What is Photography?
“Photography is many things – it can be news, evidence, identification, beauty, information, memory, art, and many more without one having to assume primacy over any other. The medium’s plurality has profoundly shifted the way in photography.” – Carla Williams
For me, Photography is a modern art that very useful in this globalization era.
What is the purpose of photography?
The purpose of photography itself is from why, how, and what for someone make the images.
The main thing that useful for photography is camera.
What is Camera?
Camera is a room. That’s why in Bahasa Indonesia, room called “Kamar” it’s because room is camera and camera is a room.
Why camera is a room?
Look at this picture.
That is camera obscura concept.
Camera obscura concept is the first concept that created camera. It concept using pin hole and a room as a camera.
In Mid XIX century photography was appear. It comes from two aspects, social and economy. Social is because the portraits of bourgeoisie and economy is because selling products and modern capitalism.
In 1839, after camera obscura concepts founded, Daguerre created first camera in this world, called Daguerreotype camera. Daguerre is the guy who invented photography. He created world first commercial photography techniques. He is French guy. He led the introduction of photography. Popularity of the daguerreotype declined in the late 1850s when the ambrotype, a faster and less expensive photographic process, became available. A few contemporary photographers have revived the process.
Daguerreotype camera has a very long process, a direct-positive process, creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative. The process required great care. The silver-plated copper plate had first to be cleaned and polished until the surface looked like a mirror. Next, the plate was sensitized in a closed box over iodine until it took on a yellow-rose appearance. The plate, held in a lightproof holder, was then transferred to the camera. After exposure to light, the plate was developed over hot mercury until an image appeared. To fix the image, the plate was immersed in a solution of sodium thiosulfate or salt and then toned with gold chloride. Exposure times for the earliest daguerreotypes ranged from three to fifteen minutes, making the process nearly impractical for portraiture. Modifications to the sensitization process coupled with the improvement of photographic lenses soon reduced the exposure time to less than a minute.
Photography also related to pictorialism and stereographs.
What is pictorialism?
Pictorialism is proposed the idea of photography as an art form. Because, before people known pictorialism, photography is not an art. Photography and art are not related. Pictorialism also created auto-focus images.
What is Stereographs?
Stereographs is a part of photography that have fuction for amusement.
There are so many famous photographer in that era, such as Lewis Caroll, Edward Curtis, Edward Weston, and many more.
Lewis Caroll create photography about children. Edward Curtis about idealistic, and Edward Weston characteristic is modernism photography that created about landscape photos and human body.
References:
Visual Cultures 