion process coated glass with a light-sensitive emulsion. The plate had to be sensitised, exposed and developed while still wet, requiring photographers to work quickly near a portable darkroom. It combined fine detail with shorter exposures and could serve as a negative for prints or as a direct positive on dark-backed glass.

An ambrotype was an underexposed wet-plate collodion negative on glass that appeared positive when backed with dark material or viewed against a dark surface. The thin glass image was often placed in a protective case like a daguerreotype. It offered a comparatively affordable, direct portrait, but each plate remained a one-of-a-kind photograph.

The tintype, also called a ferrotype, used a thin iron sheet coated with dark lacquer and a collodion emulsion. Like an ambrotype, it was an underexposed direct-positive image, developed soon after exposure. Tough, quick to make and relatively inexpensive, tintypes brought portrait-making beyond the formal studio and were popular with travelling photographers.

In 1871, Richard Leach Maddox proposed a glass plate coated with silver bromide suspended in gelatin. Commercial dry plates soon made the idea practical: unlike wet collodion, they could be prepared in advance, stored and developed later. Greater convenience and sensitivity helped photographers work with shorter exposures and encouraged smaller, more portable cameras.

George Eastman's Kodak camera came preloaded with a roll holding enough film for about 100 exposures. Customers made their photographs, then sent the entire camera to the company for processing and reloading. Its simple slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” helped make photography accessible to a much wider public.

Eastman's transparent flexible roll film, introduced commercially in 1889, used a nitrocellulose base and became an important step toward modern roll-film cameras. Unlike the earlier paper-backed roll, the transparent support allowed light to pass through the negative for printing and projection. It helped make compact cameras and repeated exposures practical.

Patented by the Lumière brothers, Autochrome was the first widely available practical colour photography process. A glass plate carried a mosaic of dyed potato-starch grains—red-orange, green and blue-violet—beneath a light-sensitive layer. Viewed as a transparency, the tiny colour filters recombined the image into luminous, pointillist colour.

The Leica I brought Oskar Barnack's compact 35mm camera design to market in 1925. It used perforated motion-picture film running horizontally to create 24 × 36 mm frames. A small camera with a bright viewfinder encouraged photographers to move freely, respond quickly and make the candid, close-up images that reshaped modern photojournalism.

Edwin Land's Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 went on sale in 1948, producing a finished black-and-white print in about a minute. A system of light-sensitive materials and processing chemicals travelled with the photograph as it developed outside the camera. Instant photography made the moment of making and seeing a picture feel inseparable.

Steven Sasson built an experimental digital camera at Kodak in 1975. It captured light with a CCD image sensor and stored image data on a cassette tape, rather than on photographic film. The prototype was bulky and its black-and-white images were low resolution, but it demonstrated a new electronic path for making photographs.

During the 1990s, digital cameras moved from specialist and professional equipment toward consumer markets. Electronic sensors replaced film, while memory cards and computer software made images easier to store, view and share. Falling costs and improving resolution changed the pace of everyday photography and laid the groundwork for the camera in every phone.