Vintage Photographic Processes
The story of photography and photographic processes owes as much to entrepreneurial endeavours and artistic expression as it does to technological development. Precursor technologies included the principles of optics, the camera obscura and the chemistry with light sensitive substances. For example, Thomas Wedgewood showed in 1800 that silver nitrate was light sensitive but there was an issue with sensitivity and permanency, as others such as Niepce had discovered decades later. Niepce’s collaborator, Louis Daguerre shifted his efforts to silver halides, resulting in the Daguerreotype process which he presented to the French Academe de Sciences in Paris in January 1839. This is considered to be the birth of “photography” that changed the nature of visual representation forever.
Credit for coining the word “photography” has traditionally gone to Sir John Herschel in 1839. It has derivations from two Greek words, “phos” meaning light and “graphe” for drawing.
