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Photography

Photographs have become an essential tool of journalism. Starting in the late nineteenth century, photography became a regular part of newspaper and magazine stories. By the mid-twentieth century, photos were widely used on television, and more recently still, online journalism.

As a process, photography breaks into three stages, and each has been subject to sometimes difficult development over the past 130 years. The first step is to create a device (today a camera) to expose or “take” the picture; the second is to preserve and print that picture; and the third—and most essential to modern print journalism—is the ability to rapidly duplicate thousands (sometimes millions) of copies of the printed picture.

Making Photographs

The idea of trying to make a permanent image of a scene (without having to paint or draw it) is an old one—dating back to Renaissance times, if not before. “Camera obscura” devices, some of them the size of small rooms, allowed for people to see a pale reflection of an outside scene on the wall of a darkened space. Adding a lens to the small hole that admitted the scene made for a brighter picture. By the seventeeth century, camera obscura equipment could be made small enough to allow it to be carried from place to place. But these were little more than elaborate playthings for the rich as there was no apparent means of preserving the displayed picture. What was needed was some means of “fixing” the reflected scene, and many people experimented with different ways to accomplish that.

Daguerreotypes

The first commercially successful type of pho-tography—though quite different in many ways than what we know today—appeared in mid-1839 when French innovator Louis J. M. Daguerre created the first widely used method of making and displaying pictures. His system created direct positive images on light-sensitive silver-coated surfaces of thin copper plates. of often exquisite quality, the “Daguerreotype” quickly became popular, especially for making personal portraits. For the first time, exact records of people as well as scenes could be reproduced in a black-and-white (and sometimes sepia-toned) image.

Though seemingly magical in their time, the Daguerreotype had several drawbacks. Taking one required high light levels, and even so, a picture sometimes had to be exposed over many minutes. Some early daylight street scenes were exposed for up to 15 minutes, giving them a lifeless aspect because moving people or vehicles failed to record in the scene. Taking portraits required sitting absolutely still for unnatural periods of time and people were sometimes placed in a metal frame so as to hold the necessary pose long enough. After 1841, improved lenses reduced exposure time to about a minute. The process rendered some color tones better than others (albeit in black and white), but skies turned out a uniform grey, no matter what the weather. And all details, whether facial or scenic, were reversed left to right because of the way the Daguerreotype camera worked.

Furthermore, the resulting image was highly fragile and subject to tarnishing over time. Nor was there any means of making copies as the process produced only positive originals, not a negative image. If multiple pictures were required, just that many different Daguerreotypes would have to be taken, at the risk of trying the patience of both the subject and the Daguerreotypist. Despite these problems, this was the first means of reproducing exact images from life and, for a time, was hugely popular in Europe and the United States.

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