photography

photography. In an age of film, television, and holiday snapshots, it is hard to remember that until comparatively recently people had little idea what their rulers or celebrities looked like, nor much impression of foreign parts, save for the odd painting or engraving. Some rulers turned this to advantage. The Tudors gave much thought to the public image their portraits presented and Elizabeth ordered the destruction of unflattering reproductions. Occasionally the situation produced embarrassment. Rushing to meet his new bride, Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII complained that she was not at all like Holbein's portrait and that he would not go through with the marriage were it not for offending her brother.

The origins of modern photography are to be found in the camera obscura (darkened room), described in the 16th cent., in which a shaft of light produced an inverted image. This could be improved if a lens was used and the inversion corrected by a mirror. The problem was to capture and reproduce the image. The German physicist Schulze demonstrated in 1727 that a mixture of chalk, nitric acid, and silver could retain an image. Thomas Wedgwood, son of the potter, experimented in the early 19th cent., but his pictures faded on exposure to light. In 1837 the French painter Daguerre produced a photograph of part of his studio and exhibited it in Paris in 1839. But since the exposure time was protracted, daguerreotype was unsuitable at first for portraits, nor could it be reproduced. Fox Talbot had already begun his own experiments at Lacock abbey in Wiltshire, using a negative, and on hearing of Daguerre's work arranged a public demonstration the same month at the Royal Institution in London. His technique was called calotype (beautiful image). By the 1850s photography was a commercial success. We have no photographs of Melbourne or Sir Robert Peel but several of Prince Albert and Palmerston. Two early and celebrated portraits are of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, taken by Robert Howlett in 1857, and of Alice Liddell (the original ‘Alice’) by Charles Dodgson in 1859. Roger Fenton's photographs from the Crimea, reproduced in the Illustrated London News, gave readers their first impressions of the scenes of war, followed in America in the 1860s by pictures of the Civil War. The census of 1851 showed that already 51 persons gave their occupations as photographers: by 1901 there were more than 17,000. At the end of the 19th cent. newspapers regularly carried photographs and the Kodak No. 1 box camera, marketed from 1888 by George Eastman, catered for the amateur photographer. The development in the 1900s of the cinema and the spread of television just before and after the Second World War meant a breadth of visual experience never known to people before.

J. A. Cannon