A Brief History of Photography
This is the tedious part; on a summer day in 1827, a French inventor named Nicephore Niepce (originally Joseph Niepce) created the first photographic image using a camera obscura. Before Niepce, people mainly used the camera obscura to look at or draw images, not to take photographs. Niepce's early works, called heliographs or sun prints, were the first steps toward modern photography, as they captured images through light.
The exact date of Niepce's first experiments with photography is not clear. His interest in lithography, an art form he felt he couldn't master, pushed him toward photography. He was also inspired by the camera obscura, which was popular among wealthy art enthusiasts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The camera obscura created beautiful but temporary "light paintings," which motivated others, like Thomas Wedgwood and Henry Fox Talbot, to find better ways to capture these images than just tracing them.
Letters Niepce wrote to his sister-in-law around 1816 show that he was able to capture small images on paper treated with silver chloride. This made him one of the first people to succeed in this kind of photography. However, the images he produced were negatives, meaning light areas appeared dark and dark areas appeared light. He also struggled to stop the images from darkening completely when exposed to light.
A Brief History of Photography
Niépce shifted his focus to various substances influenced by light, ultimately honing in on Bitumen of Judea, a naturally occurring asphalt that has been utilized for multiple purposes since ancient times. During Niépce's era, artists employed it as an acid-resistant coating on copper plates for the creation of etchings. The artist would scratch a design through the coating, subsequently immersing the plate in acid to etch the exposed regions, then removing the coating with a solvent to use the plate for printing ink copies of the design onto paper.
What captivated Niépce was the observation that the bitumen coating became less soluble after being exposed to light. He dissolved bitumen in lavender oil, a solvent commonly used in varnishes, and applied it in a thin layer onto a lithographic stone or a sheet of metal or glass. Once the coating dried, a test subject, usually an engraving printed on paper, was placed over the surface in close proximity, and both were exposed to direct sunlight. After adequate exposure, the solvent could be utilized to wash away only the unhardened bitumen that had been protected from light by lines or dark areas in the test subject. The areas of the surface that were thus revealed could then be etched with acid, or the remaining bitumen could act as the water-repellent material in lithographic printing.
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