The Camera, Part 3

Fox Talbot in England, which was initially far less successful. Right. Yeah, we we spent a lot of time talking about the early laborious methods of taking a photograph, but the startling and just game changing results, uh that they gave us. Um, you know, in all that discussion of de Guarat types, I neglected to mention my Daguarat type boyfriend and what

is this? This is a I believe it was a tumbler page and it was just a collection of like handsome do dudes with their you know, their photo having been taken with the Deguarat type. A lot of like a really neat sideburns and whatnot. But it was kind of a trend at least a few years ago. I remember it making the rounds and people having a lot of fun with it. I'm looking at it now. You know.

One of the things is nobody smiling in their deguaratype. Yes, some guys look kind of smug, but it's not really a smile, right, And there's an important reason for that, which we'll get into in this episode. This is a great blog now that I'm looking at it. Do you have a favorite old school deguerotype or I don't know if it's actually a deguaratype. The one I'm going to bring up in an old school photograph doppelganger a favorite one of those? Of course? I love the old Nicholas

Cage from the nineteenth century. Yeah, I think that that's the main one that comes to mind. But because yeah, you go back to enough photographic history, even though we have very little of it really, I mean, can can compare to the you know, the deeper history of of the human species. But yeah, you can find these weird doppelgangers where you're like, that looks like Stevie Sinny, especially if I just kind of, you know, blur my eyes

a little bit. Yeah. So, last time we covered this transition from the resin based heliography method of Joseph Nissa fourneeps, the French inventor and scientist and aristocrat to the big breakthrough announced and described in eighteen thirty nine by Louis Dega, the da Gara type method, which for a brief refresher on how that worked. Remember it had many steps, so that was sort of Dagar's breakthrough was the multi step

chemistry procedure um. So it involved sensitizing a silver coated plate with iodine fumes, and this would produce a layer of the light sensitive compound silver iodide. And then you'd expose that plate inside a camera obscura. And then, and this is the real genius step, you would take the lightly exposed plate on which the image would still be

invisible to the naked eye. You couldn't see anything yet, and you would develop that by exposing it to mercury fumes, which would bring out the latent image on the plate and create a sharp contrast. Uh And then finally you'd wash off the remaining silver eyedide to prevent further darkening. And originally this washing off step took place in in hot salt water until the better solution of hyposulfite of

soda now known as sodium. Theosulfate was suggested by John Herschel. Now, I think it's widely agreed that Digear's most original and brilliant contribution to the invention of photography was this chemical development stage. Of course, the development was so useful because it greatly cut down on exposure times, which before had been very long. Before the development stage, you might have to expose a plate for hours at a time, like maybe seven hours or twelve hours before the image would

really come through on it. You only had to get a very faint initial exposure of maybe ten to fifteen minutes before you could develop it with the mercury fumes, which sounds like a lot to us. But but like you said, it was a huge improvement over hours of exposure time. Yeah, gigantic difference back then. I mean that

it made it suddenly realistic to photograph landscapes. So if you had to expose a plate for hours on a landscape, all the shadows would be messed up, right, I mean, shadows are such an important part of our our view of the natural world. If the shadows keep shifting over the many hours of exposure, nothing's going to look right.

Um Now. Also in the last episode, we talked about the English polymath, scientist, politician and inventor Henry Fox Talbot, who had independently invented a kind of different method of photography years earlier in England. But unfortunately, even though he invented it first, he never got around to publishing his findings until after de Gara announced his invention in France and was cemented in the minds of most people as

the inventor of photography. Henry Fox Talbot's original method was different. It used paper instead of these sensitized metal plates. He sensitized the paper to light by coating it in silver chloride, and then he would expose it in a camera for a longer period than Diga's final method, and then wash it off afterwards to stop the exposure. Now, Talbot actually

had a few different methods over time. After Dager's method was announced in eighteen thirty nine, Talbot eventually went on to create and patent a different process known as the Calo type, which also made use of a different chemical form of Dagas concept of development right to shorten the exposure time needed in the camera. And while Dagas method produced these kind of sharp, one of a kind positive,

shiny reflective images on metal plates. Talbot's method produced kind of fuzzy, soft, but highly replicable, copyable negative images on paper. So these are the two main things you've got by eighteen forty and again we just have to drive home how photography was this collision of advancements in optics, chemistry, and the r it's all of it coming together, uh, just the right time, with just the right individuals. Yeah.

And one of the things we talked about in the last episode is how surprising it is that this, this first big breakthrough comes from Louis de Guerre, who was not a scientist. He was not he was not trained in chemistry. Digerre was a painter. He was an artist. I mean, he was clearly a very clever and energetic kind of go getter, but he he was not trained in chemistry. He didn't have a lot of scientific knowledge. He was kind of just bumbling around in the dark

in a way, at least at first. And one of the funny things about this is we know a lot about what Henry Fox Talbot was doing because he usually took extensive notes and journals about his ideas and his projects de Garrett generally did not. So remember last time we talked about how Louis de Guerre had this brief partnership with with niece four Niepps. How did Gare got from Niepps's heliography which used this resin and wasn't really like the ultimate process of the Daguero type to the

Daguero type. What happened in those years in between is not fully known. We don't have accurate, reliable information about what Degres postings, partnership experiments were, or like what roadmap of discoveries led to his inventions, So there's kind of a mystery there. There are stories that were reported later. One common example of one of these stories is the story about Degres magic cabinet. Have you ever heard about this? Uh No, but it already sounds uh perhaps a little

dramatic size you know very well could be apocryphal. But that's always the tendency, right, Like do you lay out the various steps and and uh minor revelations that lead to some sort of an invention, or do you come up with something uh more sexy like I saw it in a dream, you know? Or do you tell a good story? Yeah, and so The Magic Cabinet is one

of these good stories that might not be true. Supposedly, it was about how he discovered the developing process, his most his most important key insight on photography the mercury

fumes to bring out the latent image from a short exposure. Supposedly, what happened is that Degare had under exposed a plate and then he put it inside a cabinet that he was storing some chemicals in, and then came back later and found that the under exposed plate had had an image brought out in it, and it was like, WHOA, what's going on here? And he realized it must have been exposure to one of the chemicals in the cabinet.

So he just started removing one chemical at a time and trying to figure out what it was, until eventually he had removed everything from the cabinet and the cabinet was still doing this. It was still bringing out the image in under exposed plates, until he discovered that some mercury had been spilled inside the cabinet and it was this spill that was that was creating bringing the image out. Well, you know, that seems like a plausible story, and even

if it didn't quite happen like that. It is a it is a nice way of describing, you know, how he might have discovered it, you know, like it's this nice story shaped explanation. Yes. And I will say, for all of Dager's apparently good qualities, he he does not strike me, having read a good bit about his life now, as someone who would be above making up a story about how things came about. Because he was a salesman,

you know, businessman. A lot of his his accomplishments came from, you know, as we said in the last episode, you know, being a great networker, being karas mad at, being able to bring people together and get them behind his vision. Yes, exactly. So when d Get revealed his method publicly, he actually he did not take out a patent on the process anywhere except in England, or I don't know if he actually held it. I think a different guy held this patent.

But there was a patent on the daguerrotype process in England, but only in England. Uh And instead Dagara was given a pension by the French government and the Daguara type method was sort of presented as a free gift to the world from France. Except guests to England. Henry Fox Talbot, on the other hand, he tried to patent his callow type process, though he faced enormous resistance and public scorn.

And it is amazing, by the way, to read sections from articles in publications like The Economist viciously attacking the very concept of patents as quote injurious to the progress of production and to the common weelfare and thus illegitimate in the light of the principle of property rights. Can you imagine that? Well, yeah, it certainly makes sense. I mean, you still see various discussions these days about things that are being patent certainly in the you know, sort of

the genetic sciences. Oh yeah, So you know, it's not too much of elite to imagine people getting upset about the the idea of patenting photography, especially in retrospect, seeing like what effects photography had. I'm not surprised in that. It's not that I don't think it's a legitimate ethical debate to be had. I'm is kind of surprised we'd

see this coming from The Economist in the eighteen forties. Yeah, it also seems a little unfair that Talbot is the one who's who who gets it here, you know, because he's he's kind of coming up just a little behind

Deger at every turn. Yeah, and uh So, in those first few decades, the world of photography was absolutely dominated by the daguerotype, and and Talbot really seems to have gotten the short end of the stick, even though his inside of producing negatives that could be easily copied would later prove hugely important to photography as as you might guess. But any way, pretty much immediately after it was publicly explained and demonstrated, the dagaratype became enormously popular, and people

all over we're trying it out. Initial reception of the method was was mostly extremely positive, and in the last episode we discussed a few examples of this, like the absolutely glowing reception uh the daguerotype got from Edgar Allan Poe when he described its quality as quote truth itself

in the suprem nous of it perfection. One of the types of reviews that I like less I feel kind of icky about, but I see pretty often as people who are repeatedly, uh negatively comparing traditional artistic methods to the daguero type. Like there's this example Polish in the Gazette de France in UH in its announcement about the Daguero type in eighteen thirty nine, quote, you will see how far from the truth of the Daguero type are

your pencils and brushes. That's right, artists for lunatics. Now it sounds like a line that will be spoken by like a villain in a video game. You know, that's already been translated poorly. Once you will see how weak are your brushes. But I can I can imagine there might be you know, the kind of tension, right, It's kind of like, oh, my goodness, but the photos exist. Now, is this going to impact my career as a painter? Yeah,

I mean we can. We always see that kind of anxiety and perhaps uh, you know, overestimation of of what a new technology can do exactly. And and I think in some ways that reaction was sort of reasonable, even though you know, we view painting and photography as different things. Obviously some artists would have viewed photography not just as a new art form, but as a substitute for realist painting or a general replacement for traditional forms of art.

I want to mention the story that's related in one of my main sources on these episodes. A book by Helen Rappaport and Roger Watson called Capturing the Light The Birth of Photography, A True Story of Genius and Rivalry, which is a great book that goes into detail in the lives of Louis de Guerre and Henry Fox Talbot especially, but there's a section where it mentions this famous story.

This only reported many years after the fact, so again possibly untrue, kind of like Degare's own story about where the idea of the mercury fumes came from. But this is a story that the realist painter Paul Delaroche, who was known for realistic looking depictions of historical scenes such as the execution of Lady Jane Gray, you might have seen that painting before. Uh that he saw a daguerotype for the first time and commented, quote from today, painting

is dead. So he may not have actually said this, but it no doubt reflects like an anxiety that some in the art world must have felt. And remember, today we appreciate photography and painting as a as like separate art forms, they each have their own uses. But before photography, painting wasn't just a fine art. It also served practical purposes that we now mostly leave up entirely to photography,

such as family portraiture. Like, while photography doesn't supersede all forms of painting, there were clearly some cases where it did simply automate work that would once have been done

by a human painter. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it. How like that the one area that we were one of the few areas were able to sort of keep photography out of it is think of the courtroom in some cases where you have where you have the courtroom sketch still being an important part of the journalist effort there. That's a funny inversion because I mean one of the earliest uses of photography that will discuss later on as like it's like a form of objective evidence to use

in court. But yeah, there are prohibitions in some cases of allowing cameras into the courtrooms. And so now you get to see, like what does it look like when you draw a picture of Paul Manifort. Yeah, and some of these pictures are still rather amusing in the ambiguity that is sometimes possible with just a what is you know, probably a rushed sketch of of of happenings in a courtroom. Now, apart from the anxiety of painters and artists, there also uh were a few at least to question the morality

or propriety of photography as a medium. And there was a really interesting article that was quoted in in Watson and Rapp reports book from a German publication called The Leipziger Stattenzeiger, and it goes a little something like this quote. The wi to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough German investigation, but the mere desire alone, the will to do so is blasphemy. Blasphemy. God created man in his own image, and no man

made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God should have abandoned his eternal principles and allowed a Frenchman in Paris to give to the world an invention of the devil, the idea of the revolution fraternity, and Napoleon's ambition to turn Europe into one realm. All these crazy ideas, Monsieur de gear now claims to surpass because he wants to outdo the creator of the world.

If this thing were at all possible, then something similar would have been done a long time ago in antiquity by men like Archimedes or Moses. But if these wise men knew nothing of mirror pictures made permanent, then one can straightaway call the Frenchman to gear who boasts of such unheard of things, the fool of fools. Well that's the that's a kind of a confusing review. Yeah, Um, he can't possibly do it, and since he's doing it, it's very bad. Wow. Uh so that that is definitely

a negative review for um, the Garrett type. Well, I think it's interesting because this does not seem to be a common reaction to it. It seems, by and large people were very excited by it. But it does reflect the general impression of the magnitude of photography as an invention. Right. It seems absurd now that people would think of photography as a blasphemy, but I think it's possible back then for people to think this way because this was such

a strange and new and unheard of thing. And yet at the at the same time, like like I'm trying really zoning in on no man made machine may fix the image of God. Now, obviously people were and again that saying this because the idea that man is made and uh in the likeness of God and all that. But uh so, just merely fixing the image of God can't be the thing he's upset about because because painting did that. It's the idea that it's a machine. Is that this idea that that we have made a thing

that does the thing? Is this like a Butlerian Jihad kind of situation? Oh yeah, you shall not make an image in the what make a machine? And the likeness of human human mind? Yeah? Yeah, it reminds me a lot of that. Well, I don't know. I mean, there is a thing that's very often mentioned by people writing about photography at the time, in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, is there there's all this mention of the sun.

I think now because we often take photos in rooms with artificial light, Like our cameras are more sensitive, they can take dim photos. We have cameras with cameras with flashes, we have you know, brighter artificial lights. Back then, there was all all of this talk about how when you take a photo, it's heliography, right, the sun is drawing your pictures for you. It's all about sunlight because that was the only light that was generally bright enough to

actually create a photo exposure. So I think maybe this association with the sun is one of the reasons that somebody might have a more religious reaction to it, right that that that it's like the sun, the source of all, you know, the the symbol of God's glory shining down on all things bright and beautiful, all things great and small. Now it's making images for you, and this is a perversion of the light that God has given to us,

fixed it in darkness. Yeah, but like I said, I do not get any indication that this was like a major opinion. It might have been popular in Germany. I don't know, just because they didn't like Frenchmen that that didn't like the fact that the dgear that this was like something that France was bragging about. It's like, oh, here's our free gift to the world, and and some Frenchman really did take take on that idea right of of giving it to the world, of sharing photography with

the world. Yeah, overall, people loved the Daguero type and it gave way to a sort of Daguerreotype craze in which amage you're in professional photographers by the hundreds embarked

on all kinds of projects of documenting things. One example in the early days is this French optician named Noel Paymal lara Bor, and he had the idea to equip a team of traveling de guerra typists to go around the world and capture images of foreign landscapes and sites of interest, and then then to send the images back to Paris so that people could see these places like Niagara Falls, like the Great Mosque of Algiers, or like the Acropolis, see them in full realism for the first time.

Lara Bor wanted to publish them in a book, which he did in eighteen forty one called Excurgion dig de guerrienes da guariens. I think, except there's a problem, because remember what's true about the daguerrotype. The Daguera type is an opaque, one of a kind print on a metal plate. It can't be copied directly, and at the time certainly

it couldn't be printed in a book. So unfortunately, the best he could do was to have the daguerrotypes from these locations redrawn by hand as engravings so they could be printed in the book, which is. I mean, on one hand, there there actually was a great level of realism in these engravings and illustrations, since the engravings were copied from real photographs. But they weren't the photographs themselves. A kind of bizarre irony. The first like big book

of photographs wasn't it wasn't photographs illustrations. All right, Well, on that note, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we will continue to discuss the de Guara type craze and other developments in early photography. Alright, we're back now. Remember the Dagara type was revealed in eighteen thirty nine, sort of announced I think in January, and then he really described his process publicly in August, and by December eighteen thirty nine there were already jokes about

how trendy this new invention of photography had become. One really great one is a lithograph by the artist Theodore Morrissette called La ladgera type of many. I think that's the French version. I think it means degera type of mania. Uh. And it is this manic, hieronymous, bosh like hell of people swarming all around with camera boxes and photographing everything. There's even a camera hanging from a hot air balloon,

apparently anticipating like spy planes. Uh. My favorite detail is up in the upper right of the image, which appears to be some kind of a cult ritual in which pagan revelers are dancing in a circle lasciviously around a steaming vat of mercury. Remember the mercury fumes where the where the chemical insight used to develop the quick exposed print. Yeah, this is amusing because it also reminds me of our reaction to various other bits of technology. In fact, often

photographic technology. Uh, like, for instance, selfie sticks come to mind. You can well imagine the same illustration Asian popping up in uh contemporary news paper to criticize the widespread juice of selfie sticks or the or a Pokemon phone game or whatever kind of handheld technological craze is sweeping the nation. Well, you know who hated selfies was the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Yeah, well,

obviously they didn't have selfies then, but the equivalent. So I would like to talk a bit about portraits of people, because this is one of the most important early uses of photography. But to quote Bodelaire writing in eighteen fifty nine about the early days of photography, Get this, A vengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude to gear was his messiah. From that moment, our squalid society rushed narcissus to a man to gaze at

his trivial image on a scrap of metal. A madness and extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun worshippers. There's the sun again. But also so he's being a jerk. He's being like the grump who's mad about selfie sticks. But at the same time he's not wrong, right, Like, once people could take photos, what's the one thing people would really most want photos of? Well, themselves, right and in a less narcissistic vein, of their families and loved ones.

But obviously there was a lot of demand for people to have photos of themselves and people they knew. And this is a far more affordable option, even at this level of photography, compared to getting say a talented painter, hiring a painter to to create your likeness on on a canvas. That's absolutely true. Photography was an egalitarian innovation.

Painted portraiture was very expensive. Only the rich could afford it, but even regular people could save up to pay a de Garat typist for a portrait and individual portrait or a family portrait. This suddenly put realistic imagery of people within the pocketbook reach of normal people. And it was also clear early on the lot of the commerce full potential for the new art and technology of photography would

be in portraits of people. That's what people want to pay money for, and so obviously people wanted to start, you know, de Garat type portraiture businesses. But there's a problem. Portraits were a very, very difficult proposition for the earliest photography methods because exposure times were still too long too sharply capture live subjects. When Degar revealed his method, he'd

gotten the exposure through through the chemical development. He'd gotten exposure down from hours to minutes, but even the minutes were really hard. It's hard to hold a pose without moving at all for ten or fifteen minutes, right. You might end up moving somehow, changing your facial expression, and that's going to create blurry nous, which is going to lessen the value of the photo, which is an impediment

to commercial success. And in fact, when I was reading about this, I started to wonder if the you know, eighteen forties exposure times of around ten or fifteen minutes are an explanation for why people in old photos are so rarely smiling. Oh yeah, because I mean, I think a lot of us can can look at this, even our own family histories, dig up these old photos and

it's a bunch of like pain godish looking humans. You know, um, they just got bad news, right, And and of course one of the things is a lot of times we're looking at pictures from rougher time, so it's easy to just fall in line with thinking, oh, well, you know it was it was tough back then. You know, this is this photo was taken perhaps at a funeral um. But no, it's not. I mean, people in the past were happy. There were times that they smiled, but but

it was just not very often in photos. And I think one reason for this is that try to hold a smile for fifteen minutes. Oh yeah, it's certainly anything approaching a natural looking smile. Now, this would only apply to like the earlier photos that had the longer exposure times as as time went on, as the years went on, exposure times got shorter and shorter, and we'll talk about how in a minute, but it's really hard to hold a smile for even just five minutes, right, And apparently

I'm not the first person to wonder about this. I was looking this up and I found a really great twenty sixteen piece in Vox by Phil Edwards about why people didn't smile in old photos, and there are several explanations. The first point we should note is that some people actually did smile in old photos, just not as many as we're used to today now in our culture, when you take a picture, you smile, right, This was just not nearly as common. But I found you know, there's

one great example. Uh that's kind of hard to believe. It was taken in nineteen o four, but it was taken in nineteen o four in China by a photographer and anthropologist named Berthold Lawfer, and it looks like it was taken last year. It does. It's I mean, for one thing, it's it's just a high quality. But a lot of it too, is the fact that the the

individual in the photo is smiling. There is there's emotion beaming through their face and you're just you're just not used to seeing that in pictures from nineteen o four. And and I think also, you know, you mentioned, you know, to Gara types in this effort to like document other places and other people's uh and so you know, you give rise to all this anthropological photography, you know, which I think on one level, you know, there's this noble

effort to document and understand other other people. But at the at the same time, if you can't get them to smile, if they if you're having to depend on these long exposures and you're getting like a grim dour expression, like if if most photographic proof of the human species is is like a grim faced person who's ready for this, this long exposure to be done with. Like you're not getting a true sense of of the people, You're not You're missing out on a vital aspect of the human condition. Yeah,

and I think that's one reason we're seeing here. And now this photo was taken later when exposure times were shorter. Uh So, so the exposure time isn't nearly as much an issue here, but uh this this was an anthropologist who was trying to document life, who wasn't like you know it wasn't like this is the portrait of this man in the photo who that will be his portrait that hangs in his house forever. He's trying to show what life was like. And in life, a lot of

times people smile because they're happy. This guy's got He's like a guy sitting there at a table with a bowl of rice and he looks really excited. But anyway, even though some people did smile in old photos, if you see a photo from the US or Europe from the eighteen hundreds, there's a very good chance that the

subjects are not smiling. And yes, if it's a photo from those early years of photography, you know one of the eighteen forties Dagara types say, a good reason why nobody is smiling is probably exactly what we've been discussing. You can't hold a smile as long as they had to expose the plate. But there are some interesting other

explanations mentioned in that Phil Edwards piece. One was just the idea that early photography was art and it was seen as sort of a new version of painting, and in painted portraits generally people didn't smile because that was the artistic style, right. So, and as we discussed I think the first photo episode. Uh, the photographic technology like picks up where painting left off, so the the existing

styles would carry over. And then I'm also imagining that if there if there was some aspect of portraiture style that was due to the limitations of the technology, such as disposure times, like that would either uh you know, it would either further ingrain the standards or it would uh it would it would make this be the standard of the photograph, you know, like you would establish conventions

even if it wasn't necessarily still necessitated by the technology. Yeah, because otherwise the photographer shows up, Hey there's a new camera. Now everybody can smile. You might be like, well, why would I smile? That's just not done. We didn't used to smile and photographs, Why am I'm not going to be the dummy to start doing it exactly. Yeah. Another point made in this Edwards piece that's interesting is that, you know, early photos are not the same as our photos.

Our photos are often just ephemeral records capturing individual moments, and we understand them to be about moments. They're about what was going on in this one second and how we were feeling then and a lot of times in that vain people want to be smiling to show their having a good time. But photos back then weren't like that. They were sort of precious and immortal records of people as people, not not of moments as moments, right. And and also they were private, which is something that I

think is easy to forget with with photographs today. Now, obviously there's still a lot of private photography. Not everybody is, you know, is taking their their latest family photos and uh and plastering them all over the world, but a lot of people are. I mean, that's become what we do with photos. A lot of the photographs we take, we're taking to share, at least with a select audience on social media, or to you know, put on a resume,

to put on our online and resume or what have you. Yeah, exactly. In in contrast, I think these old photos, when people were first getting photo portraits made in the nineteenth century, the photo was interpreted as something like a painted port portrait. It was kind of a serious artifact representing your immortal character. I think the difference between a photo today and a photo of the eighteen fifties was kind of the difference between a tweet and a eulogy, and to take that

to extremes. I mean, in Victorian culture, it was a relatively common practice to photograph the dead and dead members of your family as a record of a person. Somebody in your family would die and you the only photo of them you might have might be of them as a corpse. Yeah. I think a lot of us out there, if we look through like our famili's photographic history goo will sometimes encounter those those photos of say a dead child. Yeah, it's very strange to us today, but it's another indication

of how differently they thought about photography back then. Uh. And just to to cement this idea of like potograph being a serious thing that was about serious values and not a place for smiling. Uh. There is even a comment from Mark Twain, who you know, Mark Twain wasn't like a person without a sense of humor. He wrote all kinds of funny stuff, but he said at one point quote, I think a photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to

posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught unfixed forever. Well, that's another thing to think about it with these two. Right, Like nowadays, with a photo shoot, you can you can you know, you get like a hundred or more images, right, and then you can you can then decide which ones have an acceptable smile, which ones have that magical smile that feels right and also doesn't make you look too silly. You can pinpoint the photo that makes you look the way you want to look. Uh. And then of course

there's you know, post processes as well. But uh, yeah, I can see where you might say, like, why would I risk a smile. I'll just stick with serious because I know that I can probably get that. That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, I'm somebody who's not good at smiling in photos. When people take pictures of me and I smile, I often see it and I'm like, oh, what was that? You know, I look like I'm like chewing on a spider or something. I don't know. I

I can sympathize. And then finally, one last point that Edwards makes in that article is that it appears that in Europe and America during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, some people just generally didn't think highly of smiling, Like they thought smiling was a sign of stupidity. So cultural norms just coming into play again. Right, But back to

the long exposure times of the earliest portraits. Watson and Rapp report in their book have an excellent chapter about early portraits, and one of the things that they have in there is an amazing quote of a firsthand description of what it was like to pose for a Daguera type by a Mr. Chittenden of Boston. We'll see how you like this one, Robert quote. The operators rolled out what looked like an overgrown barber's chair with a ballot

box attachment on a staff in front of it. I was seated in the chair and his briery and arms seized me by the wrists, ankles, waist and shoulders. There was an iron bar which served as an elongation of the spine, with a crossbar in which the head rested,

which held my head and neck as in a vice. Then, when I felt like a martyr in the embrace of the Nuremberg Maiden, which the some of the iron Maiden there um, I was told to assume my best Sunday expression, to fix my eyes on the first letter of the sign of a beer saloon opposite, and not to move or wink on pain of spoiling the exposure. So it sounds like you have to climb into a torture device

in order to be held still for this photo. Well you know, but but still today, if you get your photo taken by someone who knows what they're doing, you may be asked to for imposes that otherwise feel unnatural. You know. But it's uh, it's it's it's the thing about a photograph, of posing for a photograph is not necessarily a natural act, you know, it is it is

about the finished product. And so yeah, you might have to roll your shoulders in a way that you normally wouldn't or roll you know, position your your chin in a way that you normally wouldn't even think about. And and you do see people still grive about getting their photo taken with this degree of of disdain. Yeah, well, I mean, one of one of the funny things you're you're pointing out there is like how you have to

sometimes act unnatural to look natural. And this was also true in scenes, in bigger scenes, not just individual portraits, but like there are stories from the days of early de Guero types and crowd scenes and parties where guests would sometimes be prepared in advance that at some point they would be asked to freeze to create a quote general immobility for about seven minutes so that a decent

photo of the room could be taken. Obviously, in a crowd scene, like, they're going to be details that are a little less crucial because somebody might move and they'll just be a blurry part of the photo. But just yeah, try to imagine that. You're, like you're at a party and they want to get a sure what the party looked like. So at some point they're just going to

ask everybody to hold still while they expose it to guaratype. Yeah, everything that might be awkward in modern photography, and and you know covering an event, uh is going to be just a little bit more awkward with the limited technology. Yeah, because it sounds like a lot like a grip and grin, you know, which is still a standard of any time like a new business opens or uh, you know, any kind of business e thing happens and it needs to

be documented. You're gonna get that that nice staged uh and faked image of like two people shaking hands or presenting some sort of document that sort of thing. Can I tell you. I actually realized I have a sort of a prejudice against people who are good at posing for photos. There's something about it when people are just really good. It's suddenly assuming the pose and doing the face, and they look perfectly photogenic and can do it time

after time. I find that distrustful. Wait, isn't distrustful the right word. I find that trustworthy untrustworthy. Well, I don't know about that. I mean, most of it is just obeying the photographer, and and and I guess it helps if the photographer is good at communicating what they want you to do with your body. You know, how to roll your shoulders or your head, your chin, etcetera. Well, that's true, even if it doesn't feel right, listen to

the photographer. They can see you. You can't see you, right. It was probably was even more important then, right because nowadays the photographer can see rather instantly what the the the image is going to look like. You know, it's going to be a framed and squared and they may even be sharing that with you, either showing you the back of their digital camera or using some sort of

a like a wireless or wired viewing system. But back in uh, the olden days were discussing here like it was all uh if they were using a box of camera, it was all just in the box. It's only later that the images are going to become real. Now. Obviously, an exposure time of like ten to fifteen minutes for a portrait is just unsustained ball. That's it doesn't really work. So people tried all kinds of things to shorten the exposure.

This is also sometimes called the sitting time, right. Uh. So one thing people tried is powdering the subject's face to make it reflect more light, because the brighter something is obviously the less time it takes to expose the photo. Even on modern cameras. You know, you can think of the analogy of how shooting in low light means you have to leave the shutter open longer. So if you basically cover somebody in in pale powder, they reflect more light,

it takes less time. Another one would be a photo studio with white plaster walls to reflect as much light as possible. Sometimes they would use like mirrors to shine more sunlight onto the subject, which sounds really comfortable. I'm sure that makes it even easier to hold the pose when you've got like the sun in your eyes. Uh. Sometimes they tried like blue glass to make bright light from the windows less painful on the eyes of the subject who just had to sit there staring into the sun. Uh.

Supposedly Henry Fox Talbot worked around this. He tried to reduce sitting times by using a smaller camera. The light had to travel less distance, and thus it would be brighter and took less time to expose. There were some improvements in lenses in general camera design. Uh. There was a guy named Richard Beard who had a studio with a chair that rotated to get the best son. But

the biggest improvements came in advances in chemistry. So around the mid eighteen forties, people started using additional sensitizing chemicals. Remember Digere only had to use iodine to to sensitize the silver plate. But there were a couple of guys named Paul Beck Goddard in the in the United States and John Frederick Goddard in England. That they're not related, just both happened to be Goddard's. Uh. They started using bromine fumes to make the plate even more sensitive to

light so it would capture more detail. And less time. And then there was a French photographer named Antoine Claude who used chlorine fumes in addition to the iodine to make the plates more sensitive. So by further sensitizing the plate, they could make it gather more light data in less time. And these improvements, paired with better lenses and cameras and good light, altogether reduced exposure times from minutes to a

matter of seconds. Now, of course, one thing that's funny is that, uh, we mentioned the idea that a lot of traditional artists didn't love the idea of photo portraits because they might have seen it as replacing the work they were doing. But there's another thing not everybody loved about photo portraiture, which is that photos are too accurate. They're not always flattering. A painter could do the equivalent of photo shopping you to get the ward off your eyelid,

or to make you look taller. A Daguero type is depressingly almost violently accurate. You know. Yeah, that's true. Um, yeah, there were there were only so many things you could do, uh, in order to cover up bluemishes, et cetera when using the Daguerada. Now that's not to say that there weren't hand painted say improvements to deguerotypes at the time. They're actually wereb though a lot a lot of people thought

these looked bad. Like. One of the things that started happening or pretty early on, was the hand painted coloration of Deguara types, which, of course, because it was not color photography and people were like, well, where's the color. Some people had the idea of, well, we'll just paint the colors in, but of course that made it look less like a realistic photo and more like a hand painted thing, more like a like an illustration from a

William Blake uh publication. Right yeah. Now, of course, there's no way to talk about all the many different little incremental improvements and new methods that emerged in the following decades in the forties and fifties, but one that's really worth mentioning, I think would be Frederick Scott Archer's wet

plate method of photography. This was really important, which used a treatment called a colodeon which it was this thick liquid made out of like cotton, dissolved in nitric acid, and then you'd mix that with alcohol and ether, and then you'd apply that to a glass plate too since ties it and this method actually got the best of both worlds, between Dager's Daguero type and Henry Fox Talbot's Callo type. It made a reproducible negative image like the calotype,

so you can make copies. But it also it was sharp like the daguerotype. Remember the calotype was people thought it looked kind of fuzzy and less realistic and striking than the daguerotype. So this got the best of both worlds. But speaking of quick turnaround on photos, one one type of photochemical process that came along to improve the speed and convenience of photo production was what came to be known as the pharotype or the tin type. Yeah, this

is this is really interesting. So pharotype is the more authentic term here, right, more accurate. Tin type was kind of the informal um term, which is like tin as you'll say, it has to do with the seeming cheapness of the of the material. So yeah, and in eighteen fifties of photography innovation that became really popular in the

eighteen seventies. He was first described in eighteen fifty three by out Alf Alexandra Martin, but it was patented in eighteen fifty seven by Hamilton's Smith in America and by Clone and Jones in England. It used a process similar to wet plate photography that we were just talking about. It would produce an under exposed negative image on an iron plate. And this is a very When I say iron plate, I don't want you to imagine like an enormous,

thick like bullet catching piece of iron. It's very thin. And this is where we get the tin type because it was like this, this very thin layer um and then imagining one of those like aluminum foil baking dishes, yeah, something along those lines. So then it was blackened by painting or lacquering and then coated with an emulsion, and the dark background of the plate gave the image life, and tin dipes didn't require special backing. All of this

could be done in a matter of minutes. Even so you're preparing it, you're exposing it, you're developing, and you're varnishing it. So this is essentially the first type of instant pot right. It's kind of like the polaroid cameras you'd see later, where you could you could have the image ready in just a few minutes. Yeah, but also it was more affordable than the the garatype, So it was another one of these cases where the technology is being um changed in a way that makes it reach

more people. And I think one of the interesting things in the with the uh, with the innovations and inventions that remain in this episode is that at this point we're really getting into photography, not merely as a single invention, not even really as a as you know, a sort of a cloud of various folks working all over the world and making slight changes, but we're getting into photography as an industry of photography as as a business, and it really begins to take on a life all its own.

One of the key examples here is George Eastman's Kodak, which we'll talk about when we come back from one more break. All right, we're back. So everybody's heard of Kodak, right, and you've probably heard of heard of George Eastman. Uh, not the Italian B movie actor, but but the but

the historic, the truly famous George Eastman. And yeah, his advancements with Kodak here really took something that was previously this kind of science experiment of contraption, something best left to experts and the wealthy and adventures and really made huge strides and putting it towards putting it in the hands of everyday people. It seems like it was the next big step down in democratizing the art for everybody.

So the Dagara type and the Cala type like those made imagery, realistic imagery much more accessible than just painting portraiture had been. And then Kodak was even farther. Yes. So George Eastman lived eighteen through nineteen ten. He was a largely self educated guy who was the son of a New York politician and educator, Harvey G. Eastman, founder of Eastman's Commercial College in Rochester. And at the age of twenty three, George Eastmen obtained a camera for a

vacation trip. This is going to go on. So if he was born in eighteen twenty and he was at the age of twenty three, this would have been about eighteen forty three, just about three or four years after the Daguara type process was publicly revealed, right, So you know he was going to do what a lot of us do now and take for granted, I'm going to bring a camera on a vacation, get some photos, you know, contribute to this, this this craze of photography that's sweeping

the world. But he ended up not ended up not making the trip, but the equipment equipment that he had picked up. It fascinated him, but he he had some issues with the cost, with the weight, and with the awkward design of the equipment. All of this irked him. So he spent three years experimenting with gelatine emulsions in his mother's kitchen and UH in seventy eight he demonstrated how effective gelatine dry plates could be as opposed to wet plates. This is this is an improvement wet plates, UH,

which had to be coded, exposed, and developed while still wet. UH. You know that put some limitations on how much time can pass after the photograph before developing it. Yeah. With Archer's method, there are these stories about how you would have to have portable dark rooms, right because if you wanted to take a picture of something out in nature, out in the field, you have to get make the emulsion and get it wet and all that and take the photo immediately before it dried out, and you have

to do all this in the dark. But with this gelatine method, the dry plates could be exposed and then you could develop them later at your leisure. Um, like suddenly it's not just off to the races when you take a picture. Then in eighteen eighty he invented and patented a dry plate coading machine and this allowed for

the commercial production of these dry plates. And so at this point things began to get more business e Right, with the backing of Rochester businessman Henry Strong, he forms the Eastman Dry Plate Company in eighteen eighty one, and then this was reincorporated as the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in eighteen eighty four and then as Eastman Kodak Company in eighteen uh And of course Kodak uh is still around today. It's still a publicly traded company.

Uh so. Um, you know, despite all the changes that have occurred in the photographic world. I think it's you know, it's a testament to the impact this company had to realize that it is. It is still there now as a photography business. Kodak wasn't just working on like the media for the production, like the plates themselves. They actually did work on cameras, right. Yeah. One of the big things they did is they developed more affordable and easy

to use cameras. Uh, certainly by eighteen eighty eight. Uh, this was when they started busting out the box camera. So the box camera is when I say a box, you can look at pictures of these. They did look like a box, just like a whole on one end for the lens it had, but it had the lens film everything you needed to take a basic photograph. This wasn't the first box camera in the Kodak rolled out,

but it was the first commercially viable one. And their their motto was you press the button, we do the rest, uh, which is also just you know, it's it's a great slogan, but but yeah, they've taken this thing that we've described, this laborious process, and they've put it in a box and you push a button and you're essentially good to go. And this is also really the point in which modern snapshot photography truly becomes possible. Uh, just a really a

major moment in the accessibility of photography. You don't have to set out to do this science experiment. You can just grab your camera and go. So other key moments from the history of Kodak. And I'm we're not gonna be able to cover it all because again this is a company with a long history, but they establish professional photo finishing. They developed a flexible celluloid film that would be extremely important in the development of motion pictures, which

we'll get to believe in the next episode. Unless we take a photo break, I'm not sure what we're gonna Well, certainly in an episode soon in the future. Yes, they busted out the pocket code at camera, the folding pocket camera, and uh then in nineteen hundred the one dollar Brownie camera, which I was not familiar with this one. Looked at pictures of it. It's a little box camera and it has this kind of cartoon uh tweedle dumb tweedlede kind of character on the side. And yeah, it was a

camera you could buy for a dollar. Granted those were nineteen hundred dollars, but still, um, like, this is the the the camera becoming ever more inexpensive and ever more available to the people at large. Well, I think one thing that we should make a distinction about is the democratization of access to photography is like like a thing you could get like a portrait made, versus the democratization of photography as something you could do yourself, choosing what

to take a photo of. Right, because so there were people who were you know, who would take a decara type of you in the eighteen forties and the eighteen fifties that you could pay, and that made it affordable for people to get an image of themselves. But if you wanted to go out in the world and take a picture of something that struck your fancy, this is where that that's really changing. Yeah. Um, other advancements in nineteen o two they rolled out the developing machine that

you could develop your own film without a dark room. Uh. Aerial photography advancements took place in nineteen seventeen. So here we see, you know, the uh, the advancement of photography lining up with advancements in other fields. Five you get Code Chrome, the first commercially successful amateur color film, and at nineteen thirty seven you get the code of slide

projector uh. So uh kind of going back to the uh some of the ideas of the the camera obscura right like, now we're taking our images and we're projecting them onto the wall again, only we're doing it right side up this time and with more clarity and Again, this is just a sample because of course Kodak is

was one of the world's leading photo technology companies. But I think it does highlight just the kind of um, really rapid advancements you see, and so in business savvy advancements that end up taking place once uh, the invention becomes the property of industry, and of course it would play into other industries as well. Um Kodak would end up being involved in not only the development of motion pictures, which we alluded to already, but also the X ray industry,

which we've already podcasted on. Well, yeah, I mean that's something to think about as we consider the legacy of photography, especially in the early years. One really positive and practical use we should think of coming out of photography, I think is going back to X rays and runkin. Like the use of various forms of photography and medicine has been absolutely incalculable and the good it's provided and people.

You know, when we express gratitude for modern medicine, we often correctly think to mention things like vaccines and antibiotics and anesthetics and modern surgical techniques. It's I think it less often occurs to us to think of medical imaging is something to be thankful for. But the radical advancement of medical imaging is one of the most important things that happened in medicine over the past two hundred years.

It it improves accuracy and diagnosis of internal problems, which drastically improves outcomes, and it can, in a way, all be traced back to photography. Now again, there's just so many photo photographic innovations and inventions were just not gonna have time to cover, Like the polaroid was a major point. I remember just being fascinated by the polaroid camera when I was a child. You could point the camera, uh

take the picture. How did it comes? You just kind of shake it or let it do thing and the image materializes there. You didn't have to take film anywhere to be developed. Who are you know? They didn't have to uh stick anything in a little tube. It was just there. It was ready to go immortalized. In fact, as we all discovered when we got older, you didn't even actually have to shake it. Um. One of the funny things that I was reading about was how in

the early days did guara type as a word. It got the same sort of treatment as words like band aid and Xerox, where a specific brand name uh came to be used as a stand in for all technologies of its type. Like there's a story that Henry Fox Talbot was distressed to find out that his callow type method was sometimes being referred to as the paper diguero type. What a kick in the face. So let's talk just

a little bit more about about the legacy of the photograph. Um. You know, we've touched on a lot of this already in the previous two episodes, but you know, there's a tremendous amount to be said about the idea of the photograph as an objective statement of truth an in many ways it is you know, it would prove a highly essential tool in journalism and the documentation of wars and strife, as well as in you know, positive movement movements and

humanizing moments in in recent human history. We can easily think to the really jarring photographs of misery and death in wartime of racial strife, of protests, but also the humanizing movement moments where uh, you know, an individual that might otherwise be um, you know, considered you know another and and and dehumanized or made more human through the imagery.

I wonder if the widespread use of realistic imagery, photography, and then later on motion pictures and video is to some degree responsible for the increasing appreciation of human rights in the twentieth century, Like the idea that, oh, you know, maybe people in a place other than where I am do matter and have the same you know, rights and

concerns that I do. Yeah, it's yeah. But on the other hand, though, and there are examples of the photograph being used I think as a tool of um, you know, who want to focus on the otherness of different races and cultures, as well as by those who wish to, uh,

you know, to highlight our similarities. Um you know. We should remember that it was not only the photography was not only used to document things in a positive manner, was also used in an attempt to control people of Photography has been used as a tool of state control, of social control, as a means of tracking individuals. Um you know it is. It's been a tool of propaganda as well. It's been a tool of blackmail and exploitation.

Uh you know. They These are not cases where the invention necessarily changes human nature, but it's always worth remembering that human nature is going to shine through a technology, right, Uh, and that means in both positive and negative ways, Like the things that make humans admirable, We're going to see that in a ubiquitous technology, but we're also going to

see our awfulness. I guess the I guess one of the things that you see that I guess you see both of those and say, um, uh wartime photography and journalistic photography where you're capturing the ugliness, but you're trying to bring the truth of the ugliness out in a way that that that can benefit us, that can enable us to move past it, you know, And um, you know, I guess ultimately that's what we have to to try and grab onto in and and looking at our history

of technology, but again always just coming back to the realization that technology is uh. Any given technology is not good or evil. Uh, it is uh. It is all about the way that it is utilized. Well, yeah, that's true, because technology does not act on its own, though at the same time, I'm certainly of the opinion that not all technology is say neutral or or equally neutral. I mean, um,

technology doesn't do anything until it's used by people. But there are technologies that have technologies of inherent tendencies, They have ways that are in which they can easily be used and deployed. And so I don't think that like all technologies are on an equal footing in terms of like how harmful they are likely to be. In some cases, this is really clear. I mean obviously, like a uh, like a poison gas or a gun is not the

same as like a method of sterilizing wounds. You know, these like have inherent tendencies that make them more easy to be used for good or evil. Photography is one of those big ones where you know, it's it's it's it's scope is so broad that it's hard to it's hard to put it in one of those categories. Uh, it's it's used for everything because it is the objective record of life. It is the objective record of the world.

And thus in any case where it can be useful to represent the world, which is in almost every domain of human life, it can be used can be. Yeah, the the key here though, But but now, for the most part, I definitely agree that the photography has had tremendous positive impact. But I just think we have to keep in mind, uh, the areas where it has been used for ill as well. All right, so there you have it. Uh photography. Uh, I think I think that'll

do it. Uh. Three episodes. Uh, there's a lot to cover. We didn't cover nearly all of it. But hopefully everyone will leave these episodes with a new you know, a new respect and even awe of what photographs do for us and and what kind of amazing power we have, you know, in our pockets right now, most of us in the modern digital camera. Now as we uh we mentioned we're not done with with with photos. We're certainly

not done with the image. We're hopefully I'm going to move on to motion pictures at some point in the future here. But uh, yeah, this was a fun one. I really feel like I I learned some things I wasn't aware of regarding the history of photography, and I have a new respect for the media myself. Yeah, totally. This has proved very rich subject matter. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to Invention pod dot com and that's

where we'll find the episodes. And uh, if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is just make sure you have subscribed, and then if you can leave us a nice rating a nice review wherever you get the show, that would also be tremendously helpful. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Tari Harrison.

If you would like to get in touch with us to let us know feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,