You could say Documentary Photography first came about merely as a way to accurately record anything from any environment. This amount of scope allowed some of the earliest practice photographs and techniques to become an important element even within photographers within the 21st century.
Initially, photography was a very long and laborious process, photographers such as Joseph Nicéphore Niépce were the first recognised photographers, Niépce created images using the process of heliography, which was essentially sundrawing. Although Niépce created one of the first photographs his work is fairly unknown and only a handful of his prints remain today.
The image above, taken in 1826, took approximately 8 hours to expose, and as you can see the sun has completely crossed the sky creating shadows on either side of the image. The time scale of taking a photograph was something that did not appeal to many people. So the practice of taking a photograph still needed to be improved in many ways.
Chronologically, Louis Daguerre was the next to make a monumental discovery in photography. His Daguerreotype was a much faster way of taking a photograph, narrowing the exposure time down to around 8 minutes. Although this was still not perfect, it made portraiture available to people which was highly sought after and also very expensive at the time.
This image of Daguerre’s taken in 1838 was a shock to those who witnessed it, due to the lack of people. In actual fact the people were there just the long exposure of the photograph made all people invisible, with the exception of a man having his shoes shined.
This process was still awkward to achieve because of the complexity of the chemicals used to expose and develop each individual plate. William Henry Fox Talbot created the essential negative which allowed photographs to be duplicated, but it was not until 1889 when George Eastman created roll film that photography became available to members of the general public, and it was at this time photography really became interesting.
Initially, photography was a very long and laborious process, photographers such as Joseph Nicéphore Niépce were the first recognised photographers, Niépce created images using the process of heliography, which was essentially sundrawing. Although Niépce created one of the first photographs his work is fairly unknown and only a handful of his prints remain today.
The image above, taken in 1826, took approximately 8 hours to expose, and as you can see the sun has completely crossed the sky creating shadows on either side of the image. The time scale of taking a photograph was something that did not appeal to many people. So the practice of taking a photograph still needed to be improved in many ways.
Chronologically, Louis Daguerre was the next to make a monumental discovery in photography. His Daguerreotype was a much faster way of taking a photograph, narrowing the exposure time down to around 8 minutes. Although this was still not perfect, it made portraiture available to people which was highly sought after and also very expensive at the time.
This image of Daguerre’s taken in 1838 was a shock to those who witnessed it, due to the lack of people. In actual fact the people were there just the long exposure of the photograph made all people invisible, with the exception of a man having his shoes shined.This process was still awkward to achieve because of the complexity of the chemicals used to expose and develop each individual plate. William Henry Fox Talbot created the essential negative which allowed photographs to be duplicated, but it was not until 1889 when George Eastman created roll film that photography became available to members of the general public, and it was at this time photography really became interesting.
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