Photography Inventions

Catalog description

When, where, why, how and by whom was photography invented? What was early photography like and how did it look? What were its shortcomings, and how was it a marvel of technology? What was the world like before photography? What can we learn from the history of photography’s inventions? We know that photography has changed the world (again and again and again) but this course will also explore some of the developments that have changed photography. How do artists, and other users of photography respond to the specific properties of the medium as it is successively re-invented? This course concentrates on the multiple inventions of photography. Working separately in different countries, several individuals sought to invent automatic imaging systems using photo-chemistry and the principles of optics in the 1820s and 1830s. Great minds thought alike, and several different types of photography were born almost simultaneously. We will discuss what scientific/artistic invention is and means--how it happens, as well as exploring the evolution of the photographic medium. We will spend time considering each of the main 19th photographic processes and the remarkable images created in each, as well as the emerging photographic image culture to which each invention contributed. Later in the semester, we will continue to explore how inventions and transformations in technologies shape photographic expressions. The invention of small hand-held cameras using roll film (which made possible amateur photography and so brought photography into everyone's daily lives--as well as making possible the practice of photojournalism), of flash and strobe photography (which allow the capture of motion and the exploration of nocturnal subjects), of color photography and eventually of digital imaging, have all transformed the medium of photography further. Do these successive transformations take…