Lets take a step back in time and list the most important dates in the history of photography.
A long time ago: It all began with the Camera Obscura (which is Latin for the Dark Room). It is believed that Aristote (384-322 BC), the Arabian scholar Hassan ibn Hassan (965-1038) and Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) already knew its principles. Camera Obscura is essentially a dark, closed space (room or box) with a hole on one side of it. The light passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved. It helped painters during the Renaissance to draw lines over the projected images on canvas.
1816: We know from a letter to his sister in law that Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French inventor 1765-1833) succeeded in making negative images but that they disappeared quickly with exposure to light.
1826: Is the date of the earliest surviving photograph from nature using a camera obscura by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. (Photo above)
1829: Niepce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (French artist and physicist 1787-1851) start working together until Niépce's death.
1835: William Henry Fox Talbot (British inventor 1800-1877) makes his first photogenic drawing a durable silver chloride camera negatives on paper
1839: Louis Daguerre develops the process he calls Daguerréotype after himself. Using the camera obscura, he made the plate inside the camera light sensitive by fumes from iodine crystals. Because Niépce was at the beginning of the research, Daguerre and Niépce's son both received money for their invention by the French government. - John Herschel makes the first glass negative. - W. H. Fox Talbot makes the Calotype process public
1841: W. H. Fox Talbot patents the Calotype process - the first negative-positive process making possible the first multiple copies. It is an improved version of his earlier discovery that greatly reduces the required exposure time.
1851: Frederick Scott Archer (1813-1857) invents the photographic collodion process which precedes the modern gelatin emulsion.
1861: James Clerk Maxwell (Scottish 1831-1879) presents a projected additive color image of a multicolored ribbon, the first demonstration of color photography by the three-color method
1871: Richard Leach Maddox (English 1816-1902) invents lightweight gelatin negative plates for photography.
1888: George Eastman (American innovator 1854-1932) sells the Kodak n°1 box camera, the first easy-to-use camera. It is introduced with the slogan You press the button, we do the rest.
1948: The first poloroid camera is sold to the public. It was invented by Edwin Land (American 1909-1991)
1975: Steven Sasson (engineer at Eastman Kodak) invents and builts the first electronic camera using a charge-coupled device image sensor (digital camera). It is a prototype with 100x100 pixels in black and white.
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Ralph Gibson (b. 1939) is one of the most interesting and versatile photographers of our time. His great international reputation is based on his exceptional work, which is exhibited and collected by leading museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. The publication accompanying the exhibition Ralph Gibson. Secret of Light brings together key series from the F. C. Gundlach Collection, Hamburg, as well as the photographer’s collection and describes his artistic development from the 1960s to the present. Gibson tirelessly explores and breaks new ground in photography. The playful use and design with light are an essential part of his unmistakable signature, which is reflected in his multi-layered and complex oeuvre.
The Eye Mama book is a photographic portfolio showcasing the mama narrative and the mama gaze, what female and non-binary photographers see when they look at, and into the home.
Based on the Eye Mama Project, a photography platform sharing a curated feed by photographers worldwide who identify as mamas, the Eye Mama book brings together more than 150 images to render what is so often invisible―caregiving, mothering, family and the post-motherhood self― visible.
Eye mama was created by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker and photographer Karni Arieli during the pandemic, when everyone around the world was in lockdown and spending more time in the home, often consumed by caregiving. The visual movement centres around the “mama gaze”, an introspective look at home and care by female and non-binary visual artists.
This iconic book of photographs brings together the images from this movement, experiencing the light and dark of care and parenthood, the beauty of close-up details, love and hardship, and most importantly, the personal poetic truths of these mamas and artists.
Throughout the 1980s, award-winning photographer Dafydd Jones was granted access to some of England's most exclusive upper-class events. Now, the author of Oxford: The Last Hurrah presents this irreverent and intimate portrait of birthday parties and charity balls, Eton picnics and private school celebrations.
With the crack of a hunting rifle and a spray of champagne, these photos give an almost cinematic account of high-society England at its most riotous and its most vulnerable. Against the backdrop of Thatcher's Britain, globalization, the Falklands War, rising stocks and dwindling inherited fortunes, Jones reveals the inner lives of the established elite as they party long into the night-time of their fading world.
This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.
Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.
This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualizing the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.
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