Throughout history mankind has understood the general principles of photography. In the Fourth century BC, Aristotle wrote of a way to view a solar eclipse without damaging the eye by using a metal plate with small holes punched into it and then held up to the sun projecting an image to be viewed on the ground. In the Sixth Century, the blackening of silver salts was observed most likely by early alchemists, but it would be nearly a thousand years before this monumental discovery would come to resemble photography as we know it today.

 

Sketches of The Camera Obscura were found in the papers of Leonardo Da Vinci and also in the works of an arab scholar named Alhazan much his senior, around 1038AD. The device which would later evolve consisted of a darkened room or box and a hole through which light could enter where images of the objects outside would be projected onto sensitized plates. But it would be a fellow Italian Giambattista della Porta who would perfect the Camera Obscura with a lens. The work of Alhazan inspired another medieval tinkerer named Roger Bacon who in 1267AD created optical illusions using mirrors and the principles of the camera obscura.

 

The Renaissance had marked a turning point in the history of photography as the camera obscura had widely become used as a drawing tool. Although Leonardo may have used the device to draw on occasion, it is widely believed that as a student of Physiology, he constructed a small device so that he could test his theories of the workings of the human eye and concepts of perspective. During this Renaissance period of the mid-Fourteenth Century the Orbem E Vitro, a primitive biconvex lens was introduced which greatly reduced distortion and increased clarity making the device applicable to portraiture, landscapes and other works.

 

 

Joseph Nicephore Niepce. 1826

View from the Wimdow at Gras, France.

In an eight hour exposure on a pewter panel

treated with light sensitive chemicals

the sun had moved from east to west appearing

to shine on both sides of the building

 

 

The World's Very first Photograph would be taken by a French Lithographer from Chalons-sur-Saone , Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826. Unable to draw, he enlisted the help of his son to compose the images used in his lithography. In a twist of events, his son was conscripted into the French Army in 1814 under Napoleon to fight in the fateful Battle of Waterloo, thus leaving him to search for another way of composing images as his son marched off to war. Niepce's series of experiments resulted in what he called "Heliographs" (after the Greek "of the sun") . After a disastrous trip to England where he had gone to seek the support of the Royal Society to help promote his invention, which failed in part because he would not divulge the secrets of the process, he returned to France and formed a partnership with Louis Daguerre in 1829, which would last until his death four years later at the age of 69. Today some examples of his Heliographs are on exhibit in the Royal Photographic Society's collection.

"The cinema is an invention without a future."

-Louis Lumiere

 

 

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