Editing Photography (section)

=== Invention ===

[[File:Nicéphore Niépce Oldest Photograph 1825.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.1|Earliest known surviving heliographic engraving, 1825, printed from a metal plate made by [[Nicéphore Niépce]].<ref name="UTexas">{{cite web
 |title        = The First Photograph – Heliography
 |url          = http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/wfp/heliography.html
 |quote        = from Helmut Gernsheim's article, "The 150th Anniversary of Photography," in History of Photography, Vol. I, No. 1, January 1977: ...In 1822, Niépce coated a glass plate... The sunlight passing through... This first permanent example... was destroyed... some years later.
 |access-date   = 29 September 2009
 |archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20091006135924/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/wfp/heliography.html
 |archive-date = 6 October 2009
 |url-status   = dead
}}</ref> The plate was exposed under an ordinary engraving and copied it by photographic means. This was a step towards the first permanent photograph taken with a camera.]]

[[File:View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras_colorized_2020_new.png|thumb|396x396px|''[[View from the Window at Le Gras]]'', 1826, the earliest surviving camera photograph. Original plate (left) and [[Film colorization|colorized]] reoriented enhancement (right).]]

[[File:1838 or 1839 Frauenkirche Munich - Steinheil and Kobell 1.png|right|thumb|[[Carl August von Steinheil]] and [[Wolfgang Franz von Kobell|Franz von Kobell]]'s silver chloride photograph of [[Frauenkirche, Munich|Frauenkirche]] from the [[Old Academy (Munich)|Old Academy]], March 1837<ref name="auto">{{Cite web|url=https://www.deutsches-museum.de/museum/aktuell/1837-die-erfindung-der-fotografie-in-muenchen|title=1837: Die Erfindung der Fotografie in München|date=28 May 2024|website=www.deutsches-museum.de}}</ref>]]

The first permanent [[photoetching]] was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor [[Nicéphore Niépce]], but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it.<ref name="UTexas" /> Niépce was successful again in 1825. In 1826 he made the ''[[View from the Window at Le Gras]]'', the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e., of the image of a real-world scene, as formed in a [[camera obscura]] by a [[lens (optics)|lens]]).<ref>{{cite book
| author       = Hirsch, Robert
| title        = Seizing the light: a history of photography
| url          = https://books.google.com/books?id=vftTAAAAMAAJ
| year         = 1999
| publisher    = McGraw-Hill
| isbn         = 978-0-697-14361-7
| access-date  = 13 December 2015
| archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20160429023604/https://books.google.com/books?id=vftTAAAAMAAJ
| archive-date = 29 April 2016
| url-status   = live
}}</ref>
[[File:Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre.jpg|thumb|''[[View of the Boulevard du Temple]]'', a [[daguerreotype]] made by [[Louis Daguerre]] in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph to include people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure lasted for several minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one of them apparently having his boots polished by the other, remained in one place long enough to be visible.]]

Because Niépce's camera photographs required an extremely long [[exposure (photography)|exposure]] (at least eight hours and probably several days), he sought to greatly improve his [[Bitumen of Judea|bitumen]] process or replace it with one that was more practical. In partnership with [[Louis Daguerre]], he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced visually superior results and replaced the bitumen with a more light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were still required. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy.

Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre then redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive [[silver halide]]s, which Niépce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent. Daguerre's efforts culminated in what would later be named the [[daguerreotype]] process. The essential elements—a silver-plated surface sensitized by [[iodine]] vapor, developed by [[Mercury (element)|mercury]] vapor, and "fixed" with hot saturated [[sodium chloride|salt]] water—were in place in 1837. The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of hours. Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the several-minutes-long exposure to be visible. The existence of Daguerre's process was publicly announced, without details, on 7 January 1839. The news created an international sensation. France soon agreed to pay Daguerre a pension in exchange for the right to present his invention to the world as the gift of France, which occurred when complete working instructions were unveiled on 19 August 1839. In that same year, American photographer [[Robert Cornelius]] is credited with taking the earliest surviving photographic self-portrait.

[[File:Latticed window at lacock abbey 1835.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A latticed window in [[Lacock Abbey]], [[England]], photographed by [[William Fox Talbot]] in 1835. Shown here in positive form, this may be the oldest extant photographic negative made in a camera.]]

In Brazil, [[Hercules Florence]] had started working out a silver-salt-based paper process in 1832, later naming it ''photographia'', at least four years before [[John Herschel]] coined the English word ''photography''. In 1834, having settled on [[silver nitrate]] on paper, a combination which had been the subject of experiments by [[Thomas Wedgwood (photographer)|Thomas Wedgwood]] around the year 1800, Florence's notebooks indicate that he eventually succeeded in creating light-fast, durable images.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Hercule Florence |url=https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/instituto-hercule-florence |access-date=April 17, 2024 |website=Google Arts and Culture |language=pt-br}}</ref> Partly because he never published his invention adequately, partly because he was an obscure inventor living in a remote and undeveloped province, Hércules Florence died, in Brazil, unrecognized internationally as one of the inventors of photography during his lifetime.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Hercule Florence |url=https://ims.com.br/titular-colecao/hercule-florence/ |access-date=April 17, 2024 |website=Instituto Moreira Salles |language=pt-br}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Hercule Florence |url=https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/instituto-hercule-florence |access-date=April 17, 2024 |website=Google Arts and Culture |language=pt-br}}</ref><ref>{{cite book | title = Hercule Florence: El descubrimiento de la fotografía en Brasil | author = Boris Kossoy | publisher = Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia | isbn = 968-03-0020-X | year = 2004 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=wCoQAAAACAAJ | access-date = 2016-11-04 | archive-date = 2023-07-02 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230702164331/https://books.google.com/books?id=wCoQAAAACAAJ | url-status = live }}</ref>

Meanwhile, a [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|British]] inventor, [[William Fox Talbot]], had succeeded in making crude but reasonably light-fast silver images on paper as early as 1834<ref name=EB1911>{{cite EB1911 |wstitle=Photography |volume=21 |page=487}}</ref> but had kept his work secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention in January 1839, Talbot published his hitherto secret method in a paper to the Royal Society<ref name=EB1911/> and set about improving on it. At first, like other pre-daguerreotype processes, Talbot's paper-based photography typically required hours-long [[Exposure (photography)|exposures]] in the camera, but in 1840 he created the [[calotype]] process, which used the [[photographic processing|chemical development]] of a [[latent image]] to greatly reduce the exposure needed and compete with the daguerreotype. In both its original and calotype forms, Talbot's process, unlike Daguerre's, created a translucent [[negative (photography)|negative]] which could be used to print multiple positive copies; this is the basis of most modern chemical photography up to the present day, as daguerreotypes could only be replicated by rephotographing them with a camera.<ref>[https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/fox_talbot_william_henry.shtml William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101003154557/http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/fox_talbot_william_henry.shtml |date=3 October 2010}}. [[BBC]]</ref> Talbot's famous tiny paper negative of the Oriel window in [[Lacock Abbey]], one of a number of camera photographs he made in the summer of 1835, may be the oldest camera negative in existence.<ref>Feldman, Anthony and Ford, Peter (1989) ''Scientists & inventors''. Bloomsbury Books, p. 128, {{ISBN|1-870630-23-8}}.</ref><ref>Fox Talbot, William Henry and Jammes, André (1973) ''William H. Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative-positive process'', Macmillan, p. 95.</ref>

In March 1837,<ref name="auto"/> Steinheil, along with [[Wolfgang Franz von Kobell|Franz von Kobell]], used [[silver chloride]] and a cardboard camera to make pictures in [[Negative (photography)|negative]] of the [[Munich Frauenkirche|Frauenkirche]] and other buildings in Munich, then taking another picture of the negative to get a [[Positive (photography)|positive]], the actual black and white reproduction of a view on the object. The pictures produced were round with a diameter of 4&nbsp;cm, the method was later named the "Steinheil method".

In France, [[Hippolyte Bayard]] invented his own process for producing direct positive paper prints and claimed to have invented photography earlier than Daguerre or Talbot.<ref>{{Cite web
| url          = http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1876
| title        = Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801–1887) (Getty Museum)
| access-date  = 21 April 2019
| archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20131024055944/http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1876
| archive-date = 24 October 2013
| url-status   = dead
}}</ref>

British chemist [[John Herschel]] made many contributions to the new field. He invented the [[cyanotype]] process, later familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". He had discovered in 1819 that [[sodium thiosulphate]] was a solvent of silver halides, and in 1839 he informed Talbot (and, indirectly, Daguerre) that it could be used to "fix" silver-halide-based photographs and make them completely light-fast. He made the first [[glass negative]] in late 1839.

<!--[[File:Daguerreotype tintype photographer model studio table brady stand cast iron portrait photos.jpg|right|thumb|Mid-19th-century "Brady stand" photo model's armrest table, meant to keep portrait models still during long exposure times (studio equipment nicknamed after the famed US photographer, [[Mathew Brady]]).]] – remove, not mentioned in body-->[[File:Wilson Chinn.jpg|thumb|[[Wilson Chinn]], a branded slave from Louisiana—per ''[[The New York Times]]'', "one of the earliest and most dramatic examples of how the newborn medium of photography could change the course of history."<ref>{{cite news|last=Paulson Gage|first=Joan|title=Icons of Cruelty|url=http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/icons-of-cruelty/|newspaper=The New York Times|date=August 5, 2013}}</ref>]]
[[File:The Macon city directory, embracing a full alphabetical record of the names and inhabitants of Macon and its suburbs. A business directory of the city; county and city governments; societies, a - DPLA - f06f279fd02ed401f5126198836a5269.pdf|page=3|thumb|right|Advertisement for Campbell's Photograph Gallery from The Macon City Directory, {{circa|1877}}]]
In the March 1851 issue of ''The Chemist'', [[Frederick Scott Archer]] published his wet plate [[collodion process]]. It became the most widely used photographic medium until the gelatin dry plate, introduced in the 1870s, eventually replaced it. There are three subsets to the collodion process; the [[Ambrotype]] (a positive image on glass), the [[Ferrotype]] or Tintype (a positive image on metal) and the glass negative, which was used to make positive prints on [[albumen]] or salted paper.

Many advances in [[Photographic plate|photographic glass plates]] and printing were made during the rest of the 19th century. In 1891, [[Gabriel Lippmann]] introduced a process for making natural-color photographs based on the optical phenomenon of the [[Interference (wave propagation)|interference]] of light waves. His scientifically elegant and important but ultimately impractical invention earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908.

Glass plates were the medium for most original camera photography from the late 1850s until the general introduction of flexible plastic films during the 1890s. Although the convenience of the film greatly popularized amateur photography, early films were somewhat more expensive and of markedly lower optical quality than their glass plate equivalents, and until the late 1910s they were not available in the large formats preferred by most professional photographers, so the new medium did not immediately or completely replace the old. Because of the superior dimensional stability of glass, the use of plates for some scientific applications, such as [[astrophotography]], continued into the 1990s, and in the niche field of laser [[holography]], it has persisted into the 21st century.