Photography

The earliest extant camera photograph was not produced in silver, but by heliography, a copying process invented by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s. The process places a thin coating of bitumen on a pewter plate, selectively hardens it by sunlight, and then dissolves it by oil of lavender to bring out the image. In 1827, Niépce captured the first photograph—now in the Gernsheim Collection of the University of Texas—by a heliographic camera exposure estimated to have taken several days. Heliography was better suited to providing etching-resists for photomechanical printing plates.

Attention returned to silver; in 1837, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre discovered, fortuitously, that mercury vapor could develop camera images on iodized surfaces of silver-plated copper, the chemical prerequisite, iodine, having been discovered by Bernard Courtois in 1811(Gernsheim, 140-150). The daguerreotype process, first publicized in 1839, enjoyed widespread commercial success until photography on paper and glass replaced it in the mid-1850s.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787 at Cormeilles-en-Parisis. He began his career as an artist. He is probably the most famous of several people who invented the photography.

Images from the Nineteenth Century arrive before our eyes in many forms, but one of the most common is a silvery, mirror-like form of early photograph: this forerunner of the modern film camera was the brainchild of artist and inventor Louis Daguerre. Born in France in 1787, Daguerre became well-known for his skills as a panoramic painter, and in 1822 he invented the diorama, a version of the panoramic painting that subtly changed appearance in life-like fashion as its illumination changed over time.

In 1829, he joined Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in a collaboration to employ Niépce's recently-invented "heliograph" - a primitive form of photography - in the creation of dioramas. After Niépce's death in 1833, Daguerre continued to experiment with ways of refining the photographic process, and in 1839 the daguerrotype was presented to the world (Wilder, 250-255).

While by today's standards daguerrotypes were primitive and clumsy - exposures for ordinary subjects ranged from a few seconds to a few minutes, and copies could not be made from originals - Daguerre's invention revolutionized the world, and for the next decade was the dominant form of photographic record. Even though other processes eventually displaced the daguerrotype from its lofty perch, Daguerre had nothing to worry about: a pension from the French Government allowed him to live comfortably until his death in 1851.

His working career began as an apprentice architect. When he was 16, he was an assistant stage designer in a Paris theatre - Paris Opera. His stage designs won him a considerable acclaim. He was quite ingenious in using and handling of the light and light effects. He invented and developed Diorama - his term for impressive illusion theatre (Bajac, 25-35). In fact it was a picture show where light effects changed with large paintings of famous places. This was pretty popular in the early twenties of the last century.

He used on a regular basis a camera obscura as ...