Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our
Speaker 1: discussion of the invention of photography. Now, last time, we
Speaker 1: got up to the moment of invention, the debut of
Speaker 1: the Daguero type of of course Louis Daguerre in Paris,
Speaker 1: and the early paper based negative photo procedure of Henry
Speaker 1: Fox Talbot in England, which was initially far less successful. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we spent a lot of time talking about the
Speaker 1: early laborious methods of taking a photograph, but the startling
Speaker 1: and just game changing results, uh that they gave us. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in all that discussion of de Guarat types,
Speaker 1: I neglected to mention my Daguarat type boyfriend and what
Speaker 1: is this? This is a I believe it was a
Speaker 1: tumbler page and it was just a collection of like
Speaker 1: handsome do dudes with their you know, their photo having
Speaker 1: been taken with the Deguarat type. A lot of like
Speaker 1: a really neat sideburns and whatnot. But it was kind
Speaker 1: of a trend at least a few years ago. I
Speaker 1: remember it making the rounds and people having a lot
Speaker 1: of fun with it. I'm looking at it now. You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things is nobody smiling in their deguaratype. Yes,
Speaker 1: some guys look kind of smug, but it's not really
Speaker 1: a smile, right, And there's an important reason for that,
Speaker 1: which we'll get into in this episode. This is a
Speaker 1: great blog now that I'm looking at it. Do you
Speaker 1: have a favorite old school deguerotype or I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's actually a deguaratype. The one I'm going to
Speaker 1: bring up in an old school photograph doppelganger a favorite
Speaker 1: one of those? Of course? I love the old Nicholas
Speaker 1: Cage from the nineteenth century. Yeah, I think that that's
Speaker 1: the main one that comes to mind. But because yeah,
Speaker 1: you go back to enough photographic history, even though we
Speaker 1: have very little of it really, I mean, can can
Speaker 1: compare to the you know, the deeper history of of
Speaker 1: the human species. But yeah, you can find these weird
Speaker 1: doppelgangers where you're like, that looks like Stevie Sinny, especially
Speaker 1: if I just kind of, you know, blur my eyes
Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah. So, last time we covered this
Speaker 1: transition from the resin based heliography method of Joseph Nissa fourneeps,
Speaker 1: the French inventor and scientist and aristocrat to the big
Speaker 1: breakthrough announced and described in eighteen thirty nine by Louis Dega,
Speaker 1: the da Gara type method, which for a brief refresher
Speaker 1: on how that worked. Remember it had many steps, so
Speaker 1: that was sort of Dagar's breakthrough was the multi step
Speaker 1: chemistry procedure um. So it involved sensitizing a silver coated
Speaker 1: plate with iodine fumes, and this would produce a layer
Speaker 1: of the light sensitive compound silver iodide. And then you'd
Speaker 1: expose that plate inside a camera obscura. And then, and
Speaker 1: this is the real genius step, you would take the
Speaker 1: lightly exposed plate on which the image would still be
Speaker 1: invisible to the naked eye. You couldn't see anything yet,
Speaker 1: and you would develop that by exposing it to mercury fumes,
Speaker 1: which would bring out the latent image on the plate
Speaker 1: and create a sharp contrast. Uh And then finally you'd
Speaker 1: wash off the remaining silver eyedide to prevent further darkening.
Speaker 1: And originally this washing off step took place in in
Speaker 1: hot salt water until the better solution of hyposulfite of
Speaker 1: soda now known as sodium. Theosulfate was suggested by John Herschel. Now,
Speaker 1: I think it's widely agreed that Digear's most original and
Speaker 1: brilliant contribution to the invention of photography was this chemical
Speaker 1: development stage. Of course, the development was so useful because
Speaker 1: it greatly cut down on exposure times, which before had
Speaker 1: been very long. Before the development stage, you might have
Speaker 1: to expose a plate for hours at a time, like
Speaker 1: maybe seven hours or twelve hours before the image would
Speaker 1: really come through on it. You only had to get
Speaker 1: a very faint initial exposure of maybe ten to fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes before you could develop it with the mercury fumes,
Speaker 1: which sounds like a lot to us. But but like
Speaker 1: you said, it was a huge improvement over hours of
Speaker 1: exposure time. Yeah, gigantic difference back then. I mean that
Speaker 1: it made it suddenly realistic to photograph landscapes. So if
Speaker 1: you had to expose a plate for hours on a landscape,
Speaker 1: all the shadows would be messed up, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: shadows are such an important part of our our view
Speaker 1: of the natural world. If the shadows keep shifting over
Speaker 1: the many hours of exposure, nothing's going to look right.
Speaker 1: Um Now. Also in the last episode, we talked about
Speaker 1: the English polymath, scientist, politician and inventor Henry Fox Talbot,
Speaker 1: who had independently invented a kind of different method of
Speaker 1: photography years earlier in England. But unfortunately, even though he
Speaker 1: invented it first, he never got around to publishing his
Speaker 1: findings until after de Gara announced his invention in France
Speaker 1: and was cemented in the minds of most people as
Speaker 1: the inventor of photography. Henry Fox Talbot's original method was different.
Speaker 1: It used paper instead of these sensitized metal plates. He
Speaker 1: sensitized the paper to light by coating it in silver chloride,
Speaker 1: and then he would expose it in a camera for
Speaker 1: a longer period than Diga's final method, and then wash
Speaker 1: it off afterwards to stop the exposure. Now, Talbot actually
Speaker 1: had a few different methods over time. After Dager's method
Speaker 1: was announced in eighteen thirty nine, Talbot eventually went on
Speaker 1: to create and patent a different process known as the
Speaker 1: Calo type, which also made use of a different chemical
Speaker 1: form of Dagas concept of development right to shorten the
Speaker 1: exposure time needed in the camera. And while Dagas method
Speaker 1: produced these kind of sharp, one of a kind positive,
Speaker 1: shiny reflective images on metal plates. Talbot's method produced kind
Speaker 1: of fuzzy, soft, but highly replicable, copyable negative images on paper.
Speaker 1: So these are the two main things you've got by
Speaker 1: eighteen forty and again we just have to drive home
Speaker 1: how photography was this collision of advancements in optics, chemistry,
Speaker 1: and the r it's all of it coming together, uh,
Speaker 1: just the right time, with just the right individuals. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things we talked about in the
Speaker 1: last episode is how surprising it is that this, this
Speaker 1: first big breakthrough comes from Louis de Guerre, who was
Speaker 1: not a scientist. He was not he was not trained
Speaker 1: in chemistry. Digerre was a painter. He was an artist.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was clearly a very clever and energetic
Speaker 1: kind of go getter, but he he was not trained
Speaker 1: in chemistry. He didn't have a lot of scientific knowledge.
Speaker 1: He was kind of just bumbling around in the dark
Speaker 1: in a way, at least at first. And one of
Speaker 1: the funny things about this is we know a lot
Speaker 1: about what Henry Fox Talbot was doing because he usually
Speaker 1: took extensive notes and journals about his ideas and his
Speaker 1: projects de Garrett generally did not. So remember last time
Speaker 1: we talked about how Louis de Guerre had this brief
Speaker 1: partnership with with niece four Niepps. How did Gare got
Speaker 1: from Niepps's heliography which used this resin and wasn't really
Speaker 1: like the ultimate process of the Daguero type to the
Speaker 1: Daguero type. What happened in those years in between is
Speaker 1: not fully known. We don't have accurate, reliable information about
Speaker 1: what Degres postings, partnership experiments were, or like what roadmap
Speaker 1: of discoveries led to his inventions, So there's kind of
Speaker 1: a mystery there. There are stories that were reported later.
Speaker 1: One common example of one of these stories is the
Speaker 1: story about Degres magic cabinet. Have you ever heard about this?
Speaker 1: Uh No, but it already sounds uh perhaps a little
Speaker 1: dramatic size you know very well could be apocryphal. But
Speaker 1: that's always the tendency, right, Like do you lay out
Speaker 1: the various steps and and uh minor revelations that lead
Speaker 1: to some sort of an invention, or do you come
Speaker 1: up with something uh more sexy like I saw it
Speaker 1: in a dream, you know? Or do you tell a
Speaker 1: good story? Yeah, and so The Magic Cabinet is one
Speaker 1: of these good stories that might not be true. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: it was about how he discovered the developing process, his
Speaker 1: most his most important key insight on photography the mercury
Speaker 1: fumes to bring out the latent image from a short exposure. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: what happened is that Degare had under exposed a plate
Speaker 1: and then he put it inside a cabinet that he
Speaker 1: was storing some chemicals in, and then came back later
Speaker 1: and found that the under exposed plate had had an
Speaker 1: image brought out in it, and it was like, WHOA,
Speaker 1: what's going on here? And he realized it must have
Speaker 1: been exposure to one of the chemicals in the cabinet.
Speaker 1: So he just started removing one chemical at a time
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out what it was, until eventually
Speaker 1: he had removed everything from the cabinet and the cabinet
Speaker 1: was still doing this. It was still bringing out the
Speaker 1: image in under exposed plates, until he discovered that some
Speaker 1: mercury had been spilled inside the cabinet and it was
Speaker 1: this spill that was that was creating bringing the image out. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, that seems like a plausible story, and even
Speaker 1: if it didn't quite happen like that. It is a
Speaker 1: it is a nice way of describing, you know, how
Speaker 1: he might have discovered it, you know, like it's this
Speaker 1: nice story shaped explanation. Yes. And I will say, for
Speaker 1: all of Dager's apparently good qualities, he he does not
Speaker 1: strike me, having read a good bit about his life now,
Speaker 1: as someone who would be above making up a story
Speaker 1: about how things came about. Because he was a salesman,
Speaker 1: you know, businessman. A lot of his his accomplishments came from,
Speaker 1: you know, as we said in the last episode, you know,
Speaker 1: being a great networker, being karas mad at, being able
Speaker 1: to bring people together and get them behind his vision. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So when d Get revealed his method publicly, he actually
Speaker 1: he did not take out a patent on the process
Speaker 1: anywhere except in England, or I don't know if he
Speaker 1: actually held it. I think a different guy held this patent.
Speaker 1: But there was a patent on the daguerrotype process in England,
Speaker 1: but only in England. Uh And instead Dagara was given
Speaker 1: a pension by the French government and the Daguara type
Speaker 1: method was sort of presented as a free gift to
Speaker 1: the world from France. Except guests to England. Henry Fox Talbot,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, he tried to patent his callow
Speaker 1: type process, though he faced enormous resistance and public scorn.
Speaker 1: And it is amazing, by the way, to read sections
Speaker 1: from articles in publications like The Economist viciously attacking the
Speaker 1: very concept of patents as quote injurious to the progress
Speaker 1: of production and to the common weelfare and thus illegitimate
Speaker 1: in the light of the principle of property rights. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine that? Well, yeah, it certainly makes sense. I mean,
Speaker 1: you still see various discussions these days about things that
Speaker 1: are being patent certainly in the you know, sort of
Speaker 1: the genetic sciences. Oh yeah, So you know, it's not
Speaker 1: too much of elite to imagine people getting upset about
Speaker 1: the the idea of patenting photography, especially in retrospect, seeing
Speaker 1: like what effects photography had. I'm not surprised in that.
Speaker 1: It's not that I don't think it's a legitimate ethical
Speaker 1: debate to be had. I'm is kind of surprised we'd
Speaker 1: see this coming from The Economist in the eighteen forties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it also seems a little unfair that Talbot is the
Speaker 1: one who's who who gets it here, you know, because
Speaker 1: he's he's kind of coming up just a little behind
Speaker 1: Deger at every turn. Yeah, and uh So, in those
Speaker 1: first few decades, the world of photography was absolutely dominated
Speaker 1: by the daguerotype, and and Talbot really seems to have
Speaker 1: gotten the short end of the stick, even though his
Speaker 1: inside of producing negatives that could be easily copied would
Speaker 1: later prove hugely important to photography as as you might guess.
Speaker 1: But any way, pretty much immediately after it was publicly
Speaker 1: explained and demonstrated, the dagaratype became enormously popular, and people
Speaker 1: all over we're trying it out. Initial reception of the
Speaker 1: method was was mostly extremely positive, and in the last
Speaker 1: episode we discussed a few examples of this, like the
Speaker 1: absolutely glowing reception uh the daguerotype got from Edgar Allan
Speaker 1: Poe when he described its quality as quote truth itself
Speaker 1: in the suprem nous of it perfection. One of the
Speaker 1: types of reviews that I like less I feel kind
Speaker 1: of icky about, but I see pretty often as people
Speaker 1: who are repeatedly, uh negatively comparing traditional artistic methods to
Speaker 1: the daguero type. Like there's this example Polish in the
Speaker 1: Gazette de France in UH in its announcement about the
Speaker 1: Daguero type in eighteen thirty nine, quote, you will see
Speaker 1: how far from the truth of the Daguero type are
Speaker 1: your pencils and brushes. That's right, artists for lunatics. Now
Speaker 1: it sounds like a line that will be spoken by
Speaker 1: like a villain in a video game. You know, that's
Speaker 1: already been translated poorly. Once you will see how weak
Speaker 1: are your brushes. But I can I can imagine there
Speaker 1: might be you know, the kind of tension, right, It's
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh, my goodness, but the photos exist. Now,
Speaker 1: is this going to impact my career as a painter? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we can. We always see that kind of
Speaker 1: anxiety and perhaps uh, you know, overestimation of of what
Speaker 1: a new technology can do exactly. And and I think
Speaker 1: in some ways that reaction was sort of reasonable, even
Speaker 1: though you know, we view painting and photography as different things.
Speaker 1: Obviously some artists would have viewed photography not just as
Speaker 1: a new art form, but as a substitute for realist
Speaker 1: painting or a general replacement for traditional forms of art.
Speaker 1: I want to mention the story that's related in one
Speaker 1: of my main sources on these episodes. A book by
Speaker 1: Helen Rappaport and Roger Watson called Capturing the Light The
Speaker 1: Birth of Photography, A True Story of Genius and Rivalry,
Speaker 1: which is a great book that goes into detail in
Speaker 1: the lives of Louis de Guerre and Henry Fox Talbot especially,
Speaker 1: but there's a section where it mentions this famous story.
Speaker 1: This only reported many years after the fact, so again
Speaker 1: possibly untrue, kind of like Degare's own story about where
Speaker 1: the idea of the mercury fumes came from. But this
Speaker 1: is a story that the realist painter Paul Delaroche, who
Speaker 1: was known for realistic looking depictions of historical scenes such
Speaker 1: as the execution of Lady Jane Gray, you might have
Speaker 1: seen that painting before. Uh that he saw a daguerotype
Speaker 1: for the first time and commented, quote from today, painting
Speaker 1: is dead. So he may not have actually said this,
Speaker 1: but it no doubt reflects like an anxiety that some
Speaker 1: in the art world must have felt. And remember, today
Speaker 1: we appreciate photography and painting as a as like separate
Speaker 1: art forms, they each have their own uses. But before photography,
Speaker 1: painting wasn't just a fine art. It also served practical
Speaker 1: purposes that we now mostly leave up entirely to photography,
Speaker 1: such as family portraiture. Like, while photography doesn't supersede all
Speaker 1: forms of painting, there were clearly some cases where it
Speaker 1: did simply automate work that would once have been done
Speaker 1: by a human painter. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it. How
Speaker 1: like that the one area that we were one of
Speaker 1: the few areas were able to sort of keep photography
Speaker 1: out of it is think of the courtroom in some
Speaker 1: cases where you have where you have the courtroom sketch
Speaker 1: still being an important part of the journalist effort there.
Speaker 1: That's a funny inversion because I mean one of the
Speaker 1: earliest uses of photography that will discuss later on as
Speaker 1: like it's like a form of objective evidence to use
Speaker 1: in court. But yeah, there are prohibitions in some cases
Speaker 1: of allowing cameras into the courtrooms. And so now you
Speaker 1: get to see, like what does it look like when
Speaker 1: you draw a picture of Paul Manifort. Yeah, and some
Speaker 1: of these pictures are still rather amusing in the ambiguity
Speaker 1: that is sometimes possible with just a what is you know,
Speaker 1: probably a rushed sketch of of of happenings in a courtroom. Now,
Speaker 1: apart from the anxiety of painters and artists, there also
Speaker 1: uh were a few at least to question the morality
Speaker 1: or propriety of photography as a medium. And there was
Speaker 1: a really interesting article that was quoted in in Watson
Speaker 1: and Rapp reports book from a German publication called The
Speaker 1: Leipziger Stattenzeiger, and it goes a little something like this quote.
Speaker 1: The wi to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible,
Speaker 1: as has been shown by thorough German investigation, but the
Speaker 1: mere desire alone, the will to do so is blasphemy. Blasphemy.
Speaker 1: God created man in his own image, and no man
Speaker 1: made machine may fix the image of God. Is it
Speaker 1: possible that God should have abandoned his eternal principles and
Speaker 1: allowed a Frenchman in Paris to give to the world
Speaker 1: an invention of the devil, the idea of the revolution fraternity,
Speaker 1: and Napoleon's ambition to turn Europe into one realm. All
Speaker 1: these crazy ideas, Monsieur de gear now claims to surpass
Speaker 1: because he wants to outdo the creator of the world.
Speaker 1: If this thing were at all possible, then something similar
Speaker 1: would have been done a long time ago in antiquity
Speaker 1: by men like Archimedes or Moses. But if these wise
Speaker 1: men knew nothing of mirror pictures made permanent, then one
Speaker 1: can straightaway call the Frenchman to gear who boasts of
Speaker 1: such unheard of things, the fool of fools. Well that's
Speaker 1: the that's a kind of a confusing review. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: he can't possibly do it, and since he's doing it,
Speaker 1: it's very bad. Wow. Uh so that that is definitely
Speaker 1: a negative review for um, the Garrett type. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it's interesting because this does not seem to be
Speaker 1: a common reaction to it. It seems, by and large
Speaker 1: people were very excited by it. But it does reflect
Speaker 1: the general impression of the magnitude of photography as an invention. Right.
Speaker 1: It seems absurd now that people would think of photography
Speaker 1: as a blasphemy, but I think it's possible back then
Speaker 1: for people to think this way because this was such
Speaker 1: a strange and new and unheard of thing. And yet
Speaker 1: at the at the same time, like like I'm trying
Speaker 1: really zoning in on no man made machine may fix
Speaker 1: the image of God. Now, obviously people were and again
Speaker 1: that saying this because the idea that man is made
Speaker 1: and uh in the likeness of God and all that.
Speaker 1: But uh so, just merely fixing the image of God
Speaker 1: can't be the thing he's upset about because because painting
Speaker 1: did that. It's the idea that it's a machine. Is
Speaker 1: that this idea that that we have made a thing
Speaker 1: that does the thing? Is this like a Butlerian Jihad
Speaker 1: kind of situation? Oh yeah, you shall not make an
Speaker 1: image in the what make a machine? And the likeness
Speaker 1: of human human mind? Yeah? Yeah, it reminds me a
Speaker 1: lot of that. Well, I don't know. I mean, there
Speaker 1: is a thing that's very often mentioned by people writing
Speaker 1: about photography at the time, in the eighteen forties and
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties, is there there's all this mention of the sun.
Speaker 1: I think now because we often take photos in rooms
Speaker 1: with artificial light, Like our cameras are more sensitive, they
Speaker 1: can take dim photos. We have cameras with cameras with flashes,
Speaker 1: we have you know, brighter artificial lights. Back then, there
Speaker 1: was all all of this talk about how when you
Speaker 1: take a photo, it's heliography, right, the sun is drawing
Speaker 1: your pictures for you. It's all about sunlight because that
Speaker 1: was the only light that was generally bright enough to
Speaker 1: actually create a photo exposure. So I think maybe this
Speaker 1: association with the sun is one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: somebody might have a more religious reaction to it, right
Speaker 1: that that that it's like the sun, the source of all,
Speaker 1: you know, the the symbol of God's glory shining down
Speaker 1: on all things bright and beautiful, all things great and small.
Speaker 1: Now it's making images for you, and this is a
Speaker 1: perversion of the light that God has given to us,
Speaker 1: fixed it in darkness. Yeah, but like I said, I
Speaker 1: do not get any indication that this was like a
Speaker 1: major opinion. It might have been popular in Germany. I
Speaker 1: don't know, just because they didn't like Frenchmen that that
Speaker 1: didn't like the fact that the dgear that this was
Speaker 1: like something that France was bragging about. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's our free gift to the world, and and some
Speaker 1: Frenchman really did take take on that idea right of
Speaker 1: of giving it to the world, of sharing photography with
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, overall, people loved the Daguero type and
Speaker 1: it gave way to a sort of Daguerreotype craze in
Speaker 1: which amage you're in professional photographers by the hundreds embarked
Speaker 1: on all kinds of projects of documenting things. One example
Speaker 1: in the early days is this French optician named Noel
Speaker 1: Paymal lara Bor, and he had the idea to equip
Speaker 1: a team of traveling de guerra typists to go around
Speaker 1: the world and capture images of foreign landscapes and sites
Speaker 1: of interest, and then then to send the images back
Speaker 1: to Paris so that people could see these places like
Speaker 1: Niagara Falls, like the Great Mosque of Algiers, or like
Speaker 1: the Acropolis, see them in full realism for the first time.
Speaker 1: Lara Bor wanted to publish them in a book, which
Speaker 1: he did in eighteen forty one called Excurgion dig de
Speaker 1: guerrienes da guariens. I think, except there's a problem, because
Speaker 1: remember what's true about the daguerrotype. The Daguera type is
Speaker 1: an opaque, one of a kind print on a metal plate.
Speaker 1: It can't be copied directly, and at the time certainly
Speaker 1: it couldn't be printed in a book. So unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: best he could do was to have the daguerrotypes from
Speaker 1: these locations redrawn by hand as engravings so they could
Speaker 1: be printed in the book, which is. I mean, on
Speaker 1: one hand, there there actually was a great level of
Speaker 1: realism in these engravings and illustrations, since the engravings were
Speaker 1: copied from real photographs. But they weren't the photographs themselves.
Speaker 1: A kind of bizarre irony. The first like big book
Speaker 1: of photographs wasn't it wasn't photographs illustrations. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take a quick break. When we
Speaker 1: come back, we will continue to discuss the de Guara
Speaker 1: type craze and other developments in early photography. Alright, we're
Speaker 1: back now. Remember the Dagara type was revealed in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine, sort of announced I think in January, and
Speaker 1: then he really described his process publicly in August, and
Speaker 1: by December eighteen thirty nine there were already jokes about
Speaker 1: how trendy this new invention of photography had become. One
Speaker 1: really great one is a lithograph by the artist Theodore
Speaker 1: Morrissette called La ladgera type of many. I think that's
Speaker 1: the French version. I think it means degera type of mania. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it is this manic, hieronymous, bosh like hell of
Speaker 1: people swarming all around with camera boxes and photographing everything.
Speaker 1: There's even a camera hanging from a hot air balloon,
Speaker 1: apparently anticipating like spy planes. Uh. My favorite detail is
Speaker 1: up in the upper right of the image, which appears
Speaker 1: to be some kind of a cult ritual in which
Speaker 1: pagan revelers are dancing in a circle lasciviously around a
Speaker 1: steaming vat of mercury. Remember the mercury fumes where the
Speaker 1: where the chemical insight used to develop the quick exposed print. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is amusing because it also reminds me of our
Speaker 1: reaction to various other bits of technology. In fact, often
Speaker 1: photographic technology. Uh, like, for instance, selfie sticks come to mind.
Speaker 1: You can well imagine the same illustration Asian popping up
Speaker 1: in uh contemporary news paper to criticize the widespread juice
Speaker 1: of selfie sticks or the or a Pokemon phone game
Speaker 1: or whatever kind of handheld technological craze is sweeping the nation. Well,
Speaker 1: you know who hated selfies was the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: obviously they didn't have selfies then, but the equivalent. So
Speaker 1: I would like to talk a bit about portraits of people,
Speaker 1: because this is one of the most important early uses
Speaker 1: of photography. But to quote Bodelaire writing in eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: nine about the early days of photography, Get this, A
Speaker 1: vengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this
Speaker 1: multitude to gear was his messiah. From that moment, our
Speaker 1: squalid society rushed narcissus to a man to gaze at
Speaker 1: his trivial image on a scrap of metal. A madness
Speaker 1: and extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun worshippers.
Speaker 1: There's the sun again. But also so he's being a jerk.
Speaker 1: He's being like the grump who's mad about selfie sticks.
Speaker 1: But at the same time he's not wrong, right, Like,
Speaker 1: once people could take photos, what's the one thing people
Speaker 1: would really most want photos of? Well, themselves, right and
Speaker 1: in a less narcissistic vein, of their families and loved ones.
Speaker 1: But obviously there was a lot of demand for people
Speaker 1: to have photos of themselves and people they knew. And
Speaker 1: this is a far more affordable option, even at this
Speaker 1: level of photography, compared to getting say a talented painter,
Speaker 1: hiring a painter to to create your likeness on on
Speaker 1: a canvas. That's absolutely true. Photography was an egalitarian innovation.
Speaker 1: Painted portraiture was very expensive. Only the rich could afford it,
Speaker 1: but even regular people could save up to pay a
Speaker 1: de Garat typist for a portrait and individual portrait or
Speaker 1: a family portrait. This suddenly put realistic imagery of people
Speaker 1: within the pocketbook reach of normal people. And it was
Speaker 1: also clear early on the lot of the commerce full
Speaker 1: potential for the new art and technology of photography would
Speaker 1: be in portraits of people. That's what people want to
Speaker 1: pay money for, and so obviously people wanted to start,
Speaker 1: you know, de Garat type portraiture businesses. But there's a problem.
Speaker 1: Portraits were a very, very difficult proposition for the earliest
Speaker 1: photography methods because exposure times were still too long too
Speaker 1: sharply capture live subjects. When Degar revealed his method, he'd
Speaker 1: gotten the exposure through through the chemical development. He'd gotten
Speaker 1: exposure down from hours to minutes, but even the minutes
Speaker 1: were really hard. It's hard to hold a pose without
Speaker 1: moving at all for ten or fifteen minutes, right. You
Speaker 1: might end up moving somehow, changing your facial expression, and
Speaker 1: that's going to create blurry nous, which is going to
Speaker 1: lessen the value of the photo, which is an impediment
Speaker 1: to commercial success. And in fact, when I was reading
Speaker 1: about this, I started to wonder if the you know,
Speaker 1: eighteen forties exposure times of around ten or fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: are an explanation for why people in old photos are
Speaker 1: so rarely smiling. Oh yeah, because I mean, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of us can can look at this, even
Speaker 1: our own family histories, dig up these old photos and
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of like pain godish looking humans. You know, um,
Speaker 1: they just got bad news, right, And and of course
Speaker 1: one of the things is a lot of times we're
Speaker 1: looking at pictures from rougher time, so it's easy to
Speaker 1: just fall in line with thinking, oh, well, you know
Speaker 1: it was it was tough back then. You know, this
Speaker 1: is this photo was taken perhaps at a funeral um.
Speaker 1: But no, it's not. I mean, people in the past
Speaker 1: were happy. There were times that they smiled, but but
Speaker 1: it was just not very often in photos. And I
Speaker 1: think one reason for this is that try to hold
Speaker 1: a smile for fifteen minutes. Oh yeah, it's certainly anything
Speaker 1: approaching a natural looking smile. Now, this would only apply
Speaker 1: to like the earlier photos that had the longer exposure
Speaker 1: times as as time went on, as the years went on,
Speaker 1: exposure times got shorter and shorter, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: how in a minute, but it's really hard to hold
Speaker 1: a smile for even just five minutes, right, And apparently
Speaker 1: I'm not the first person to wonder about this. I
Speaker 1: was looking this up and I found a really great
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen piece in Vox by Phil Edwards about why
Speaker 1: people didn't smile in old photos, and there are several explanations.
Speaker 1: The first point we should note is that some people
Speaker 1: actually did smile in old photos, just not as many
Speaker 1: as we're used to today now in our culture, when
Speaker 1: you take a picture, you smile, right, This was just
Speaker 1: not nearly as common. But I found you know, there's
Speaker 1: one great example. Uh that's kind of hard to believe.
Speaker 1: It was taken in nineteen o four, but it was
Speaker 1: taken in nineteen o four in China by a photographer
Speaker 1: and anthropologist named Berthold Lawfer, and it looks like it
Speaker 1: was taken last year. It does. It's I mean, for
Speaker 1: one thing, it's it's just a high quality. But a
Speaker 1: lot of it too, is the fact that the the
Speaker 1: individual in the photo is smiling. There is there's emotion
Speaker 1: beaming through their face and you're just you're just not
Speaker 1: used to seeing that in pictures from nineteen o four.
Speaker 1: And and I think also, you know, you mentioned, you know,
Speaker 1: to Gara types in this effort to like document other
Speaker 1: places and other people's uh and so you know, you
Speaker 1: give rise to all this anthropological photography, you know, which
Speaker 1: I think on one level, you know, there's this noble
Speaker 1: effort to document and understand other other people. But at
Speaker 1: the at the same time, if you can't get them
Speaker 1: to smile, if they if you're having to depend on
Speaker 1: these long exposures and you're getting like a grim dour expression,
Speaker 1: like if if most photographic proof of the human species
Speaker 1: is is like a grim faced person who's ready for this,
Speaker 1: this long exposure to be done with. Like you're not
Speaker 1: getting a true sense of of the people, You're not
Speaker 1: You're missing out on a vital aspect of the human condition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's one reason we're seeing here. And
Speaker 1: now this photo was taken later when exposure times were shorter.
Speaker 1: Uh So, so the exposure time isn't nearly as much
Speaker 1: an issue here, but uh this this was an anthropologist
Speaker 1: who was trying to document life, who wasn't like you
Speaker 1: know it wasn't like this is the portrait of this
Speaker 1: man in the photo who that will be his portrait
Speaker 1: that hangs in his house forever. He's trying to show
Speaker 1: what life was like. And in life, a lot of
Speaker 1: times people smile because they're happy. This guy's got He's
Speaker 1: like a guy sitting there at a table with a
Speaker 1: bowl of rice and he looks really excited. But anyway,
Speaker 1: even though some people did smile in old photos, if
Speaker 1: you see a photo from the US or Europe from
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, there's a very good chance that the
Speaker 1: subjects are not smiling. And yes, if it's a photo
Speaker 1: from those early years of photography, you know one of
Speaker 1: the eighteen forties Dagara types say, a good reason why
Speaker 1: nobody is smiling is probably exactly what we've been discussing.
Speaker 1: You can't hold a smile as long as they had
Speaker 1: to expose the plate. But there are some interesting other
Speaker 1: explanations mentioned in that Phil Edwards piece. One was just
Speaker 1: the idea that early photography was art and it was
Speaker 1: seen as sort of a new version of painting, and
Speaker 1: in painted portraits generally people didn't smile because that was
Speaker 1: the artistic style, right. So, and as we discussed I
Speaker 1: think the first photo episode. Uh, the photographic technology like
Speaker 1: picks up where painting left off, so the the existing
Speaker 1: styles would carry over. And then I'm also imagining that
Speaker 1: if there if there was some aspect of portraiture style
Speaker 1: that was due to the limitations of the technology, such
Speaker 1: as disposure times, like that would either uh you know,
Speaker 1: it would either further ingrain the standards or it would
Speaker 1: uh it would it would make this be the standard
Speaker 1: of the photograph, you know, like you would establish conventions
Speaker 1: even if it wasn't necessarily still necessitated by the technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because otherwise the photographer shows up, Hey there's a new camera.
Speaker 1: Now everybody can smile. You might be like, well, why
Speaker 1: would I smile? That's just not done. We didn't used
Speaker 1: to smile and photographs, Why am I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be the dummy to start doing it exactly. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: point made in this Edwards piece that's interesting is that,
Speaker 1: you know, early photos are not the same as our photos.
Speaker 1: Our photos are often just ephemeral records capturing individual moments,
Speaker 1: and we understand them to be about moments. They're about
Speaker 1: what was going on in this one second and how
Speaker 1: we were feeling then and a lot of times in
Speaker 1: that vain people want to be smiling to show their
Speaker 1: having a good time. But photos back then weren't like that.
Speaker 1: They were sort of precious and immortal records of people
Speaker 1: as people, not not of moments as moments, right. And
Speaker 1: and also they were private, which is something that I
Speaker 1: think is easy to forget with with photographs today. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously there's still a lot of private photography. Not everybody is,
Speaker 1: you know, is taking their their latest family photos and
Speaker 1: uh and plastering them all over the world, but a
Speaker 1: lot of people are. I mean, that's become what we
Speaker 1: do with photos. A lot of the photographs we take,
Speaker 1: we're taking to share, at least with a select audience
Speaker 1: on social media, or to you know, put on a resume,
Speaker 1: to put on our online and resume or what have you. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: In in contrast, I think these old photos, when people
Speaker 1: were first getting photo portraits made in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the photo was interpreted as something like a painted port portrait.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a serious artifact representing your immortal character.
Speaker 1: I think the difference between a photo today and a
Speaker 1: photo of the eighteen fifties was kind of the difference
Speaker 1: between a tweet and a eulogy, and to take that
Speaker 1: to extremes. I mean, in Victorian culture, it was a
Speaker 1: relatively common practice to photograph the dead and dead members
Speaker 1: of your family as a record of a person. Somebody
Speaker 1: in your family would die and you the only photo
Speaker 1: of them you might have might be of them as
Speaker 1: a corpse. Yeah. I think a lot of us out there,
Speaker 1: if we look through like our famili's photographic history goo
Speaker 1: will sometimes encounter those those photos of say a dead child. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very strange to us today, but it's another indication
Speaker 1: of how differently they thought about photography back then. Uh.
Speaker 1: And just to to cement this idea of like potograph
Speaker 1: being a serious thing that was about serious values and
Speaker 1: not a place for smiling. Uh. There is even a
Speaker 1: comment from Mark Twain, who you know, Mark Twain wasn't
Speaker 1: like a person without a sense of humor. He wrote
Speaker 1: all kinds of funny stuff, but he said at one
Speaker 1: point quote, I think a photograph is a most important document,
Speaker 1: and there is nothing more damning to go down to
Speaker 1: posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught unfixed forever. Well,
Speaker 1: that's another thing to think about it with these two. Right,
Speaker 1: Like nowadays, with a photo shoot, you can you can
Speaker 1: you know, you get like a hundred or more images, right,
Speaker 1: and then you can you can then decide which ones
Speaker 1: have an acceptable smile, which ones have that magical smile
Speaker 1: that feels right and also doesn't make you look too silly.
Speaker 1: You can pinpoint the photo that makes you look the
Speaker 1: way you want to look. Uh. And then of course
Speaker 1: there's you know, post processes as well. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see where you might say, like, why would
Speaker 1: I risk a smile. I'll just stick with serious because
Speaker 1: I know that I can probably get that. That's a
Speaker 1: good point. Yeah. I mean, I'm somebody who's not good
Speaker 1: at smiling in photos. When people take pictures of me
Speaker 1: and I smile, I often see it and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: what was that? You know, I look like I'm like
Speaker 1: chewing on a spider or something. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: I can sympathize. And then finally, one last point that
Speaker 1: Edwards makes in that article is that it appears that
Speaker 1: in Europe and America during the Victorian and Edwardian periods,
Speaker 1: some people just generally didn't think highly of smiling, Like
Speaker 1: they thought smiling was a sign of stupidity. So cultural
Speaker 1: norms just coming into play again. Right, But back to
Speaker 1: the long exposure times of the earliest portraits. Watson and
Speaker 1: Rapp report in their book have an excellent chapter about
Speaker 1: early portraits, and one of the things that they have
Speaker 1: in there is an amazing quote of a firsthand description
Speaker 1: of what it was like to pose for a Daguera
Speaker 1: type by a Mr. Chittenden of Boston. We'll see how
Speaker 1: you like this one, Robert quote. The operators rolled out
Speaker 1: what looked like an overgrown barber's chair with a ballot
Speaker 1: box attachment on a staff in front of it. I
Speaker 1: was seated in the chair and his briery and arms
Speaker 1: seized me by the wrists, ankles, waist and shoulders. There
Speaker 1: was an iron bar which served as an elongation of
Speaker 1: the spine, with a crossbar in which the head rested,
Speaker 1: which held my head and neck as in a vice. Then,
Speaker 1: when I felt like a martyr in the embrace of
Speaker 1: the Nuremberg Maiden, which the some of the iron Maiden
Speaker 1: there um, I was told to assume my best Sunday expression,
Speaker 1: to fix my eyes on the first letter of the
Speaker 1: sign of a beer saloon opposite, and not to move
Speaker 1: or wink on pain of spoiling the exposure. So it
Speaker 1: sounds like you have to climb into a torture device
Speaker 1: in order to be held still for this photo. Well
Speaker 1: you know, but but still today, if you get your
Speaker 1: photo taken by someone who knows what they're doing, you
Speaker 1: may be asked to for imposes that otherwise feel unnatural.
Speaker 1: You know. But it's uh, it's it's it's the thing
Speaker 1: about a photograph, of posing for a photograph is not
Speaker 1: necessarily a natural act, you know, it is it is
Speaker 1: about the finished product. And so yeah, you might have
Speaker 1: to roll your shoulders in a way that you normally
Speaker 1: wouldn't or roll you know, position your your chin in
Speaker 1: a way that you normally wouldn't even think about. And
Speaker 1: and you do see people still grive about getting their
Speaker 1: photo taken with this degree of of disdain. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, one of one of the funny things you're
Speaker 1: you're pointing out there is like how you have to
Speaker 1: sometimes act unnatural to look natural. And this was also
Speaker 1: true in scenes, in bigger scenes, not just individual portraits,
Speaker 1: but like there are stories from the days of early
Speaker 1: de Guero types and crowd scenes and parties where guests
Speaker 1: would sometimes be prepared in advance that at some point
Speaker 1: they would be asked to freeze to create a quote
Speaker 1: general immobility for about seven minutes so that a decent
Speaker 1: photo of the room could be taken. Obviously, in a
Speaker 1: crowd scene, like, they're going to be details that are
Speaker 1: a little less crucial because somebody might move and they'll
Speaker 1: just be a blurry part of the photo. But just yeah,
Speaker 1: try to imagine that. You're, like you're at a party
Speaker 1: and they want to get a sure what the party
Speaker 1: looked like. So at some point they're just going to
Speaker 1: ask everybody to hold still while they expose it to guaratype. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything that might be awkward in modern photography, and and
Speaker 1: you know covering an event, uh is going to be
Speaker 1: just a little bit more awkward with the limited technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it sounds like a lot like a grip and grin,
Speaker 1: you know, which is still a standard of any time
Speaker 1: like a new business opens or uh, you know, any
Speaker 1: kind of business e thing happens and it needs to
Speaker 1: be documented. You're gonna get that that nice staged uh
Speaker 1: and faked image of like two people shaking hands or
Speaker 1: presenting some sort of document that sort of thing. Can
Speaker 1: I tell you. I actually realized I have a sort
Speaker 1: of a prejudice against people who are good at posing
Speaker 1: for photos. There's something about it when people are just
Speaker 1: really good. It's suddenly assuming the pose and doing the face,
Speaker 1: and they look perfectly photogenic and can do it time
Speaker 1: after time. I find that distrustful. Wait, isn't distrustful the
Speaker 1: right word. I find that trustworthy untrustworthy. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know about that. I mean, most of it is just
Speaker 1: obeying the photographer, and and and I guess it helps
Speaker 1: if the photographer is good at communicating what they want
Speaker 1: you to do with your body. You know, how to
Speaker 1: roll your shoulders or your head, your chin, etcetera. Well,
Speaker 1: that's true, even if it doesn't feel right, listen to
Speaker 1: the photographer. They can see you. You can't see you, right.
Speaker 1: It was probably was even more important then, right because
Speaker 1: nowadays the photographer can see rather instantly what the the
Speaker 1: the image is going to look like. You know, it's
Speaker 1: going to be a framed and squared and they may
Speaker 1: even be sharing that with you, either showing you the
Speaker 1: back of their digital camera or using some sort of
Speaker 1: a like a wireless or wired viewing system. But back
Speaker 1: in uh, the olden days were discussing here like it
Speaker 1: was all uh if they were using a box of camera,
Speaker 1: it was all just in the box. It's only later
Speaker 1: that the images are going to become real. Now. Obviously,
Speaker 1: an exposure time of like ten to fifteen minutes for
Speaker 1: a portrait is just unsustained ball. That's it doesn't really work.
Speaker 1: So people tried all kinds of things to shorten the exposure.
Speaker 1: This is also sometimes called the sitting time, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: So one thing people tried is powdering the subject's face
Speaker 1: to make it reflect more light, because the brighter something
Speaker 1: is obviously the less time it takes to expose the photo.
Speaker 1: Even on modern cameras. You know, you can think of
Speaker 1: the analogy of how shooting in low light means you
Speaker 1: have to leave the shutter open longer. So if you
Speaker 1: basically cover somebody in in pale powder, they reflect more light,
Speaker 1: it takes less time. Another one would be a photo
Speaker 1: studio with white plaster walls to reflect as much light
Speaker 1: as possible. Sometimes they would use like mirrors to shine
Speaker 1: more sunlight onto the subject, which sounds really comfortable. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that makes it even easier to hold the pose
Speaker 1: when you've got like the sun in your eyes. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they tried like blue glass to make bright light
Speaker 1: from the windows less painful on the eyes of the
Speaker 1: subject who just had to sit there staring into the sun. Uh.
Speaker 1: Supposedly Henry Fox Talbot worked around this. He tried to
Speaker 1: reduce sitting times by using a smaller camera. The light
Speaker 1: had to travel less distance, and thus it would be
Speaker 1: brighter and took less time to expose. There were some
Speaker 1: improvements in lenses in general camera design. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: a guy named Richard Beard who had a studio with
Speaker 1: a chair that rotated to get the best son. But
Speaker 1: the biggest improvements came in advances in chemistry. So around
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen forties, people started using additional sensitizing chemicals.
Speaker 1: Remember Digere only had to use iodine to to sensitize
Speaker 1: the silver plate. But there were a couple of guys
Speaker 1: named Paul Beck Goddard in the in the United States
Speaker 1: and John Frederick Goddard in England. That they're not related,
Speaker 1: just both happened to be Goddard's. Uh. They started using
Speaker 1: bromine fumes to make the plate even more sensitive to
Speaker 1: light so it would capture more detail. And less time.
Speaker 1: And then there was a French photographer named Antoine Claude
Speaker 1: who used chlorine fumes in addition to the iodine to
Speaker 1: make the plates more sensitive. So by further sensitizing the plate,
Speaker 1: they could make it gather more light data in less time.
Speaker 1: And these improvements, paired with better lenses and cameras and
Speaker 1: good light, altogether reduced exposure times from minutes to a
Speaker 1: matter of seconds. Now, of course, one thing that's funny
Speaker 1: is that, uh, we mentioned the idea that a lot
Speaker 1: of traditional artists didn't love the idea of photo portraits
Speaker 1: because they might have seen it as replacing the work
Speaker 1: they were doing. But there's another thing not everybody loved
Speaker 1: about photo portraiture, which is that photos are too accurate.
Speaker 1: They're not always flattering. A painter could do the equivalent
Speaker 1: of photo shopping you to get the ward off your eyelid,
Speaker 1: or to make you look taller. A Daguero type is
Speaker 1: depressingly almost violently accurate. You know. Yeah, that's true. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: there were there were only so many things you could do, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to cover up bluemishes, et cetera when using
Speaker 1: the Daguerada. Now that's not to say that there weren't
Speaker 1: hand painted say improvements to deguerotypes at the time. They're
Speaker 1: actually wereb though a lot a lot of people thought
Speaker 1: these looked bad. Like. One of the things that started
Speaker 1: happening or pretty early on, was the hand painted coloration
Speaker 1: of Deguara types, which, of course, because it was not
Speaker 1: color photography and people were like, well, where's the color.
Speaker 1: Some people had the idea of, well, we'll just paint
Speaker 1: the colors in, but of course that made it look
Speaker 1: less like a realistic photo and more like a hand
Speaker 1: painted thing, more like a like an illustration from a
Speaker 1: William Blake uh publication. Right yeah. Now, of course, there's
Speaker 1: no way to talk about all the many different little
Speaker 1: incremental improvements and new methods that emerged in the following
Speaker 1: decades in the forties and fifties, but one that's really
Speaker 1: worth mentioning, I think would be Frederick Scott Archer's wet
Speaker 1: plate method of photography. This was really important, which used
Speaker 1: a treatment called a colodeon which it was this thick
Speaker 1: liquid made out of like cotton, dissolved in nitric acid,
Speaker 1: and then you'd mix that with alcohol and ether, and
Speaker 1: then you'd apply that to a glass plate too since
Speaker 1: ties it and this method actually got the best of
Speaker 1: both worlds, between Dager's Daguero type and Henry Fox Talbot's
Speaker 1: Callo type. It made a reproducible negative image like the calotype,
Speaker 1: so you can make copies. But it also it was
Speaker 1: sharp like the daguerotype. Remember the calotype was people thought
Speaker 1: it looked kind of fuzzy and less realistic and striking
Speaker 1: than the daguerotype. So this got the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1: But speaking of quick turnaround on photos, one one type
Speaker 1: of photochemical process that came along to improve the speed
Speaker 1: and convenience of photo production was what came to be
Speaker 1: known as the pharotype or the tin type. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this is really interesting. So pharotype is the more
Speaker 1: authentic term here, right, more accurate. Tin type was kind
Speaker 1: of the informal um term, which is like tin as
Speaker 1: you'll say, it has to do with the seeming cheapness
Speaker 1: of the of the material. So yeah, and in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifties of photography innovation that became really popular in the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies. He was first described in eighteen fifty three
Speaker 1: by out Alf Alexandra Martin, but it was patented in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty seven by Hamilton's Smith in America and by
Speaker 1: Clone and Jones in England. It used a process similar
Speaker 1: to wet plate photography that we were just talking about.
Speaker 1: It would produce an under exposed negative image on an
Speaker 1: iron plate. And this is a very When I say
Speaker 1: iron plate, I don't want you to imagine like an enormous,
Speaker 1: thick like bullet catching piece of iron. It's very thin.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get the tin type because
Speaker 1: it was like this, this very thin layer um and
Speaker 1: then imagining one of those like aluminum foil baking dishes, yeah,
Speaker 1: something along those lines. So then it was blackened by
Speaker 1: painting or lacquering and then coated with an emulsion, and
Speaker 1: the dark background of the plate gave the image life,
Speaker 1: and tin dipes didn't require special backing. All of this
Speaker 1: could be done in a matter of minutes. Even so
Speaker 1: you're preparing it, you're exposing it, you're developing, and you're
Speaker 1: varnishing it. So this is essentially the first type of
Speaker 1: instant pot right. It's kind of like the polaroid cameras
Speaker 1: you'd see later, where you could you could have the
Speaker 1: image ready in just a few minutes. Yeah, but also
Speaker 1: it was more affordable than the the garatype, So it
Speaker 1: was another one of these cases where the technology is
Speaker 1: being um changed in a way that makes it reach
Speaker 1: more people. And I think one of the interesting things
Speaker 1: in the with the uh, with the innovations and inventions
Speaker 1: that remain in this episode is that at this point
Speaker 1: we're really getting into photography, not merely as a single invention,
Speaker 1: not even really as a as you know, a sort
Speaker 1: of a cloud of various folks working all over the
Speaker 1: world and making slight changes, but we're getting into photography
Speaker 1: as an industry of photography as as a business, and
Speaker 1: it really begins to take on a life all its own.
Speaker 1: One of the key examples here is George Eastman's Kodak,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about when we come back from one
Speaker 1: more break. All right, we're back. So everybody's heard of Kodak, right,
Speaker 1: and you've probably heard of heard of George Eastman. Uh,
Speaker 1: not the Italian B movie actor, but but the but
Speaker 1: the historic, the truly famous George Eastman. And yeah, his
Speaker 1: advancements with Kodak here really took something that was previously
Speaker 1: this kind of science experiment of contraption, something best left
Speaker 1: to experts and the wealthy and adventures and really made
Speaker 1: huge strides and putting it towards putting it in the
Speaker 1: hands of everyday people. It seems like it was the
Speaker 1: next big step down in democratizing the art for everybody.
Speaker 1: So the Dagara type and the Cala type like those
Speaker 1: made imagery, realistic imagery much more accessible than just painting
Speaker 1: portraiture had been. And then Kodak was even farther. Yes.
Speaker 1: So George Eastman lived eighteen through nineteen ten. He was
Speaker 1: a largely self educated guy who was the son of
Speaker 1: a New York politician and educator, Harvey G. Eastman, founder
Speaker 1: of Eastman's Commercial College in Rochester. And at the age
Speaker 1: of twenty three, George Eastmen obtained a camera for a
Speaker 1: vacation trip. This is going to go on. So if
Speaker 1: he was born in eighteen twenty and he was at
Speaker 1: the age of twenty three, this would have been about
Speaker 1: eighteen forty three, just about three or four years after
Speaker 1: the Daguara type process was publicly revealed, right, So you
Speaker 1: know he was going to do what a lot of
Speaker 1: us do now and take for granted, I'm going to
Speaker 1: bring a camera on a vacation, get some photos, you know,
Speaker 1: contribute to this, this this craze of photography that's sweeping
Speaker 1: the world. But he ended up not ended up not
Speaker 1: making the trip, but the equipment equipment that he had
Speaker 1: picked up. It fascinated him, but he he had some
Speaker 1: issues with the cost, with the weight, and with the
Speaker 1: awkward design of the equipment. All of this irked him.
Speaker 1: So he spent three years experimenting with gelatine emulsions in
Speaker 1: his mother's kitchen and UH in seventy eight he demonstrated
Speaker 1: how effective gelatine dry plates could be as opposed to
Speaker 1: wet plates. This is this is an improvement wet plates, UH,
Speaker 1: which had to be coded, exposed, and developed while still wet. UH.
Speaker 1: You know that put some limitations on how much time
Speaker 1: can pass after the photograph before developing it. Yeah. With
Speaker 1: Archer's method, there are these stories about how you would
Speaker 1: have to have portable dark rooms, right because if you
Speaker 1: wanted to take a picture of something out in nature,
Speaker 1: out in the field, you have to get make the
Speaker 1: emulsion and get it wet and all that and take
Speaker 1: the photo immediately before it dried out, and you have
Speaker 1: to do all this in the dark. But with this
Speaker 1: gelatine method, the dry plates could be exposed and then
Speaker 1: you could develop them later at your leisure. Um, like
Speaker 1: suddenly it's not just off to the races when you
Speaker 1: take a picture. Then in eighteen eighty he invented and
Speaker 1: patented a dry plate coading machine and this allowed for
Speaker 1: the commercial production of these dry plates. And so at
Speaker 1: this point things began to get more business e Right,
Speaker 1: with the backing of Rochester businessman Henry Strong, he forms
Speaker 1: the Eastman Dry Plate Company in eighteen eighty one, and
Speaker 1: then this was reincorporated as the Eastman Dry Plate and
Speaker 1: Film Company in eighteen eighty four and then as Eastman
Speaker 1: Kodak Company in eighteen uh And of course Kodak uh
Speaker 1: is still around today. It's still a publicly traded company.
Speaker 1: Uh so. Um, you know, despite all the changes that
Speaker 1: have occurred in the photographic world. I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's a testament to the impact this company had to
Speaker 1: realize that it is. It is still there now as
Speaker 1: a photography business. Kodak wasn't just working on like the
Speaker 1: media for the production, like the plates themselves. They actually
Speaker 1: did work on cameras, right. Yeah. One of the big
Speaker 1: things they did is they developed more affordable and easy
Speaker 1: to use cameras. Uh, certainly by eighteen eighty eight. Uh,
Speaker 1: this was when they started busting out the box camera.
Speaker 1: So the box camera is when I say a box,
Speaker 1: you can look at pictures of these. They did look
Speaker 1: like a box, just like a whole on one end
Speaker 1: for the lens it had, but it had the lens
Speaker 1: film everything you needed to take a basic photograph. This
Speaker 1: wasn't the first box camera in the Kodak rolled out,
Speaker 1: but it was the first commercially viable one. And their
Speaker 1: their motto was you press the button, we do the rest, uh,
Speaker 1: which is also just you know, it's it's a great slogan,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, they've taken this thing that we've described,
Speaker 1: this laborious process, and they've put it in a box
Speaker 1: and you push a button and you're essentially good to go.
Speaker 1: And this is also really the point in which modern
Speaker 1: snapshot photography truly becomes possible. Uh, just a really a
Speaker 1: major moment in the accessibility of photography. You don't have
Speaker 1: to set out to do this science experiment. You can
Speaker 1: just grab your camera and go. So other key moments
Speaker 1: from the history of Kodak. And I'm we're not gonna
Speaker 1: be able to cover it all because again this is
Speaker 1: a company with a long history, but they establish professional
Speaker 1: photo finishing. They developed a flexible celluloid film that would
Speaker 1: be extremely important in the development of motion pictures, which
Speaker 1: we'll get to believe in the next episode. Unless we
Speaker 1: take a photo break, I'm not sure what we're gonna Well,
Speaker 1: certainly in an episode soon in the future. Yes, they
Speaker 1: busted out the pocket code at camera, the folding pocket camera,
Speaker 1: and uh then in nineteen hundred the one dollar Brownie camera,
Speaker 1: which I was not familiar with this one. Looked at
Speaker 1: pictures of it. It's a little box camera and it
Speaker 1: has this kind of cartoon uh tweedle dumb tweedlede kind
Speaker 1: of character on the side. And yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: camera you could buy for a dollar. Granted those were
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred dollars, but still, um, like, this is the
Speaker 1: the the camera becoming ever more inexpensive and ever more
Speaker 1: available to the people at large. Well, I think one
Speaker 1: thing that we should make a distinction about is the
Speaker 1: democratization of access to photography is like like a thing
Speaker 1: you could get like a portrait made, versus the democratization
Speaker 1: of photography as something you could do yourself, choosing what
Speaker 1: to take a photo of. Right, because so there were
Speaker 1: people who were you know, who would take a decara
Speaker 1: type of you in the eighteen forties and the eighteen
Speaker 1: fifties that you could pay, and that made it affordable
Speaker 1: for people to get an image of themselves. But if
Speaker 1: you wanted to go out in the world and take
Speaker 1: a picture of something that struck your fancy, this is
Speaker 1: where that that's really changing. Yeah. Um, other advancements in
Speaker 1: nineteen o two they rolled out the developing machine that
Speaker 1: you could develop your own film without a dark room. Uh.
Speaker 1: Aerial photography advancements took place in nineteen seventeen. So here
Speaker 1: we see, you know, the uh, the advancement of photography
Speaker 1: lining up with advancements in other fields. Five you get
Speaker 1: Code Chrome, the first commercially successful amateur color film, and
Speaker 1: at nineteen thirty seven you get the code of slide
Speaker 1: projector uh. So uh kind of going back to the
Speaker 1: uh some of the ideas of the the camera obscura
Speaker 1: right like, now we're taking our images and we're projecting
Speaker 1: them onto the wall again, only we're doing it right
Speaker 1: side up this time and with more clarity and Again,
Speaker 1: this is just a sample because of course Kodak is
Speaker 1: was one of the world's leading photo technology companies. But
Speaker 1: I think it does highlight just the kind of um,
Speaker 1: really rapid advancements you see, and so in business savvy
Speaker 1: advancements that end up taking place once uh, the invention
Speaker 1: becomes the property of industry, and of course it would
Speaker 1: play into other industries as well. Um Kodak would end
Speaker 1: up being involved in not only the development of motion pictures,
Speaker 1: which we alluded to already, but also the X ray industry,
Speaker 1: which we've already podcasted on. Well, yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: something to think about as we consider the legacy of photography,
Speaker 1: especially in the early years. One really positive and practical
Speaker 1: use we should think of coming out of photography, I
Speaker 1: think is going back to X rays and runkin. Like
Speaker 1: the use of various forms of photography and medicine has
Speaker 1: been absolutely incalculable and the good it's provided and people.
Speaker 1: You know, when we express gratitude for modern medicine, we
Speaker 1: often correctly think to mention things like vaccines and antibiotics
Speaker 1: and anesthetics and modern surgical techniques. It's I think it
Speaker 1: less often occurs to us to think of medical imaging
Speaker 1: is something to be thankful for. But the radical advancement
Speaker 1: of medical imaging is one of the most important things
Speaker 1: that happened in medicine over the past two hundred years.
Speaker 1: It it improves accuracy and diagnosis of internal problems, which
Speaker 1: drastically improves outcomes, and it can, in a way, all
Speaker 1: be traced back to photography. Now again, there's just so
Speaker 1: many photo photographic innovations and inventions were just not gonna
Speaker 1: have time to cover, Like the polaroid was a major point.
Speaker 1: I remember just being fascinated by the polaroid camera when
Speaker 1: I was a child. You could point the camera, uh
Speaker 1: take the picture. How did it comes? You just kind
Speaker 1: of shake it or let it do thing and the
Speaker 1: image materializes there. You didn't have to take film anywhere
Speaker 1: to be developed. Who are you know? They didn't have
Speaker 1: to uh stick anything in a little tube. It was
Speaker 1: just there. It was ready to go immortalized. In fact,
Speaker 1: as we all discovered when we got older, you didn't
Speaker 1: even actually have to shake it. Um. One of the
Speaker 1: funny things that I was reading about was how in
Speaker 1: the early days did guara type as a word. It
Speaker 1: got the same sort of treatment as words like band
Speaker 1: aid and Xerox, where a specific brand name uh came
Speaker 1: to be used as a stand in for all technologies
Speaker 1: of its type. Like there's a story that Henry Fox
Speaker 1: Talbot was distressed to find out that his callow type
Speaker 1: method was sometimes being referred to as the paper diguero type.
Speaker 1: What a kick in the face. So let's talk just
Speaker 1: a little bit more about about the legacy of the photograph. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we've touched on a lot of this already
Speaker 1: in the previous two episodes, but you know, there's a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount to be said about the idea of the
Speaker 1: photograph as an objective statement of truth an in many
Speaker 1: ways it is you know, it would prove a highly
Speaker 1: essential tool in journalism and the documentation of wars and strife,
Speaker 1: as well as in you know, positive movement movements and
Speaker 1: humanizing moments in in recent human history. We can easily
Speaker 1: think to the really jarring photographs of misery and death
Speaker 1: in wartime of racial strife, of protests, but also the
Speaker 1: humanizing movement moments where uh, you know, an individual that
Speaker 1: might otherwise be um, you know, considered you know another
Speaker 1: and and and dehumanized or made more human through the imagery.
Speaker 1: I wonder if the widespread use of realistic imagery, photography,
Speaker 1: and then later on motion pictures and video is to
Speaker 1: some degree responsible for the increasing appreciation of human rights
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, Like the idea that, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe people in a place other than where I am
Speaker 1: do matter and have the same you know, rights and
Speaker 1: concerns that I do. Yeah, it's yeah. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, though, and there are examples of the photograph
Speaker 1: being used I think as a tool of um, you know,
Speaker 1: who want to focus on the otherness of different races
Speaker 1: and cultures, as well as by those who wish to, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, to highlight our similarities. Um you know. We
Speaker 1: should remember that it was not only the photography was
Speaker 1: not only used to document things in a positive manner,
Speaker 1: was also used in an attempt to control people of
Speaker 1: Photography has been used as a tool of state control,
Speaker 1: of social control, as a means of tracking individuals. Um
Speaker 1: you know it is. It's been a tool of propaganda
Speaker 1: as well. It's been a tool of blackmail and exploitation.
Speaker 1: Uh you know. They These are not cases where the
Speaker 1: invention necessarily changes human nature, but it's always worth remembering
Speaker 1: that human nature is going to shine through a technology, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: and that means in both positive and negative ways, Like
Speaker 1: the things that make humans admirable, We're going to see
Speaker 1: that in a ubiquitous technology, but we're also going to
Speaker 1: see our awfulness. I guess the I guess one of
Speaker 1: the things that you see that I guess you see
Speaker 1: both of those and say, um, uh wartime photography and
Speaker 1: journalistic photography where you're capturing the ugliness, but you're trying
Speaker 1: to bring the truth of the ugliness out in a
Speaker 1: way that that that can benefit us, that can enable
Speaker 1: us to move past it, you know, And um, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess ultimately that's what we have to to try
Speaker 1: and grab onto in and and looking at our history
Speaker 1: of technology, but again always just coming back to the
Speaker 1: realization that technology is uh. Any given technology is not
Speaker 1: good or evil. Uh, it is uh. It is all
Speaker 1: about the way that it is utilized. Well, yeah, that's true,
Speaker 1: because technology does not act on its own, though at
Speaker 1: the same time, I'm certainly of the opinion that not
Speaker 1: all technology is say neutral or or equally neutral. I mean, um,
Speaker 1: technology doesn't do anything until it's used by people. But
Speaker 1: there are technologies that have technologies of inherent tendencies, They
Speaker 1: have ways that are in which they can easily be
Speaker 1: used and deployed. And so I don't think that like
Speaker 1: all technologies are on an equal footing in terms of
Speaker 1: like how harmful they are likely to be. In some cases,
Speaker 1: this is really clear. I mean obviously, like a uh,
Speaker 1: like a poison gas or a gun is not the
Speaker 1: same as like a method of sterilizing wounds. You know,
Speaker 1: these like have inherent tendencies that make them more easy
Speaker 1: to be used for good or evil. Photography is one
Speaker 1: of those big ones where you know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's scope is so broad that it's hard to it's
Speaker 1: hard to put it in one of those categories. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's used for everything because it is the objective
Speaker 1: record of life. It is the objective record of the world.
Speaker 1: And thus in any case where it can be useful
Speaker 1: to represent the world, which is in almost every domain
Speaker 1: of human life, it can be used can be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the key here though, But but now, for the
Speaker 1: most part, I definitely agree that the photography has had
Speaker 1: tremendous positive impact. But I just think we have to
Speaker 1: keep in mind, uh, the areas where it has been
Speaker 1: used for ill as well. All right, so there you
Speaker 1: have it. Uh photography. Uh, I think I think that'll
Speaker 1: do it. Uh. Three episodes. Uh, there's a lot to cover.
Speaker 1: We didn't cover nearly all of it. But hopefully everyone
Speaker 1: will leave these episodes with a new you know, a
Speaker 1: new respect and even awe of what photographs do for
Speaker 1: us and and what kind of amazing power we have,
Speaker 1: you know, in our pockets right now, most of us
Speaker 1: in the modern digital camera. Now as we uh we
Speaker 1: mentioned we're not done with with with photos. We're certainly
Speaker 1: not done with the image. We're hopefully I'm going to
Speaker 1: move on to motion pictures at some point in the
Speaker 1: future here. But uh, yeah, this was a fun one.
Speaker 1: I really feel like I I learned some things I
Speaker 1: wasn't aware of regarding the history of photography, and I
Speaker 1: have a new respect for the media myself. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: This has proved very rich subject matter. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out more episodes of Invention,
Speaker 1: head on over to Invention pod dot com and that's
Speaker 1: where we'll find the episodes. And uh, if you want
Speaker 1: to support the show, the best thing you can do
Speaker 1: is just make sure you have subscribed, and then if
Speaker 1: you can leave us a nice rating a nice review
Speaker 1: wherever you get the show, that would also be tremendously helpful.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Tari Harrison.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: to let us know feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at invention
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