What is photography? [session 2]

 1. The art or process of producing images of objects on photosensitive surfaces.
2. The art, practice, or occupation of taking and printing photographs.
3. A body of photographs

Before the invention of photography people used various techniques to illustrate their surroundings. Techniques such as paintings, carving and sculpturing. Images have been projected onto surfaces for years. Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. The image below is the earliest known, surviving heliographic engraving in existence, made by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825 by the heliography process.

The first permanent photograph (later accidentally destroyed) was an image produced in 1822 also by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His photographs were produced on a polishedpewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea.

“View from the Window at Le Gras” [Circa, 1826]

This image was captured by Louis Daguerre in late 1838. It was the first-ever photograph of a person. The actual image is of a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the city traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is a man in the bottom left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show up in the picture.

The First Photograph of a Human ”Boulevard Du Temple” [Paris, 1838]

Tom Stoddart-1998
A rich local man steals the maize for
which a child has queued for hours

This image is a is part of a group of photos from the country of Sudan. It was captured in the winter of 1998 which was a key date in Sudanese history. 1998 was the peak of a famine and civil war in Sudan it was also the year the Americans (land of government and regulation) destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. A hundred thousand people died in Sudan in 1998. The photograph illustrates that in a world without law, regulation or government, rich people will regularly steal food from starving children. Where as in a world with law and regulation children will not be left to starve and the rich will not steal and everyone will be looked after. 

Early photography ethics were not considered as people were so fascinated by the fact that it recorded nature more realistically than any other art form such as painting and drawings had ever done before and because of this, people trusted it and believed it portrayed reality. However it was not long before fake and manipulated photographs began to appear which was not long after the invention of photography.

Technology was not that advanced when first introduced which made it difficult to capture certain things due to the long exposure which is why some photographs were staged, such as war photographs. Images do not always mean one thing as sometimes the means are constructed. 

In 1917, Elise Wright, age 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, age 10, used a simple camera to produce what they claimed were photographs of fairies in their garden in Cottingley, England.

The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on faries he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand magazine. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, but others believed they had been faked. In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked using cardboard cut outs of fairies copied from a popular children's book of the time, but Frances continued to claim that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.

Photography is one of the new media forms that changes perception and the structure of society.

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