Photography is barely two hundred years old, and almost every part of it was strange when it was new. A room was a camera. A picture took days. Color arrived as potato starch. These stories follow the medium from a bitumen-coated plate in a French window to a sensor smaller than a fingernail, with the people who got there first and the ones who got the credit.
Every tile in a Photography game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pioneers
nine stories
1A gift to the world, with one exception
On the tile: DaguerreAugust 1839
In August 1839 the French government acquired the daguerreotype from Louis Daguerre in exchange for lifetime pensions and presented the process to the world as a gift, recipe and all. Five days before that announcement, a patent numbered 8194 had quietly been filed in England. The result was a strange map of photography: anyone in Paris or Philadelphia could work the process for nothing, while in England a daguerreotypist needed a license.
William Henry Fox Talbot built tiny wooden cameras, now known as his mousetraps, and set them around Lacock Abbey pointed at windows. The image he made in August 1835 of a latticed window in the south gallery is the earliest surviving photographic negative in the world. The negative mattered more than the view. Pressed against a fresh sheet of sensitized paper, it gave a positive print, and then another, and another.
Anna Atkins, an English botanist, skipped the camera entirely. She laid dried seaweed straight onto paper treated with iron salts, set it in the sun, and washed it in water, leaving ghost-white algae on deep blue. She began issuing the results in October 1843 as Photographs of British Algae, the first book ever printed and illustrated by photography. Her volumes ran to more than four hundred plates, and she wrote every scientific name by hand.
The astronomer John Herschel gave photography much of its language. He coined negative and positive for the two stages of a print, and he pushed the word photography itself into use. In 1842 he invented the cyanotype, which prints in deep blue; Anna Atkins put it to work a year later. He also solved the problem that ruined early pictures. Silver salts kept reacting to light, so Herschel fixed prints with hyposulfite of soda, still called hypo in darkrooms.
Hippolyte Bayard was an early inventor of photographic processes, and he watched the French state reward Daguerre instead. In October 1840 he posed slumped and half covered by a sheet, playing a corpse, and made what is often called the first faked photograph. On the back he wrote his own obituary, explaining that the government, having supported Monsieur Daguerre more than was necessary, could do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, so the unhappy man threw himself into the water.
The story everyone tells is that Leland Stanford wagered twenty-five thousand dollars on whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground, and hired Eadweard Muybridge to settle it. Virtually every serious historian who has looked has concluded there was no bet. Stanford wanted prestige and faster racehorses, not winnings. The photographs did settle the real argument: a horse leaves the ground in the middle of its stride, and Muybridge caught it in 1878.
Julia Margaret Cameron was forty-eight, the mother of six, and settled at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight when her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera in 1863. She did not treat it as a pastime. Within a year she had assembled albums for her family and been elected to the Photographic Society in London. Her portraits are close, dim and often slightly soft, and they still look unlike anyone else's.
8India's first woman photojournalist signed Dalda 13
On the tile: Vyarawalla
Homai Vyarawalla became India's first woman photojournalist, working in a sari with a Rolleiflex at a time when the job had no women in it. She signed her pictures Dalda 13. She photographed the end of British rule and the young republic that followed, returning again and again to Jawaharlal Nehru, her favorite subject, and she closed her press career in 1970, a year after her husband died.
Gordon Parks bought a camera at a pawnshop and taught himself to use it. In 1948 a photo essay about the life of a Harlem gang leader brought him wide acclaim and a job: the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine, where he worked for about two decades. He photographed fashion and poverty with the same care, and he was also a writer, a composer and a director of feature films.
The first Kodak, sold in 1888 for twenty-five dollars, came sealed with enough film for a hundred pictures and no way to reload it yourself. When the roll ran out you shipped the entire camera to the factory in Rochester, New York, paid ten dollars, and got back your prints and the camera, freshly loaded. George Eastman's slogan explained the bargain in eight words: you press the button, we do the rest.
In 1900 Kodak sold a box camera of stiff board and imitation leather for one dollar, and aimed the advertising squarely at children. The story goes that the name came from Palmer Cox's Brownies, the cartoon sprites every child of the day knew, and Kodak's ads did borrow their look. No Kodak document says so. What is on the record is the designer: Frank Brownell of Rochester, who built the camera and whose name fits just as well.
Oskar Barnack had asthma and could not lug the heavy plate cameras of his day, so at the Leitz optical works in Wetzlar he built a small one in 1913 and 1914 and nicknamed it Liliput. Its trick was 35mm film borrowed from the movie industry, run sideways through the camera rather than vertically. Leitz put the production model, the Leica I, on show at the Leipzig spring fair in 1925.
For decades the Speed Graphic was the American newspaper camera, a folding box that shot sheets of four by five inch film behind a focal plane shutter reaching a thousandth of a second. Graflex of Rochester built it from 1912 until 1973. Arthur Fellig, who signed his pictures Weegee, won permission in 1938 to install a police radio in his car, and with a Speed Graphic on the seat beside him he was often first on the scene.
Every Apollo crew that landed carried Hasselblad cameras onto the lunar surface, and every crew left them there. The trip home had almost no weight to spare, so the astronauts unclipped the film magazines, carried those back to the module, and abandoned the bodies and lenses where they stood. From Apollo 11 through Apollo 17 that adds up to twelve camera bodies still sitting in the dust, loaded with nothing, pointed at nothing.
On a family vacation in 1943, Edwin Land photographed his three-year-old daughter Jennifer, who asked to see the picture. The technology to show it to her did not exist; prints came back from a laboratory days later. Land set out to change that, and the first Polaroid camera went on sale in 1948, five years after the question. Instant film went on selling for the rest of the century.
7The patent office said the birds could not lift it
On the tile: Pigeon camera1908
Julius Neubronner was a German apothecary who sent medicine out by homing pigeon, and one bird came back four weeks late. Curious about where it had been, he strapped a small timed camera to a pigeon's breast on a leather harness with an aluminum breastplate. The German patent office rejected the idea, insisting no domestic pigeon could carry a seventy-five gram load. He sent them photographs and got his patent in 1908. At an exhibition in Dresden the pictures were developed on the spot and sold as postcards.
8The first digital camera was the size of a toaster
On the tile: 1975 prototype1975
In 1975 a young Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson bolted together a lens, a Fairchild sensor of a hundred by a hundred pixels, and a portable cassette recorder. Capturing a picture took fifty milliseconds; writing it to tape took twenty-three seconds. The result weighed about eight pounds, was roughly the size of a toaster, and could be viewed only on a television. Kodak took out a patent and never put it into production.
Kodak's Professional DCS, marketed from May 1991, was a Nikon F3 with its back replaced by a digital one, and it was the first digital single lens reflex camera anyone could buy. The camera stored nothing itself: a cable ran to a separate unit holding a two hundred megabyte hard disk, which the photographer carried. Pictures came out about 1.3 megapixels, and the kit cost twenty thousand dollars or more.
1The first person in a photograph was holding still
On the tile: Bootblackc. 1838
Daguerre aimed a camera out of his studio window at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, a street full of carriages and pedestrians. The exposure ran for minutes on end, so the traffic left no trace whatever. Two figures survive at the lower left: a man having his boots polished, one foot up on the box, and the bootblack bent over the work. They are widely taken to be the first people to appear in a photograph. Nobody wrote down their names.
Dorothea Lange stopped at a pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, California in March 1936 and, by her own account, made five exposures, working closer each time. She did not ask the woman's name. The caption that went out with the picture said only this: destitute pea pickers in California, mother of seven children, age thirty-two. Lange also wrote that the woman, later identified as Florence Owens Thompson, had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.
Coming around from the far side of the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, Bill Anders saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon and said out loud how pretty it was. Frank Borman, teasing him about the strict list of lunar features he was meant to photograph, told him not to take it because it was not scheduled. Anders shot a black-and-white frame, then asked Jim Lovell for a magazine of color film. NASA's transcript assigned those lines to the wrong men until a historian played the onboard tape and matched the voices.
On September 20, 1932, eleven ironworkers sat along a beam 850 feet above Manhattan, eating lunch with their feet hanging in the air. They were not caught unawares. Rockefeller Center's builders had hired photographers to generate press for a tower nearing completion, and this was the shot. Three photographers were working the site that day, and nobody has established which of them pressed the shutter.
Late on November 1, 1941, driving through New Mexico, Ansel Adams saw the moon standing over the village of Hernandez with the white crosses of its graveyard lit by the last of the sun. He set up in a hurry and could not find his light meter. Adams knew the luminance of the moon from memory, worked the exposure out in his head, and made a single negative. A moment later the light was gone.
In 1934 a London newspaper printed a photograph of a long neck rising from Loch Ness, sold to it by a physician. It convinced people for sixty years. The published version was cropped tight; the full frame showed the far shore, and that detail led researchers to Christian Spurling, who at ninety-three admitted he had built the creature by grafting a head and neck of plastic wood onto the conning tower of a toy submarine.
In the summer of 1917, two cousins in the English village of Cottingley borrowed a quarter plate camera and photographed fairies down by the beck. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had invented Sherlock Holmes, published the pictures as evidence that fairies were real. Elsie Wright finally explained them in 1983: the fairies were drawings, propped up in the grass with hatpins. The cousins had held the secret through decades of argument.
Philippe Halsman wanted Salvador Dalí suspended in midair with cats and water flying past him. His wife and one of his daughters threw three cats across the frame while the contents of a bucket went with them, Dalí jumped, and Halsman fired. He said it took twenty-eight attempts, and the session ran five or six hours. In the unretouched print you can see the wires holding the easel and an assistant's hand steadying a chair.
9A captured rocket took the first photo from space
On the tile: V-2 rocketOctober 24, 1946
On October 24, 1946, engineers at White Sands in New Mexico bolted a 35mm DeVry movie camera into the nose of a captured German V-2 and fired it straight up. It reached about 65 miles, far higher than any camera had been, then fell and hit the desert at 500 feet per second. The rocket was wreckage. The film, in a steel case, was fine. The grainy frames show clouds over the American Southwest.
Frederick Scott Archer published the wet collodion process in 1851 and never patented it; he died in poverty six years later. The process gave photographers sharp glass negatives and a stopwatch problem. A plate had to be coated, sensitized, exposed, developed and fixed while it was still wet, ten to fifteen minutes from start to finish. So photographers in the field carried a portable darkroom, often a horse-drawn wagon, and worked within sight of the subject.
Early photographic plates could not hold sea and sky at once: expose for the water and the clouds burned out, expose for the clouds and the sea went black. Gustave Le Gray got around it by printing from two negatives, one exposed for the sky and one for the water, aligned by hand before the paper went into the sun. Photographers have been blending exposures ever since.
The Lumière brothers' autochrome, on the market from 1907, put color photography in the hands of anyone who could load a glass plate. The filter was potato starch: transparent grains sieved to about a hundredth of a millimeter, dyed red, green and violet, and dusted onto the plate at roughly four million grains to the square inch. The price was patience. An autochrome needed about thirty times the exposure of a black-and-white plate.
Kodachrome was invented by two working musicians. Leopold Mannes, a pianist, and Leopold Godowsky Jr., a concert violinist, met as teenagers, got obsessed with color photography, and eventually moved their experiments into Eastman Kodak's laboratories. Working in the dark, they timed development by whistling the last movement of Brahms's C minor symphony. Kodak first sold the film in 1935, and kept making it for seventy-four years.
Photographers treat the Zone System as Ansel Adams's invention. Adams did not. He wrote that it was a codification of existing principles of sensitometry, worked out with Fred Archer at the Art Center School in Los Angeles around 1939 and 1940. The idea is easy to state and hard to master: give every brightness in a scene a number from zero to ten, decide which number a tone should land on, then expose and develop to put it there.
Harold Edgerton taught electrical engineering at MIT and insisted his photographs were a side effect of research. His tool was the stroboscope: a flash brief enough to freeze whatever was moving, whether a bullet or a golf swing. He began photographing falling milk drops in 1932, got a black-and-white version of the splash in 1936, and kept at it for two decades before the 1957 color picture of a drop landing on a red surface as a perfect crown.
Man Ray was printing photographs in the small bathroom he used as a darkroom in Paris when an unexposed sheet of paper slipped into the developing tray. Rather than waste it, he set a glass funnel, a measuring glass and a thermometer on the wet paper, switched on the light, and watched shapes rise out of nothing. He called the results rayographs, and in 1922 he published twelve of them as Champs délicieux, with a preface by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara.
A digital sensor counts light, not color, so Bryce Bayer at Kodak laid a checkerboard of red, green and blue filters over the pixels and let arithmetic reconstruct the rest. He used twice as many green filters as red or blue, to match the way the human eye works. Kodak filed the patent in March 1975 and it issued in July 1976. Nearly every color camera made since, including the one in your pocket, uses his pattern.
In October 1969, Willard Boyle and George Smith sat down at Bell Labs and sketched out the charge-coupled device in less than an hour. A CCD turns light into electric charge, then shuffles that charge along a row of cells to be counted, which is how a photograph became a list of numbers. Forty years later the Royal Swedish Academy gave the two of them half of the 2009 physics Nobel, for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit.