History of photography

The history of photography traces the development of image-making technologies, photographic practices, and visual culture from early experiments to the present.

Camera obscura: An optical device that projects an image of a scene through a small opening onto a surface. Its projected images supplied a model for the first photographic cameras.
Daguerreotype: A unique photograph formed on a polished, silver-coated copper plate. Its sharp detail and one-of-a-kind format defined photography’s first popular process.
George Eastman: An American entrepreneur who developed mass-market photographic materials and founded the Eastman Kodak Company. His roll-film business made snapshot photography accessible to a broad public.
Photojournalism: The practice of reporting news through photographs, often alongside written journalism. Portable cameras and faster printing helped photographs become part of daily news.
Pictorialism: An international movement that promoted photography as an expressive fine art, often through painterly techniques. Its advocates argued that photographs could be artistic interpretations rather than mechanical records.
Nicéphore Niépce: A French inventor who produced the earliest surviving permanent camera photograph in the 1820s. His experiments established that light-sensitive materials could preserve a camera image.
Calotype: A photographic process that uses a paper negative to produce multiple positive prints. Its reproducible negative became a foundation for later photographic systems.
Julia Margaret Cameron: A nineteenth-century British photographer known for expressive portraits and literary subjects. Her deliberately soft-focus portraits challenged expectations of technical sharpness.
Documentary photography: Photography that records people, places, or conditions to create a sustained account of reality. Documentary projects turned cameras toward social conditions and historical change.
Straight photography: A photographic approach that emphasizes sharp focus, tonal clarity, and the medium’s direct descriptive qualities. It opposed pictorialist manipulation and made photographic precision an artistic ideal.

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