PHOTOGRAPHY
/ 1839 — present

1826 — Niépce burns a window into pewter.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce coats a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea and points it out his attic window in Burgundy. Eight hours later, the world is fixed: View from the Window at Le Gras — the first surviving photograph.

Sunlight falls on both sides of the courtyard — because it kept moving while the plate exposed.

1839 — the daguerreotype goes public.

Niépce dies; his partner Louis Daguerre perfects a silver-iodide-on-copper plate, developed in mercury vapour. France buys the patent and gifts it "free to the world" on 19 August 1839 — photography's official birthday.

• Sharper than any prior process — a mirror with a memory.
• Single positive, no negative: every plate unique, laterally reversed.
• Exposure drops to minutes; portrait studios open globally within a year.
• Talbot's calotype (1841) introduces the negative — and reproducibility.

1888 — "You press the button, we do the rest."

George Eastman's Kodak No. 1 ships pre-loaded with roll film for 100 exposures. You shoot, mail the camera back. Rochester develops, prints, reloads, returns it. Photography leaves the studio for the kitchen table.

1925 — 35mm, Leica, and the decisive moment.

Oskar Barnack's Leica I uses motion-picture 35mm film in a body you can put in a pocket. Cameras stop being furniture. Henri Cartier-Bresson turns the street into a stage — geometry caught in 1/125th of a second.

• "The decisive moment" — l'instant décisif, 1952.
• Candid, ambient-light, eye-level photography becomes possible.
• Tri-X, Plus-X — fast films catch up with the small format.

The war photographer.

Robert Capa wades onto Omaha Beach with two Contax cameras. Only 11 frames survive a darkroom accident — The Magnificent Eleven. His partner Gerda Taro had already died at the Spanish Civil War in 1937, the first woman war photographer killed in action.

• "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."
• Photography becomes the moral conscience of the 20th century.
• Capa dies on a landmine in Indochina, 1954, aged 40.

The Depression, in photographs.

Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration hires Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee. Between 1935–1944 they shoot ~175,000 negatives of rural America. Photography becomes social policy — and a national archive.

• Migrant Mother (Lange, 1936) — Florence Owens Thompson, 32, seven children.
• Evans + James Agee — Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
• The look of "the documentary" is invented here.

1935 — Kodachrome arrives. Critics sneer.

Two musicians, Mannes & Godowsky, invent a three-emulsion color film at Kodak. National Geographic loves it; the art world doesn't. For decades color was "vulgar" — until William Eggleston's 1976 MoMA show forces the gates open.

• 1935: Kodachrome 16mm; 35mm follows in 1936.
• 1976: Eggleston at MoMA — color is "real" photography.
• 2009: last roll of Kodachrome ever manufactured.

Photojournalism, 1936–1972.

Henry Luce's LIFE launches Nov 1936; circulation hits 13.5 million. Magnum Photos — Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Seymour, Rodger — founded 1947, photographer-owned. The picture story is the news.

• W. Eugene Smith — Country Doctor, Minamata.
• Eddie Adams, Saigon, 1968 — one frame ends a war's reputation.
• Nick Út, Kim Phúc, 1972 — the napalm girl.
• Television and the news weeklies' collapse end the era by the late '70s.

1991 — the sensor replaces the silver halide.

Kodak DCS-100: a Nikon F3 grafted onto a 1.3-megapixel CCD and a 4kg shoulder pack. $13,000. Within 15 years it kills the company that invented it. Phones finish the job.

~92% of photos taken today are taken with a phone.

2010 — photography becomes a feed.

Instagram launches Oct 2010 — at first a square-crop nostalgia filter for iPhone 4 photos. By 2024 it ships 95+ million images a day. The photograph stops being a thing and becomes a signal.

• Algorithmic ranking replaces editorial selection.
• The selfie, the influencer, the geotagged sunset.
• Authorship dilutes; provenance breaks; the caption out-weighs the frame.
• Photography is the most produced and least looked-at art form in history.

2022 — the index breaks.

For 183 years a photograph was — by definition — light that had touched a sensitive surface. Diffusion models sever that link. The image survives; the indexicality doesn't. DALL·E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Flux, Sora.

• C2PA, content credentials, on-camera signing — provenance becomes infrastructure.
• News orgs publish AI-image policies; courts try to catch up.
• The question stops being what does the picture show and becomes where did the picture come from.

References & viewing.

• Susan Sontag — On Photography (1977)
• Roland Barthes — Camera Lucida (1980)
• Beaumont Newhall — The History of Photography (MoMA, 1937→)
• John Szarkowski — The Photographer's Eye (1966)
• Geoff Dyer — The Ongoing Moment (2005)
• Fred Ritchin — After Photography (2008)
• Joan Fontcuberta — Pandora's Camera (2014)

Archives: George Eastman Museum · Library of Congress (FSA-OWI) · Magnum Photos · MoMA Collection.

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