4th Century BC Aristotle notes the natural phenomenon whereby a narrow beam of light entering a dark room projects an image (upside down and rather fuzzy) onto piece of paper about 15cm away from the entry point.

1490 Leonardo da Vinci realises the potential for the camera obscura (‘darkened room’) as an aid to accurate drawing and perspective; he develops his ideas in his notebooks, 1508.

1558 Giambattista della Porta, an Italian physician, publishes the first account of the use of the camera obscura as a drawing aid in a scientific book Magia Naturalis. He perfects the camera obscura, using a convex rather than concave lens.

17th and 18th Camera obscura used by many artists as drawing aids, allegedly
Centuries including Caraveggio (1571-1610) Vermeer (1632-55) and Canaletto (1697-1768) – though most were reluctant to admit it. (David Hockney, 2001, creates controversy in BBC series and book Secret Knowledge by suggesting the great leap forward in painting at that time could not have been due just to sudden, widespread improvements in technique, but was attributable to the use of the camera obscura and camera lucida – a ‘prism (or lens) on a stick’ - as aids.)

Portable versions of the camera obscura appear in the 17th century, initially cumbersome tents, or like sedan chairs. Small wooden box versions, incorporating a mirror (the world’s first SLR cameras!), become the most popular form in the 18th century, because artists could easily place thin tracing paper over the glass screen, and the mirror also corrected the inverse image. Devices like these lead to the first photographic cameras invented in the 19th century by Wedgwood, Niepce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot.

1760 Charles Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche (1723-74) anticipates the detailed transcription of the observable world that would occur with photography in his novel Giphantie.

1802 Thomas Wedgwood experiments with putting images on ceramics. He succeeds in capturing image on leather, but cannot fix it (it continues to darken).

1813 Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a wealthy French landowner, works to replace lithographic chalk with light.

1826 Niepce’s heliograph (‘sun drawing’) View from a Window at Gras is the oldest known photograph in existence. Its lack of clarity “suggests an appropriate mysteriousness underlying the very act of photography and the process of ‘seeing’.” (Clarke, 1997,p.12)

1827 Niepce presents ‘the first picture copied from Nature’ to the Royal Society in London. Uses ‘heliography’ to copy engravings.

1829 Niepce collaborates with Louis Daguerre, originator of the diorama in 1822, and experimenter with the camera obscura and the problem of fixing an image cast by light.

1833 Niepce dies; Daguerre uses his work to capture images on silvered copper plates: ‘daguerreotypes’.

William Henry Fox Talbot begins to try to fix images on light-sensitive paper.

1835 Fox Talbot succeeds, using gallic acid developer to produce a paper ‘negative’ which, made translucent by waxing, could be used to make positive prints. This was the origin of modern photograhic printing, allowing multiple prints to be made from a single negative.

1837 First successful daguerrotypes: latent images in iodide of silver developed by exposure to vapours of mercury, and fixed by immersion in common salt and hot water. The process produces a single metal plate with a reversed image. The degree of detail and clarity achieved were remarkable, especially when compared with Niepce’s first print.

1839 The birth of photography (‘writing with light’):

Daguerre announces the daguerreotype (having failed to form a company to exploit the process) and offers the rights to the French state, which awards him a pension; at the presentation, committee member Delacroix laments “from this day, painting is dead”. The French state makes the process freely available. 24 others subsequently claim to have invented photography.

Fox Talbot makes public his paper-negative process, from which came Talbotype or Calotype prints, and protects it by patent in 1841.

Hippolyte Bayard succeeds in making direct positives on paper, but fails to promote his process, and complains bitterly at his lack of recognition.

The term ‘photography’ begins to be used in both English and German.

1840 Petzval (a Viennese mathematician) and Voigtlaender (an optician) work to improve lenses. Early examples rely on flint and crown glass.

1842 Jena glass is invented in France, overcoming the limitations of flint and crown glass, and is developed in Germany by Schott of Jena and by Zeiss (another optician).

1844-46 Fox Talbot publishes The Pencil of Nature.

1849-50 Du Camp (writer and friend of Flaubert) takes pictures in Egypt.

1850s Photography becomes a populous profession. Carte de visite portraits become fashionable in the early ‘50s; pictures supplement names, identity becomes a matter of images rather than words. The demand is exploited particularly by Disderi, using a camera taking ten photographs on a single plate.

1851-52 Teynard also photographs Egypt.

1852 Fenton photographs in Russia and follows Crimean War 1955.

1850 Evrard introduces albumen (egg-white) paper, following earlier experiments by Herschel in England, and Niepce de St-Victoire (cousin of Nicephore Niepce), who coated glass negatives for wet exposure. This rendered details scrupulously, but exposure times were slow. The process was ideal for landscape, architecture and art reproduction. Albumen paper remains widely used for the rest of the century; by 1894 main European manufacturer Dresdener Albumin Papier Fabrik A.G. uses 60,000 fresh eggs a day.

1851 Scott Archer introduces wet collodion process: a sticky substance derived from gun cotton and dissolved in ether, and spread on glass plates, with added potassium iodide. These were extremely light-sensitive, and exposure times were reduced from minutes to seconds.

Commission des Monumentes Historiques project to to record threatened architecture in France the greatest of many architectural surveys undertaken in the 1850s.

Societe Heliographique formed in Paris.

1853 Photographic Society formed in London.

1854 Salzmann documents ancient architecture in Jerusalem.

1855 Taupenot publishes first effective dry-plate process.

1856 Stereoscope viewers, drawing on scientific research in the 1830s and the work of Brewster in Edinburgh and Duboscq on stereoscopic cameras and viewers in the early 1850s, were now ‘to be seen in every drawing room’ (Jeffrey, 1981). The market lasted until the end of the century, and stereoscopes were most popular in America, until the 1890s when stereoscopic cards went out of fashion.

1857 Petzval and Voigtlaender introduce the orthoscopic (‘correct seeing’) lens.

1858 Thomas Skaife succeeds in photographing a shell in flight as it was fired from a mortar.

1859 Thomas Skaife introduces the Pistolgraph, using wet collodion process, with wide aperture Dallmeyer f/2.2 and f/1.1 lenses (the fastest available at the time) and yielding circular negatives around one inch in diameter.

1860 Mass-produced dry plates on sale in England, but wet collodion process, although cumbersome, remains preferred by photographers well into the 1870s.

Sir John Herschel, writing in the Photographic News (May) refers to: ‘the possibility of taking a photograph, as it were, by a snap-shot – of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time’. Credited as origin of the term ‘snapshot’ in photography (previously a term from hunting / shooting, meaning to shoot quickly, without taking careful aim or preparation).
In fact Skaife’s Pistolgraph, of a year earlier, already did it.

1860s Carte de visite portraits widely collected, by Queen Victoria among others. The craze lasts to the end of the century.

1861 Celluloid invented.

1864 Swan introduces the carbon printing process, giving durable prints with very fine tonal range, and permitting high-quality mass production for the first time. Process is used by Braun in Alsace to copy old master drawings; British rights are purchased by the Autotype Company, which prints Thomson’s Illustrations of China and its People in 1873-74.

1871 Dr R Maddox of Southampton publishes details of a new photographic emulsion using gelatine and bromide of silver.

1875 Leon Warnerke, in London, develops a magazine camera, taking a spool of stripping film (an expensive substance manufactured from collodion and India rubber applied to glazed paper).

1878 Warnerke introduces a light-metering ‘Sensitometer’.

1887-88 Amidst a flurry of experiments with instantaneous picture-making, Eadweard Muybridge (British photographer working in California) succeeds in capturing the action of a galloping horse.

1878 Gelatine dry plates on the market. Fast and convenient, and ‘gentle’ on cameras (previously rotted by wet collodion). Light metering becomes necessary as the fast-drying plates come into use.

1879 Alfred Harman, professional photographer and early exponent of Fox Talbot’s negative / positive printing Calotype process, founds the ILFORD business at Ilford, Essex.

1880 First halftone reproduction from a photograph appears in the New York Daily Graphic on March 4th.

1882 Georg Meisenbach of Munich patents a halftone photo-block process which could be used with type in ordinary letterpress printing. First print from a Meisenbach autotype block appears in the Illustrierte Zeitung, Leipzig, 13th October 1883.

1884 onwards Muybridge continues researches on action photography at University of Pennsylvania. Similar work is carried out by E.J. Marey in Paris and, slightly later, Ottomar Anschuetz in Breslau.

Development of ‘animated photography’ and of the Kinetoscope, Cinematograph, Theatrograph and Animatograph. W Friese-Greene patents his process in Britain in 18889; Thomas Edison pioneers the process in America and the Lumiere brothers in France.

‘Hand cameras’ allow amateurs to capture movement at street level. (Paul Martin’s ‘Facile’ hand camera of 1889 weighed over four pounds when loaded with 12 plates and resembled a small suitcase. BUT: a Hasselblad 500C/M with standard 80mm lens, lenshood and metering prism today weighs 4lb 2oz; and a professional Nikon D3 digital SLR weighs …)

1888 John Carbutt of Philadelphia begins manufacture of flexible negative films based on celluloid.

George Eastman introduces the Kodak: a roll-film arrangement taking 100 pictures, developed at the Eastman factory and returned to the owner with reloaded camera.

1889 Kodak uses a nitro-cellulose film of the sort developed by Rev. Hannibal Goodwin in 1887.

1890 Max and Louis Levy, in Philadelphia, introduce the first commercial halftone screens, using a sandwich of lacquered glass plates etched with parallel lines.

Karl Klic develops rotogravure process, allowing the gravure process (‘an expensive and delicate method of printing’, invented by him in 1879 and used, inter alia, by art photographers) to be used on rotary cylinder presses

1890s Many American magazine illustrations now printed by another screen process, using dots rather than lines, developed by Frederick Ives, also of Philadelphia.

Albumen paper is eventually superseded by quicker, cheaper and more permanent gelatine-chloride printing-out papers. Automatic printing machines are developed to take advantage of the new rapid papers.

Focal-plane shutters, good for ‘fast work’, become popular (Goerz-Anschuetz shutter offered 90 speeds from 1/10 to 1/1200 of a second).

The Goerz half-plate (5in x 4in) camera is developed, using flat film, in conjunction with Anchuetz ‘the animal movement specialist’.

Twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras help ‘capture the instant’ by allowing operators to watch for the right moment.

Genuine pocket cameras evolve in the late 1890s, together with daylight-loading roll film.

Artist photographers become increasingly interested in symbolism, and in underlying order beyond appearance. The art movement centres on photographic societies, which are especially widespread in Britain, numbering 256 in 1900.

1896 Monthly magazine Paris Moderne first published in the autumn, featuring candid photo-essays on Parisian life.

1898 French sports magazine La Vie au grand air is founded, and soon begins to use photo-reports.

1900 Diaphragm aperture system (f.1 – f.64 and beyond) established at an international congress in Paris.

Eastman Kodak introduces the Box Brownie for $1 in America in February and 5/- in Britain in May (same price at existing exchange rate). It initially produced six (later eight) 2.25x2.25 square negatives on what became standard, daylight-loading 120 roll film. The name Brownie drew on characters popular in America from children’s books and stories written and illustrated by the Canadian Palmer Cox. The American marketing was whimsical, featuring Cox-like cartoon characters, and was aimed strongly at children. The British promotion never suggested the camera was aimed at children. Over 100,000 cameras are sold in the first year and, passing through many model changes, the Brownie was still popular in the 1950s.

1903 The Daily Mirror is founded in November, the first daily newspaper anywhere to be illustrated exclusively with photographs. Photo-reporting becomes a profession at this time.

1905 Das Illustrirte Blatt, in Germany, is the first weekly to be printed in rotogravure. The Frankfurter Illustrierte follows in 1911 and the Weltspiegel in Berlin in 1912, but the process, which made possible long- run high-quality printing, was fully exploited only in the 1930s.

1907 The Lumiere brothers begin the commercial manufacture of ‘Autochrome’ plates at their Lyons factory. This was the first popular colour process, invented in 1904; it used dyed potato starch grains, coated with silver bromide emulsion, on glass plates. The autochrome image was either projected or inspected in a hand viewer, and the process continued in use until the 1930s. (Frederick Ives of Philadelphia had experimented with more intricate colour systems in the 1890s.)

1920s Still reportage photography has its heyday after the Great War. Illustrated journals flourish in Germany, and the photo-agencies Dephot and Weltrundschau are founded in 1928. But innovative photo-journalism peters out in Germany after Hitler comes to power.

1925 Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar, introduces the first production-model Leica 1 (Model A) at the Spring Fair in Leipzig, the name being a contraction of LEitz CAmera. Pioneering 35mm photography, Leitz development manager Oskar Barnack conceived the idea of reducing the negative size for subsequent enlarging in 1905, and developed the original ‘UR’ and ‘O’ prototypes in 1913-14 (3 made) and 1923-24 (31 made) respectively. The 24x36mm negative size was arrived at by doubling the 18x24 frame size of existing cinema film, and Barnack chose film strip with space for 36 pictures. 1,000 Leica A models are produced in the first year. The first small-format enlarger is introduced under the name FILAR in the same year, and the first 35mm projector under the name ULEJA a year later.

Meanwhile the Ernemann company in Dresden develop the Ermanox, with an extremely fast Ernostar lens. This made indoor photography photography in ordinary electric lighting possible.

1928 Lucien Vogel founds the magazine Vu in Paris, which becomes important in the early thirties.

c. 1930 A new kind of candid, spontaneous reportage comes into being, exploiting the advantages of the Leica and Ermanox.

1930s Commercial production of coated paper begins; heat-drying printing inks are developed for letter-press printing.

1932 Leitz introduces the Leica II with coupled rangefinder and built-in viewfinder.

1933 Henri Cartier-Bresson has his first exhibition in New York.

1935 The Ihagee Kine Exacta is introduced, forerunner of sophisticated SLR (single lens reflex) cameras, popularly-priced models of which do not, however, appear until the 1950s.

1935 The first practical colour film for amateurs and professionals comes onto the market, but is not widely available until after 1945.

1936 Life magazine begins publication in America.

1937 Edward Weston is the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim award. Photographers are regularly honoured thereafter as photography’s status grows in the United States.

1938 Picture Post is established in Britain, one of the most serious of all the illustrated magazines.

1939 The Polaroid process, initially using silver halide negative material to produce a positive in one stage, is pioneered in Europe and used for document copying. After further development in the US, Edwin Land introduces the Polaroid camera in 1947.

Principal source:

Ian Jeffrey Photography: A Concise History, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. 1981 (reprinted 2006).

Additional Sources:

Michael Busselle The Encyclopedia of Photography, London: Octopus Books, 1983.

Graham Clarke The Photograph, Oxford: OUP The Oxford History of Art, 1997.

Colin Harding ‘The Camera Obscura’, Black & White Photography, Lewes: GMC Publications, November 2008, p. 81.
Mary Warner Marien Photography: A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2002.

The History of Ilford, Harman Technology, 2008.

http://en.leica-camera.com/culture/history
http://www.boxcameras.com
http://www.thebigcamera.com.au

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