Daguerreotype-Mania

The basis of photography began centuries before the medim was invented. People enjoyed both art and the immediate viewing of places and figures around them. Whether these were paintings, sculptures or even sketches, the introduction of art gave people a lens in order to view both the world around them and anything in their own imagination. Photography, when it emerged in the 18th century as a medium was intended for pictures of everyday life, both portraits and documentation that we existed. This was all thanks to the innovators and early photographers, especially a man named Nicéphore Niépce. Niépce and his brother, Claude, had been experimenting with photography for quite some time before Nicéphore made a breakthrough. Some of their attempts

Daguerreotype-mania was happening in Europe with Louis Daguerre having written a book on how to produce the metal plate everyone went out to buy cameras and chemicals. With the invention being prosperous inventors worked on new lenses and ways to creates images with the daguerreotype method. But while the daguerreotype was gaining speed the calotype was still a ways away. While exposure time for the calotype was going down to almost 30 seconds on a bright day, Talbot was viewed as an obstruction to the world of photography. Talbot however, continued forward with the medium eventually gaining fame for his photographs and his ideas of photography as an artistic device. People soon became interested in the calotypes negative method. But the problem still stood or how to get deeper detail that you would see in daguerreotypes onto the paper

Pictorial Photography started out as a means to create graphic imagery that could not be possible through one photograph. Thus photographs were created in the later half of the 19th century with aesthetics in mind. Photographers began to think “what would the people like to see?” and so they began to show pictures of everyday life and an all around image of society from labor to war. Civil War photography was one of the more interesting series, which focused in on the soldiers and contributors of the war. This documentary photography focused in on the people in photographs, combining the two previous styles of photography, portraits and documentary to create a photographic compromise that would propel the medium even further. Similar to the pictorial photography, a new idea was invented of composite photography. This process included taking bits of different negatives to create a full vibrant image. With new inventions in photography, it’s hard to forget that all of these photographers were still using the wet plate or albumen process, which was very difficult to say the least. In 1871 a doctor named Richard Leach Maddox, who was allergic to collodion, suggested they use gelatin instead, which worked much better than the wet plate process of the