a dark room, with a pinhole opening in the wall, allowing light through from the outside. The pinhole acts as a lens, and an image can be projected upside down on the far wall.
Camera Obscura
He was a student of Samuel Morse, a famed civil war photographer. He met Daguerre in france in 1839. He opened a portrait studio in 1844 and offered Daguerreotypes at a reasonable price in the U.S.
“The Camera is the eye of history”
Matthew Brady (1822-1896)
what was one important advance in the mass production of images? It was invented in 1796 in Germany, as a way to publish music and posters at a low cost.
Lithography
Joseph Niepce, French Lithoagrapher started looking for a way to speed things up. He began experimenting with light-sensitive chemicals in 1820’s. His collaboration with Daguerre led to the first practical method of taking photographs. This was known as what?
Precursors of Photography
Pho or Phot: Greek word for “light” and “graph” meaning to write.
An image, especially a positive print, recorded by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface.
Early on it was one image, not multiple reproductions or “positives” from one “negative”
Origin of the word “photography”
He notes that there is a strong belief in the US that technology =progress. But, that there is also growing skepticism.
Belief(positive technology=progress)
Skepticism (technology / Progress)
Leo Marx
Two historical frames that shape our contemporary understandings of technological progress.
- Enlightenment Belief in Progress
2. Technocratic Concept of Progress
Mechanization and factory system =knowledge & power
Embrace of new scientific thought and invention
Fueled by American & French Revolutions: Freedom, from previous forms of domination(individual, systematic, institutional)
History=progress
Key distinction: progress for the good of all, political, not progress for the “self” but for the people
Enlightenment Belief in Progress
Proponents: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson
Ideas of Technological progress & political liberation
Not technological progress for its own sake
Not inevitable
Tied to democratic social change and general social uplift and betterment
Here technology is not put before: justice, harmony, beauty, self-fulfillment.
Enlightenment View of Progress
Developed as industrial capitalism grew stronger
Progress became separated off from political liberation
Embrace of technological innovation and change for its own sake.
Was part of a larger belief in “manifest destiny” and the “conquest of nature” by mankind.
Onward civilization
Industrial capitalists embraced this mode of thinking.
Scientific and technological innovation is the basis for general progress.
Technocratic View of Progress
Who was a proponent of the Technocratic view of progress?
Daniel Webster
Note the missionary and religious fervor of the quotation. Blending religiosity and grandiose political visions with ideas of technological progress.
He thought “ the technocratic idea of progress is a belief in the sufficiency of scientific and technological innovation as the basis for general progress. Saying that if we can ensure the advance of science- based technologies, the rest will take care of itself.
Marx
Both viewpoints are alive and well in the U.S. today. A deep ambivalence about technology as well as a deep faith- in a religious sense- in its capacities.
Marx worry- “the apparent loss of interest in, or unwillingness to name, the social ends for which scientific and technological power are to be used.”
Technocratic Vs. Social Progress
What rises out of the technocratic view of progress?
Fordism(assembly mode of production) and Taylorism (scientific management and time-motion regulation) Standardization of process & product Economies of Scale Control of the worker and the workplace Mass production
He was a German gold-smith, who planned to announce his typing technique in a fair in 1439.
Johannes Gutenberg
During what was a 15 yr development, Gutenberg worked on perfecting the key technical problem of this?
Mass producing books
Gutenbergs’s key insight was that individual pieces of “moveable” type could be made from alloy of lead with tin and anatomy. The alloy could be melted using conventional foundries and poured into “matrix” that held the blanks for the different letters of the alphabet.
He assembled all the necessary ingredients to produce thousands of books.
Gutenbergs innovations
what was the very fist book printed?
The Gutenberg Bible
Sometimes called the “first photographer” he experimented with light-sensitive chemicals and created the first unfixed photographic picture in 1972.
Thomas Wedgewood
A french lithographer, started experimenting with photography a decade later and, around 1826 found a partial solution to the problem. He had the first photo in 1826.
joseph Niepce
a Parisian artist, who was giving up on painting elaborate theatrical scenes. He was in search of finding a faster way to accurately depict his subjects.
Louis Daguerre
Eventually he found sodium thiosulfate (hypo) in 1837 and began taking and exhibiting pictures that he called heliographs but soon they were called this?
Daguerreotypes
Among the first to use flash photography in the US
Used it to take photos of squalid conditions, dangerous alleys and suffering children.
Photojournalist
The “halftone”process and was able to take advantage of this new technology.
Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
Used photography for social reform
Joined the national child labor committee in 1907
Lewis Hine (1874-1940)
Founded a publishing empire in 1923
Time magazine started in 1923
The times, capsulized abridgment of a condensation.
Time spoke to its generation.
Henry Luce (1898-1967)
Luce also publicized Fortune (for the business community)
A photographer, who visited migrant farm camps while working for the FSA in California.
Shot the most famous portrait of the era or 20th century.
“Migrant Mother”- photo taken in March, 1936 in Nipomo, California.
Dorothea Lange
A FSA photographer, made similarly iconic photos as Migrant mother.
Northern-born African American.
Unaccustomed to the racism of the south.
He photographed Ella Watson ( holding the broom & mop, standing in front of the US Flag)
He went on to work for Life Magazine for 20yrs.
Became the first major African- American director in the US with films like the Learning Tree (1969) and shaft (1971)
Gordon Parks
Inventor of the Morse Code for the telegraph.
Was present in Paris when Daguerre’s process was announced.
Trying to find funding for the Morse Code.
Decided to teach photography in NY and was doing so by September of 1839. His student was Matthew Brady
Samuel Morse
The pictoralist photographic movement.
The snobbery of Parisian portrait painters over what was legitimately artistic spurred the “pictoralist” photographic movement.
Defended art by depicting subjects with soft visual effects and artistic poses.
Pictorialism
Paul Strand- photographer who reacted to the success of the 291 gallery. Thought Pictorialism was too apologetic and didn’t take advantage of the new medium. He took photography into advertising and abstract work with the idea of “absolute unqualified objectivity” rather than artistically manipulated photos. Politically Liberal.
Straight Photography Movements
Photographer who founded Kodak Corporation in 1884.
the camera that was sold ready to take pictures and then returned to the company in Rochester.
Another camera loaded with 100 pictures, came back with the printed photos. His slogan was “you push the button, we do the rest”
George Eastman
Began in the mid 1300’s
Religious images are playing cards were typical themes
Turned to new techniques such as engraving in the 1440’s because woodblock had poor resolution after time.
The earliest woodblock printed book, the Diamond Sutra- a Chinese scroll.
Wood Block
insight was confirmed by the 20th century experiments showing that the concepts are much more likely to be remembered when they are presented as images rather than words (nelson et. al. 1976)
The Picture Superiority Effect
Aka melainotype or ferrotype. Is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of iron coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion.
Tintype
An image, usually on a strip or sheet of transparent film, in which the highest Areas of the photographed subject appear darkest and the darkest area appear lightest.
Negative
Film or paper record of a scene that represents the color & luminance of objects in that scene with the same colors & luminances.
Positive
“Stone” “to write” a method of printing originally based on the principle that oil and water do not mix.
Invented by aloys senefelder, the technique is a precursor of photography and offset printing.
Lithography
The quality or fact of representing a person, thing or situation accurately or in a way that us true to life.
The general attempt to depict subjects truthfully.
Realism
Accuracy in details/ exactness
Fidelity
Communication is solely spoken by word, a culture cultivated & transmitted only through spoken word.
Oral culture
Walter Lippmann-we all use this or pictures our heads as mental shortcuts that allows us to make quick judgement.
The power of the mass media to create and shape public opinion is well known.
Fixed conventional notion or concept of an individual or group of people held by a number of people.
Stereotype