The Story of Photography, told through it's printing technologies

From Robert Hunt, A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, London, 1841:

The announcement of the discovery of a process by which light – the most subtile of the elements, the mysterious agent of vision – was made to pencil, on solid tablets, the objects it illuminated, and permanently fix the fleeting shadow, possessed…so much of the marvelous and the beautiful as to excite more than common wonder.”

From Wm. Crawford, The Keepers of Light, Morgan & Morgan, 1973:

“In linguistics, syntax is the name for the rules of structure that make meaning possible. We have to follow syntactical rules in order to turn our concepts into statements … There is a syntactical structure for the “language” of photography, and that comes, not from the photographer, but from the chemical, optical and mechanical relationships that make photography possible. The photographer can do only what the technology available at the time permits him to do. … You simply cannot look at photographs as if they were ends without means. Each is the culmination of a process in which the photographer makes his decisions and discoveries within a technological framework…

In photography, the syntax is the technology.”

Introduction

The story of photography is inextricably bound up with the story of lithography and therefore with the story of printing. In the early part of the 19th century, an energetic Parisian inventor named Nicephore Niépce conceived the idea that light might be used to simplify the production of lithographic plates. These were stone slabs on which letters and images could be drawn, by hand, using a substance that oil-based ink would adhere to. The slab could then be inked and used to print many copies of its hand drawn contents. Lithography had been in use since ____, and had become the dominant printing technology. Niépce was aware that asphalt or tar hardened under the action of strong light. He thought there might be a way to “imprint” lithographic stones by coating them with asphalt and then exposing them to light through a template. This would greatly reduce the amount of hand labor involved in producing lithographic plates. His experiments, aimed at enhancing lithographic printing, led in 1826 to the first known permanent photograph from nature, a view from Niépce’s window recorded on pewter. It led further, in 1839, to the daguerreotype, the first photographic process to seize the public imagination. Niépce partnered with Louis J. M. Daguerre, who named and popularized the process.

Almost all photography has been based on the idiosyncracies of a very few very common substances: silver, iron, asphalt, gelatin (as in Jello). Asphalt was the first and started the ferment that led to photography. But these idiosyncratic substances weren’t the cause of the ferment. They were just the newest conscripts in an old quest.

The Story

The urge to record visual images is part of human nature since earliest times. The caves of southern France bear evidence of our ancestors’ impulse to record their experience 40,000 years ago. Our even earlier forebears undoubtedly used whatever materials they found at hand to mark with, and to mark upon. A few cave drawings have survived because of their protected environment. Earlier efforts, scratched into earth, bark, or bone, have not.

The history of the graphic arts, including all forms of painting and printing, is the story of the evolution of these tools and materials, of the substrates that carried the images and the methods of creating the images on them. It is part of the story of man’s effort to extend the range of his influence beyond the range of his immediate presence. It is part of the story of the evolution of a level of communication that sets us apart from all other creatures.

Man always strove to make marks of significance to himself and others, without excessive labor, on some material of adequate viewability, portability, and permanence. His earliest efforts – probably scratched in dirt – were readily made but are lost to us. The Rosetta Stone, we may imagine, took more effort and had more than adequate permanence, but still required its audience to come to it. Neither earth nor chisel and stone were to be the agents of mass communication.

Throughout most of this evolution, from the era of cave drawings to the engravings of Renaissance, the human eye and hand alone guided the tool that produced the image. Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type aided the reproduction of the written word. But images were still engraved by hand. Then, less than 200 years ago, the odd behavior of asphalt, silver, iron and gelatin was noticed and feverishly exploited. Suddenly light – fleeting, impalpable light – began to replace the engraver’s hand. Using the sensitivity of these substances, images were formed “by the agency of light alone”, in the words of Fox Talbot in 1840. Photography was born. A new world opened in visual communication, and a powerful new vocabulary was added to the lexicon of the visual artist.

What follows here is a survey of the evolving technologies of photographic printing, or, in the words of William Crawford, of the syntax of photography.