We have been trying to record this moment for millennia. From glass plates to film and pixels, the journey to the world of #PicsOrItDidntHappen has been revolutionary. Take a tour.
still Life
In 1826, after years of experimentation, French landowner Nicephore Niépce took the world’s first recognizable photograph: a grainy outline of the terraces and countryside surrounding his estate.
how did he do it? Well, he invented heliography. This was a method that used light to harden and blacken the surface of metal plates coated with asphalt, and then placed inside a box with a small hole and a lens.
As light fell on the plate, the surface darkened and an image was formed. The “unexposed” parts were then washed with oil to reveal the scene created by light.
These photos were taken over several hours, but were still very blurry.
a gift to the world
Just seven years after that first picture, in 1833, Niepce died of a stroke.
He left his notes with the Parisian painter Louis Daguerre, who refined his friend’s process until he invented the Daguerreotype, which produced far more detailed images using mercury vapor – in just 30 minutes.
His Boulevard du Temple (1838), taken on a deserted street in Paris, is considered the first photograph of a human being: a man stopping to have his shoes polished.
Most people moved in and out of these early scenarios so quickly that they could not be caught. He stood still for so long that he was caught, completely by accident.
Daguerre sold the full rights to the daguerreotype and heliography to the French government in 1839, which released them to the public that year as France’s gift to the world.
Who, me?
That same year, across the Atlantic, a 30-year-old American photographer stood without moving and stared at a makeshift camera for 15 minutes.
Robert Cornelius recently took the world’s first selfie.
camera-less photography
By the 1840s, people were experimenting with cyanotypes: camera-less photographs that placed a subject on light-sensitive paper coated with ferric compounds, and exposed the paper to sunlight.
The light turned the background blue, leaving white spots where the object had been.
Illustrator and botanist Anna Atkins used this method to create attractive images of ferns and other plants. His 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, was the first book to be illustrated in this manner.
initial witness
Once a camera could be trusted to preserve a moment, it began to serve as a witness to history.
In the 1850s, Roger Fenton was commissioned by the art dealership and print publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons to document the Crimean War (1853–56; fought to prevent Russia from expanding into the Ottoman Empire).
They traveled in a horse-drawn van equipped with a dark room. The long exposure time meant that very little live combat was recorded. However, an 1855 image titled The Valley of the Shadow of Death shows a ravine littered with cannonballs – and there are still historians debating whether it was staged.
settler of arguments
Does a galloping horse lift all four hooves off the ground simultaneously?
It is said that English photographer Edward Muybridge was trying to settle a bet with a racehorse owner when he shot his famous sequence of short-exposure photographs. This is from 1878.
He set up a racetrack equipped with boxy stereoscopic cameras and proved that the horse actually raised all hooves off the ground.
Muybridge later projected those images at high speed using a device he invented, creating an illusion of motion so powerful that it laid the groundwork for cinema.
Smile!
The world’s first point-and-shoot handheld camera became available for sale in 1888. It required no skill or training to use it.
This device was invented by American entrepreneur George Eastman. They called it Kodak. It came with preloaded paper-gelatin film. Once the 100-image roll was used up, customers shipped the cameras to the company, which developed the images, reloaded the film, and shipped it all back.
a catalyst for change
By the 1880s photography was being used as a tool for social reform.
Images such as Danish-American photojournalist Jacob Riis’s The Bandit’s Roast (1888) exposed the harsh realities of poverty that were largely hidden from public view. He used newly invented magnesium flash powder to illuminate the dark slums of New York, with their dank stairwells and crowded tenements. The images made headlines and ultimately contributed to the passage of new affordable-housing laws.
The photographs were furthering the medical cause.
And they were advancing workers’ rights.
He was revolutionizing fashion, fashion magazines and giving birth to the idea of photo-magazine.
They were changing our views on war. And enabling a level of documentation that can endure – Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists will always find it difficult to explain the images below.
starry eyed
By the 1950s, photographs were helping convert people into brands.
For example, Elvis Presley’s publicity team used carefully crafted press photographs (posters, magazine covers, and stills from TV programs) to craft his image as a star in 1956.
Six decades later, social media would hand over the reins of such image-building to the star herself. In 2017, Beyoncé announced her second pregnancy by posting directly to Instagram with a single, Renaissance art-inspired portrait. It soon became the most liked photo on the platform.
a world in flux
Amidst all this, a lot was changing. Cell phones emerged. They soon acquired cameras—but even before that, techie Philip Kahn attached a digital camera to a cell phone to instantly share a photo of his newborn daughter with family, making it the first photo taken on a phone.
The photos will immortalize the horror of the 9/11 attacks on America. and Indian Ocean tsunami.
you and your
Then Instagram came and everything changed.
Launched in 2010, its first image, taken by co-founder Kevin Systrom, was a yellow-filtered photo of a dog near a taco cart in Mexico. It changed our ideas about what counts as documentation.
It gave the world a chance to unite and celebrate; Made viral images a pop-culture phenomenon.
In this way, the lens has been present at some of humanity’s most important moments.
It has changed our view of our world, our bodies and our universe.
It has given us the opportunity to see how the climate crisis is changing our world.
And it provides daily evidence of how elusive the cherished goal of world peace is.
uncanny valley
Meanwhile, in 2023, another first: an AI-generated image wins a photography award.
German artist Boris Aldagsen says he created it in hopes of starting a conversation about the use of such devices. When it won the Sony World Photo Award, he refused to accept it.
Women are not present in the frame. It was not created using a camera.
The jury thought it was an interesting use of the medium. He argues that it is not the same medium at all.
