Photography timeline

  • ancient times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole

  • 16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens

  • 17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs

  • 1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.

  • 1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.

  • 1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper

  • 1826: Niépce creates a permanent image

  • 1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper.

  • 1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process.

  • 1841: Talbot patents his process under the name "calotype".

  • 1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.

  • 1853: Nadar (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris

  • 1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade

    • The ruined abbey of San Galgano, between Rome and Florence
  • 1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era

  • 1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.

  • 1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the "color separation" method.

  • 1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives

  • 1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography.

  • 1870: Center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.

  • 1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the "dry plate" process.

  • 1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse.

  • 1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.

  • 1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.

  • 1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.

  • 1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper

  • 1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of tenament life in New york City

  • 1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.

  • 1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City

  • 1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.

  • 1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France

  • 1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working mills.

  • 1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz, develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film.

  • 1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.

  • 1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris

  • 1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.

  • 1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he begins an 11-year project photographing street life

  • 1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful, close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects; Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6 cm image on rollfilm.; Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature

  • 1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT

  • 1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman, aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and shoots himself.

  • 1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit

  • 1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition to film.

  • 1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next six years. Roman Vishniac begins his project of the soon-to-be-killed-by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.

  • 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera

  • World War II:

    • Development of multi-layer color negative films
    • Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
  • 1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency

  • 1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and white film

  • 1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder

  • 1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art

  • 1959: Nikon F introduced.

  • 1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City.

  • 1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos

  • 1970: William Wegman begins photographing his Weimaraner, Man Ray.

  • 1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame

  • 1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22

  • 1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the first working CCD-based digital still camera

  • 1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William Eggleston's Guide

  • 1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed in 1980; Jan Groover begins exploring kitchen utensils

  • 1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins work on seascapes.

  • 1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid.

  • 1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera

  • 1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera)

  • 1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US); In the American West by Richard Avedon


  • 1988: Sally Mann begins publishing nude photos of her children

  • 1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new all-electronic lens mount

  • 1990: Adobe Photoshop released.

  • 1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3

  • 1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD

  • 1993: Founding of photo.net (this Web site), an early Internet online community; Sebastiao Salgado publishes Workers; Mary Ellen Mark publishes book documenting life in an Indian circus.

  • 1995: Material World, by Peter Menzel published.

  • 1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics

  • 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a leading manufacturer.

  • 2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone

  • 2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt

  • 2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with the Olympus E-1; Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000

  • 2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras

  • 2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR, with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000


    • This timeline is from http://photo.net/history/timeline
    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)