Photography: Annotated Bibliography

Practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training from the earliest days of taking photos, the first photographers were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a trade, a science, an art, or an entertainment, and who often were unaware of each other’s work. Exactly as it sounds photography means photo-graphing. The word photography comes from two Greek words, photo, or “light”, and graphos, or drawing and from the start of photography; the history of the aforementioned has been debated. The idea of taking pictures started some thirty-one thousand years ago when strikingly sophisticated images of bears, rhinoceroses, bison, horses and many other types of creators were painted on the walls of caves found in southern France. Former director of photography at New Yorks museum of modern art says that “The progress of photography has been more like the history of farming, with a continual stream of small discoveries leading to bigger ones, and in turn triggering more experiments, inventions, and applications while the daily work goes along uninterrupted.” ˡ

For many years the only way to capture an image required one to paint or draw the model or object. This was until 1814 when Joseph Nicephore Niepce a French inventor, took the first picture in history. Even though the picture was a permanent print the image known as “View from the window at Le Guas” took eight hours to expose!

1. Gustavon, Todd. Camera: A History of Photography from daguerreotype to Digital. New York, NY: Sterling Publishing, 2009. Intro p.2

A process based on selection instead of synthesis-the invention of photography provided a radically new picture making process. As different materials we...

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...y.” -George Eastman.ˡˡ

9. Strauss, D. Levi. Between the eyes. New York, NY: Aperture Foundation, 2003.P.170

10. Gustavon, Todd. Camera: A History of Photography from daguerreotype to Digital. New York, NY: Sterling Publishing, 2009

11. Kallen, A. Stuart. Eye on Art, Photography. Farmington, MI: Lucent Books, 2007.

Works Cited

Kallen, A. Stuart. Eye on Art, Photography. Farmington, MI: Lucent Books, 2007.

2 Gustavon, Todd. Camera: A History of Photography from daguerreotype to Digital. New York, NY: Sterling Publishing, 2009

3 Strauss, D. Levi. Between the eyes. New York, NY: Aperture Foundation, 2003.

4 Szarkowski, John. The Photographers Eye. Garden City,NY: Doubleday and Co. INC. 1966.

5 Light, Ken. Tremain, Kerry. Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.