Evolution Of Photography Research Paper

Although the basic concept of photography has been around since fifth century B.C, the beginnings of the camera date back to the early 1800s when people began using various light-sensitive substances to produce images. In the 1820s, an inventor named Joseph Nicephore Niépce started to us light in order to produce the etchings and lithographs that he desired, calling it a heliograph. Along with Niépce, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre joined in the efforts to secure images by light in a camera. Together, they created a variant of the heliograph that used rosin on silver plates. Due to this process being very slow, Daguerre went on to discover that “a silver iodide plate required only a fraction of the exposure time and that an invisible image could

As a result of these ideas, he created the daguerreotype. This invention is very significant because it caused the industry to flourish and it “was being used commercially in every industrialized nation by the late 1840s”. Although these daguerreotypes were small and hard to copy, they were still a milestone in the development of photography. The daguerreotype allowed for the portraits of many important figures in society to be taken. This influenced the average person during the time to get their own portraits taken as well (Osterman 28). After the expansion of the daguerreotype, many efforts continued in order to improve the process of taking photographs. By the 1850’s, people were using a wet plate process that sensitized collodion film while still wet and then exposed in a camera. This process “reduced exposure times by half and made portraits in the studio

According to Szto, “Conceptualizing social problems based on empirical evidence, rather than in moral and religious categories, positioned photography to affect change because of its straightforward and truth-feeling qualities” (95). This shows that photography is capable of creating social change through the reality that it creates. It is interested to see how this affects social welfare provision within our country. Many “social welfare leaders were attracted to communicating social problems to a mass audience” (Szto 94). This is important because the images created by these leaders had a large effect on viewers. Through photography, the rich were able to see how the poor were living. Due to this, the lives of the poor were put into reality but those who were blind to it before. In addition, it has been used to evoke compassion within an individual. This is described by Szto when he states that “the camera’s ability to elicit an emotive connection between image and viewer was remarkably similar to how the human mind perceived and recorded events” (96). These emotions evoked through photography have helped shape the social situations that we have