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List of the Top 80 Most Famous 19th-Century Photographers. Here is a short list of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century. Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon (1811-81) Born in France, Adam-Salomon began life as a sculptor and carried his artistic talents - some say excessively - into his photography.
- Pictorialism
Like art groups, the photographic societies which had sprung...
- Becher, Bernd/Hilla
Profiles of Other Famous Camera Artists. In addition to the...
- History of Photography
The best known photographers to use the calotype process...
- Street Photography
Photographers: 19th-Century. What are the Characteristics of...
- Julia Margaret Cameron
Now considered to be one of the greatest photographers of...
- Pictorialism
1. Famous photographer, painter and filmmaker, Man Ray was the sole American who was a significant part of both the Dada and Surrealist movements. Despite his contributions in various artistic mediums, he is best remembered as a photographer who popularised solarisation and Rayographs techniques.
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- Overview
- The Birth of Photography
- Technological Improvements
By modern standards, nineteenth-century photography can appear rather primitive. While the stark black and white landscapes and unsmiling people have their own austere beauty, these images also challenge our notions of what defines a work of art.
Photography is a controversial fine art medium, simply because it is difficult to classify—is it an art or a science? Nineteenth century photographers struggled with this distinction, trying to reconcile aesthetics with improvements in technology.
Although the principle of the camera was known in antiquity, the actual chemistry needed to register an image was not available until the nineteenth century.
Artists from the Renaissance onwards used a camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber), or a small hole in the wall of a darkened box that would pass light through the hole and project an upside down image of whatever was outside the box. However, it was not until the invention of a light sensitive surface by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce that the basic principle of photography was born.
Photographers after Niépce experimented with a variety of techniques. Louis Daguerre invented a new process he dubbed a daguerrotype in 1839, which significantly reduced exposure time and created a lasting result, but only produced a single image.
At the same time, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot was experimenting with what would eventually become his calotype method, patented in February 1841. Talbot’s innovations included the creation of a paper negative, and new technology that involved the transformation of the negative to a positive image, allowing for more than one copy of the picture. The remarkable detail of Talbot’s method can be see in his famous photograph, The Open Door (1844) which captures the view through a medieval-looking entrance. The texture of the rough stones surrounding the door, the vines growing up the walls and the rustic broom that leans in the doorway demonstrate the minute details captured by Talbot’s photographic improvements.
The collodion method was introduced in 1851. This process involved fixing a substance known as gun cotton onto a glass plate, allowing for an even shorter exposure time (3-5 minutes), as well as a clearer image.
The big disadvantage of the collodion process was that it needed to be exposed and developed while the chemical coating was still wet, meaning that photographers had to carry portable darkrooms to develop images immediately after exposure. Both the difficulties of the method and uncertain but growing status of photography were lampooned by Honoré Daumier in his Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art (1862). Nadar, one of the most prominent photographers in Paris at the time, was known for capturing the first aerial photographs from the basket of a hot air balloon. Obviously, the difficulties in developing a glass negative under these circumstances must have been considerable.
Further advances in technology continued to make photography less labor intensive. By 1867 a dry glass plate was invented, reducing the inconvenience of the wet collodion method.
Prepared glass plates could be purchased, eliminating the need to fool with chemicals. In 1878, new advances decreased the exposure time to 1/25th of a second, allowing moving objects to be photographed and lessening the need for a tripod. This new development is celebrated in Eadweard Muybridge’s sequence of photographs called Galloping Horse (1878). Designed to settle the question of whether or not a horse ever takes all four legs completely off the ground during a gallop, the series of photographs also demonstrated the new photographic methods that were capable of nearly instantaneous exposure.
October 2004. The daguerreotype, the first photographic process, was invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and spread rapidly around the world after its presentation to the public in Paris in 1839.
The Nineteenth Century: The Invention of Photography. In 1839 a new means of visual representation was announced to a startled world: photography. Although the medium was immediately and enthusiastically embraced by the public at large, photographers themselves spent the ensuing decades experimenting with techniques and debating the nature of ...
The Bigger Picture: From cheaply manufactured daguerreotype portraits to photographic publications and Kodak cameras, nineteenth-century photography truly became a mass medium. Photography also had a significant impact on art, since in it was understood to be the gold standard of optical realism.
Jan 25, 2016 · Early Forms of 19th Century Photography. January 25, 2016. Most of the earliest photographs were not printed on paper, but on sheets of metal or glass. These photographs capture extraordinary details, and give us a glimpse of life in the 19th century.
