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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Publisher : Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
2024 | 184 pages
In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water―and the history of controlling it―is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry―past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.
With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.
Twana’s Box' can be described in many ways: a journey through a photographer’s rare archive, documenting the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 1974–1992; a son’s quest to find his lost father, who was murdered by a military regime; a young man’s way to piece together the fragments of a scattered family in a scattered culture; the becoming of a photographer who, through the stories of others, starts to understand his own identity in times of war. 'Twana’s Box' is not only the photo book that holds a selection of Twana Abdullah’s archive; it is a unique insight into a time and place in a region that has since completely transformed. Rawsht has spent years piecing together his father’s negatives and stories. His archival work inspired him to become a photographer himself, working for Metrography – the first independent Iraqi photo agency – before immigrating to Europe. ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, hb, Kurdish/Arabic/English
Taken across Europe and Africa, Akinbiyi’s images of everyday city life muse on the sociopolitical labyrinths of urban society
Whether in Bamako, Berlin, London, Lagos or Durban, British photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946) creates black-and-white street scenes that function as visual metaphors, ruminating on cultural change, social exclusion and colonialism’s effect on urban planning.
A deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, curated by the acclaimed London-based designer
This volume, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm―Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, is an artist’s book created by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.” Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores and films by artists such as Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith, among others, are juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner―Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner’s own vibrant, virtuosic designs.
