Early Photography Research Paper
An Investigation of the History of
Photography and Early Cinema
Before 20th Century
Media History Course
Supervised by
Dr. Jonathan Stubbs
Prepared by
Niwar A. Obaid
December 2, 2013
Introduction
Ever since 1839 photography has become an essential means of communication and expression. In its early years, photography 's unique powers of visual description have been used to record, report, and inform. As stated by Beaumont Newhall (1982: 7), photography "is at once a science and an art" and both aspects are inseparably associated throughout its astounding rise from a substitute for skill of hand to an independent art form. A central role of photography was and still is that it has documented and recorded people 's lives and the world in …show more content…
history from a variety of perspectives. Nowadays photography has become a powerful means of communication and a mode of visual expression that touches human life in many ways. The early developments and advances of photography by European inventors are focused by historians of mass communication which will be explained throughout this essay.
Similarly, cinema, as a medium of entertainment, is now more than a century old. However, its great potential as an instructional and motivational instrument has been realized in history. Developing countries, worried to hasten the processes of economic and social change which will offer their people a better life, have turned increasingly to cinema as a means of improving or replacing traditional communication forms (Peter Hopkinson: 1971:5). Nevertheless, cinema drew from existing media, especially theater and photography, also making use of the “persistence of vision” phenomena, in its early period it was seen as more powerful than any other media (environmetalhistory.org).
The aim of this essay is to shed light on the developments in the history of these two prevailing mediums before 20th century. I would like to discuss and clarify the answers of this question: Standard histories of mass communication have focused on developments in Western Europe and North America. How can we explain this limited focus?
Photography
First, we owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel, who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public (Robert Leggat: 1995). The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible. It is somewhat strange that photography was not invented before 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography came into being. The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence about four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a camera obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated. The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light (ibid).
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the French man who successfully produced the first picture in 1827, using material that hardened on exposure to light which "was the first of those photomechanical techniques that were soon to revolutionize the graphic arts by eliminating the hand of man in the reproduction of pictures of all kinds" (Beaumont Newhall: 1982: 14), although this picture required an exposure of eight hours.
Photographers after Niépce experimented with variable techniques. Louis Daguerre invented a new process he dubbed a daguerrotype in 1839, which significantly reduced exposure time and created a permanent result (Rebecca Easby). The daguerreotype 's silver image was capable of rendering exquisitely fine detail. It was a single-image process; however, each exposure produced only one picture, incapable of reproduction. As notified by Robert Leggat (1995), in case anyone required two copies, the only way of coping with this was to use two cameras side by side. Thus, there was a high need for a means of copying pictures which daguerreotypes lacked that ability.
Besides, daguerreotype quickly developed into a succeeding business in England and the United States. Wonderful portraits were made by such daguerreotypists as Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes in Boston. The French were well-known for landscapes and cityscapes. In 1840 a much faster lens was designed by the Hungarian Jozsef Petzval and manufactured by Peter Voigtlander in Austria. Not much later, a technique was discovered that increased significantly the light sensitivity of the daguerreotype plate. This process involved a second fuming with chlorine or bromine before exposure (scphoto.com). Consequently, this indicates the intense attention of Western Europe and North America to the prompt changes of photographical techniques and its enhancements.
In the meantime in France, witnessing the early 1839 announcement was an American, Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse himself had been experimenting in photography, and when he heard Daguerre 's announcement he wrote about it right away for his audiences in America. Later on, he returned to New York City and taught the new process to several students, including Mathew Brady (Whose contribution will be mentioned later). In 1840 the world 's first portrait studio was opened in New York City. We can credit Morse for bringing photography to America along with his well-known invention, the telegraph (Ross Collins).
At the same time, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot was experimenting with 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, which led to the possibility of more than on copy. Calotypes did not displace the daguerreotype in spite of their flexibility and the simplicity with which they could be made (Rebecca Easby). Nevertheless, calotypes and the salted paper prints that were made from them remained popular in the United Kingdom and on the European continent outside of France until the collodion process arrived. In 1846 Fox Talbot published a book of photographs called The Pencil of Nature, commenting that the pictures were “…natural images… impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist 's pencil.” (Roger Parry: 2011). Thus, photographic pioneers viewed their technology as simply a way of loyally recording a “real” image. The calotype was not nearly as popular as daguerreotype, partly because of Talbot 's controlling patents. Instead, daguerreotypes stayed popular in America and Europe for about a decade. Everyone had to have one, especially famous people.
Frenchmen made two significant technical improvements on Talbot 's basic calotype process. The first was described by Gustave Le Gray as waxing the paper for negatives before applying to it the sensitizing solutions. The second improvement to the calotype made possible the mass-production of prints for publication in books and albums in quantity exceeding the production of the Talbotype Establishment in Reading (Beaumont Newhall: 1982: 54).
The increasing of photographic establishments reflects photography 's growing popularity; from a simple handful in the mid '1840s the number had grown to 66 in 1855, and to 147 two years later. In London, a favourite place was Regent Street where, in the peak in the mid 'sixties there were no less than forty-two photographic establishments! In America the growth was just as dramatic: in 1850 there were 77 photographic galleries in New York alone (Robert Leggat: 1995).
In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Fredrick Scott Archer from United Kingdom, who introduced the collodion process. This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in photography (ibid). 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 (Rebecca Easby).
In 1871 a new age in photography began when an amateur English photographer, R.L. Maddox, made a successful dry plate that recollected its light-sensitivity after drying. Other inventors followed his lead, and soon fast, reliable dry plates, much more convenient to use than the earlier wet plates, were offered at a reasonable cost. The dry plate represented a turning point in photography (scphoto.com).
Rebecca Easby stated that prepared glass plates could be purchased, eliminating the need to fool with chemicals. In 1878, new advances reduced 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).
Finally in 1888 George Eastman developed the dry gelatin roll film, making it easier for film to be carried. Eastman also produced the first small inexpensive cameras, allowing more people access to the technology. As a result, in 1889 he presented the first Kodak camera with the slogan, "You push the button and we do the rest." Thus was launched the era of mass-market photography (scphoto.com).
Stereoscopic photography also became extremely popular during this period. A special stereo camera with two lenses was used to take two simultaneous photographs of the subject from viewpoints separated by about the same distance as a pair of human eyes. When the resulting pictures were viewed through a special viewing device, they merged to create a three-dimensional image (ibid). Also, Beaumont Newhall (1982: 115) remarks that stereographs of the late 1850s first showed us, in what were called "Instantaneous views", phases of actions in the stride of animals and humans never seen before.
Photographers in the 19th century were pioneers in a new artistic attempt, blurring the lines between art and technology. Frequently using traditional methods of composition and combining these with innovative techniques, photographers created a new vision of the material world. Despite the struggles, early photographers must have had with the limitations of their technology; their artistry is also noticeable (Rebecca Easby).
As mentioned before, photography had a great contribution to recording history, and those who volunteered to do that, were eager to engage in wars and dangerous battlefields to take pictures.
The first extensive photographic coverage of war was undertaken by Roger Fenton, an Englishman who came to photography from the legal profession, first as an amateur and then as a professional. Later he became the founder of the Photographic Society of London; he then became official photographer to the British Museum (Beaumont Newhall: 1982:85). There were also some photographers who were pioneers of Europe to take part in wars and risky places. When the Civil War broke out in America in 1861, the photographic fraternity took the news lightly. Brady, the former daguerreotypist, had a significant role in dangers and difficulties of combat photography (ibid). His sense for photographic documentation led him to undertake the recording of Civil War. Also, most important was the many portraits Brady made of Abraham Lincolin. There were several other photographers with Brady who were involved in such issues. This clearly proves why the emphasis of historians was on the progress of this medium in Europe and
America.
It is so obvious that the invention of photography was received in Europe so eagerly, perhaps because it was an idea that people were primed and ready for in the age of discoveries and innovations. We have in photography a combination of science and art to produce a perfect, as they thought then, a perfect rendition of a scene or person. Furthermore, Collins cited that it is very clear why people of the period were so concerned with this idea when we reflect that in the 1840s the machine age was apparently spread. Science was leading to new and better inventions, and the machine was thought to be the great response to all the world 's problems. Western European people revered science, and photography was a product of scientific experiment, i.e. chemical and optical experiment. Accordingly, the history verifies the reason of focusing on the growth of photography in Western Europe countries.
Early Cinema
Cinema is a complicated and highly technical medium, primarily combining the chemistry of photographic film with the mechanics of producing a visual illusion. "Over a 100-year period it has moved from fairground novelty to fine art and high finance by way of the studio system, the power of the stars, and a ruthless business approach" (Roger Parry: 2011:267). Consequently, it paved the way for many of the economic models of the new media industry. Cinema in its beginning as a novelty in several big cities -- New York, Paris, London, and Berlin -- the new medium quickly found its way around the world, attracting larger and larger audiences wherever it was shown and taking the place of other forms of entertainment as it did so, stated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1996).
Numerous countries lay claim to the invention of moving pictures, but the cinema, like so many other technological innovations, has no specific originating moment and its birth belongs to no particular country and no particular person. In fact, one can date the origins of cinema back to such varied sources as sixteenth-century Italian experiments with the camera obscura, several early nineteenth-century optical toys, and a host of practices of visual representation such as dioramas and panoramas. Moreover, Robert Pearson refers that:
"In the last decade of the nineteenth century, efforts to project continuously moving images on to a screen intensified and inventors/ entrepreneurs in several countries presented the ‘first’ moving pictures to the marvelling public: Edison in the United States; the Lumie`re brothers in France; Max Skladanowsky in Germany; and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain. None of these men can be called the primary originator of the film medium, however, since only a favourable conjunction of technical circumstances made such an ‘invention’ possible at this particular moment: improvements in photographic development; the invention of celluloid, the first medium both durable and flexible enough to loop through a projector; and the application of precision engineering and instruments to projector design."
In its early period, films were seen mostly through temporary storefront spaces and travelling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. The length of a film could be under a minute and would often present a single scene, authentic or staged, of daily life, a public event, a sporting event and the like. There was a lack of cinematic technique, no editing and usually no camera movement, and flat, theatrical arrangements. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to thrive before the end of the century, in countries around the world (en.wikipidia.org.).
Among the various people working to develop motion pictures in the late 1800s, the most successful were the partnerships between Thomas Edison and William Dickson in America and the Brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière in France (earlycinema.com). Their experiments, prompted by motion capture work by photographer Eaedward Muybridge and Etienne Marey, provided the foundation for motion picture photography and presentation, and their techniques can still be seen in the capture and projection of motion pictures today. In 1893, Thomas Edison patented a machine called Kinetoscope, a type of peep-show device launched commercially, it had already become a prominent filmic presence in slideshows, penny gaffs and Kinetoscope parlours across the US and Europe. However, Edison’s machines were designed for the individual to experience moving pictures in private, not for a public display. As declared by Simon Popple and Koe Kember (2004: 7) that Edison 's control of the emerging market was soon threatened by a group of competitors struggling to develop their own film-making and projection technologies. Nevertheless it was in Europe that the main threat to Edison monopoly emerged.
In Britain, photographer Birt Acres and electrical engineer Robert Paul together developed their own motion picture camera to create films for use with copies of Edison 's Kinetoscope. Acres and Paul 's brief partnership led to the production of the first successful British film in March 1895.
Paul Burns (1997) points out that the success of Edison 's machines stimulated other experimenters to improve on his devices and make efforts to find a way of projecting films for big audiences. In 1895 a number of new motion-picture cameras and projection devices, some within the same machine, were demonstrated in the United States and Europe. The most successful was by the two brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, Cinematographe, from which cinema derives its name was a combination of camera and projector, stated by Simon Popple and Joe Kember (2004: 7). They gave their first private film show in March 1895, and in December they began public showings at the Grand Café in Paris. These were almost instantly popular, and in 1896 the Lumière 's converted a room at the café into the world 's first cinema theatre. The Cinématographe spread rapidly through Europe, and in 1896 it was imported into the United States (Paul Burns).
As affirmed by Robert Pearson that the Lumieres probably were not first to project moving pictures on a screen to an audience; this honour perhaps belongs to German inventors Max and Emil Skladanowsky, who projected their apparatus "Bioscop", had done the same in Berlin two months before the Cinematographe’s renowned public show. Despite the competition, the Lumieres’ business and marketing skills permitted them to become nearly instantly known throughout Europe and the United States and secured a place for them in film history. Whereas "Europe brought the audiences into the newly created cinema theatres, America stuck with Edison’s technology and his films were mostly used by traveling carnivals and fairground operators in peep-show booths." (Roger Parry: 2011: 268). As Manely declared that the Sklandowsky 's Bioscope was a camera/projector which was never demanded in the market due to its awkwardness and could not compete with what was occurring in England, France, and eventually, the America.
Other devices were developed, remarkably the Mutoscope, by Henry Morton Marvin and Herman Casler. It was a peepshow device which employed a flip-book principle, and it was perfected and patented on November 21st 1894. Furthermore, the Vitascope, developed by Thomas Armat and Charles Jenkins which employed similar principles as Edison 's Kinetoscope but with the extra benefit of the ability to project the moving pictures (Simon Popple and Joe Kember) .
In these early years Edison had two main local rivals. In 1898 two former vaudevillians, Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith, founded the Vitagraph Company of America initially to make films for exhibition in conjunction with their own vaudeville acts (Robert Pearson).
In 1897, major production companies founded and the construction of "purpose-built" studios started throughout Europe and America. In the UK James Willilamson and George Albert Smith began production of films on south coast and Robert W. Paul founded The Paul Animatograph Company. On the other hand, in France, Pathe Freres began production and established a new company named "The General Company of Cinematographs, Phonographs and Film" (Simon Popple and Joe Kember).
The person who created one of the biggest excitements in the earliest movements of movies was the French magician Georges Méliès, who was influenced by both Dickson’s initial works and the films of the Lumières. Méliès began incorporating special effects through his use of editing based on his stage tricks. The magician was the first filmmaker to bring fantasy, science fiction, horror and dark comedy to the cinema, as well as one of the first to begin writing skits with actors, ignoring the idea of shooting actualities (Brian Manely). Georges Méliès always shot in his studio, staging action for the camera, his films showing fantastical events that could not happen in ‘real life’. Although all his films conform to the standard period tableau style, they are also full of magical appearances and disappearances, achieved through what cinematographers call ‘stop action’, that is, stopping the camera, having the actor enter or exit the shot, and then starting the camera again to create the illusion that a character has simply vanished or materialized (Robert Pearson).
In the first decade of cinema the tendency to rent films slowly replaced direct sales as the market enlarged and the technology of film projection became more and more "standardized". Edison 's efforts would describe attempts to control the technological development of cinema through patent law, and would include attempts to protect American markets inside and outside, even to the extent of avoiding European films being seen in US (Simon Popple and Joe Kember).
Although French, German, American and British pioneers have all been credited with the 'invention ' of cinema, the British and the Germans played a relatively minor role in its world-wide exploitation. It was above all the French, followed by the Americans, who were the "most ardent exporters of the new invention", serving to embed the cinema in China, Japan, and Latin America as well as in Russia. In terms of artistic development it was again the French and the Americans who took the lead among the other nations (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith). The struggle and competition to further achievements and developments of films in Europe and America is evidenced by almost all historians. The contribution to the cinema continued in 1890s and each year some improvements were added, almost all the developments and enhancements were by the inventors of Western European countries and North America who were pioneers to such great medium, and their impact is still seen today 's world of cinema.
Conclusion
In this essay, we discussed and explained the improvements and developments of photography and cinema in their early history. As a result, we discovered enough proofs and evidences from several historians of different sources who emphasized the progress of these two great mediums in Western countries and North America. In one hand, photography was seen as a scientific product, thus, European people from different countries, such as Niépce and Daguerre in France, Talbot and Archer from United Kingdom found their path to experience and invent and enhance new techniques to photography. As a medium of communication, history recording and entertainment, photography was welcomed by people.
Regarding cinema in its early years, it was a medium which rapidly developed by the prominent inventors and founders in America and Europe. Like so many other technological innovations, cinema has no specific originating moment and its birth belongs to no particular country and no particular person. Of the many great inventors and contributors to cinema were Edison in the United States, the Lumie`re brothers in France, Max Skladanowsky in Germany, and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain and etc. Consequently, we could to a good extent provide sufficient evidences to the reason why standard histories of mass communication have focused on developments in Western Europe and North America, besides with explanations for each phase in the history.
Bibliography
Collins, Ross. North Dakota State University, Fargo (n.d.). A Brief History of Photography and Photojournalism. Retrieved from http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~rcollins/242photojournalism/historyofphotography.html
Hopkinson, Peter. (1971) Role of Film in Development. France: Unesco. Retrieved from www.unesdoc.unesco.org
Jeffrey Easby, Rebecca (n.d.). Early Photography. Retrieved from http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/early-photography.html
http://en.wikipedia.org http://www.aipcinema.com/ficheiros/Conteudos/EARLY_CINEMA.pdf http://www.earlycinema.com/ http://www.environmentalhistory.org/revcomm/ http://www.scphoto.com/html/history.html
Leggat, Robert. (1995) A History of Photography from its beginning till 1920s. Retrieved from www.mpritchard.com/photohistory/
Marley, Brian. (July 2011) Moving Pictures: The History of Early Cinema. Retrieved from www.csa.com/discoveryguides/film/review.pdf
Newhall, Beaumont. (1982). The History of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. The Oxford History of World Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press (1996). Retrieved from biblioteka.teatr obraz.ru/files/file/...cinema/The_Oxford_History.pdf
Parry, Roger. (2011) The Ascent of Media, From Gilgamesh to Google Via Gutenburg. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Paul Burns. (1997) The History of the Discovery of Cinematography. Retrieved from http://www.precinemahistory.net/
Pearson, Robert (24 April 2008). Early Cinema. Retrieved from http://leyendocine.blogspot.com/2008/04/cine-temprano-por-robert-pearson.html
Popple, Simon and Kember, Joe. (2004) Early Cinema from Factory Gate to Dream Factory. London: Wallflower Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.com.cy/books?id=eeJD9tzWwCEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_vpt_buy#v=onepage&q&f=false
Photography and Early Cinema
Before 20th Century
Media History Course
Supervised by
Dr. Jonathan Stubbs
Prepared by
Niwar A. Obaid
December 2, 2013
Introduction
Ever since 1839 photography has become an essential means of communication and expression. In its early years, photography 's unique powers of visual description have been used to record, report, and inform. As stated by Beaumont Newhall (1982: 7), photography "is at once a science and an art" and both aspects are inseparably associated throughout its astounding rise from a substitute for skill of hand to an independent art form. A central role of photography was and still is that it has documented and recorded people 's lives and the world in …show more content…
history from a variety of perspectives. Nowadays photography has become a powerful means of communication and a mode of visual expression that touches human life in many ways. The early developments and advances of photography by European inventors are focused by historians of mass communication which will be explained throughout this essay.
Similarly, cinema, as a medium of entertainment, is now more than a century old. However, its great potential as an instructional and motivational instrument has been realized in history. Developing countries, worried to hasten the processes of economic and social change which will offer their people a better life, have turned increasingly to cinema as a means of improving or replacing traditional communication forms (Peter Hopkinson: 1971:5). Nevertheless, cinema drew from existing media, especially theater and photography, also making use of the “persistence of vision” phenomena, in its early period it was seen as more powerful than any other media (environmetalhistory.org).
The aim of this essay is to shed light on the developments in the history of these two prevailing mediums before 20th century. I would like to discuss and clarify the answers of this question: Standard histories of mass communication have focused on developments in Western Europe and North America. How can we explain this limited focus?
Photography
First, we owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel, who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public (Robert Leggat: 1995). The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible. It is somewhat strange that photography was not invented before 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography came into being. The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence about four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a camera obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated. The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light (ibid).
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the French man who successfully produced the first picture in 1827, using material that hardened on exposure to light which "was the first of those photomechanical techniques that were soon to revolutionize the graphic arts by eliminating the hand of man in the reproduction of pictures of all kinds" (Beaumont Newhall: 1982: 14), although this picture required an exposure of eight hours.
Photographers after Niépce experimented with variable techniques. Louis Daguerre invented a new process he dubbed a daguerrotype in 1839, which significantly reduced exposure time and created a permanent result (Rebecca Easby). The daguerreotype 's silver image was capable of rendering exquisitely fine detail. It was a single-image process; however, each exposure produced only one picture, incapable of reproduction. As notified by Robert Leggat (1995), in case anyone required two copies, the only way of coping with this was to use two cameras side by side. Thus, there was a high need for a means of copying pictures which daguerreotypes lacked that ability.
Besides, daguerreotype quickly developed into a succeeding business in England and the United States. Wonderful portraits were made by such daguerreotypists as Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes in Boston. The French were well-known for landscapes and cityscapes. In 1840 a much faster lens was designed by the Hungarian Jozsef Petzval and manufactured by Peter Voigtlander in Austria. Not much later, a technique was discovered that increased significantly the light sensitivity of the daguerreotype plate. This process involved a second fuming with chlorine or bromine before exposure (scphoto.com). Consequently, this indicates the intense attention of Western Europe and North America to the prompt changes of photographical techniques and its enhancements.
In the meantime in France, witnessing the early 1839 announcement was an American, Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse himself had been experimenting in photography, and when he heard Daguerre 's announcement he wrote about it right away for his audiences in America. Later on, he returned to New York City and taught the new process to several students, including Mathew Brady (Whose contribution will be mentioned later). In 1840 the world 's first portrait studio was opened in New York City. We can credit Morse for bringing photography to America along with his well-known invention, the telegraph (Ross Collins).
At the same time, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot was experimenting with 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, which led to the possibility of more than on copy. Calotypes did not displace the daguerreotype in spite of their flexibility and the simplicity with which they could be made (Rebecca Easby). Nevertheless, calotypes and the salted paper prints that were made from them remained popular in the United Kingdom and on the European continent outside of France until the collodion process arrived. In 1846 Fox Talbot published a book of photographs called The Pencil of Nature, commenting that the pictures were “…natural images… impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist 's pencil.” (Roger Parry: 2011). Thus, photographic pioneers viewed their technology as simply a way of loyally recording a “real” image. The calotype was not nearly as popular as daguerreotype, partly because of Talbot 's controlling patents. Instead, daguerreotypes stayed popular in America and Europe for about a decade. Everyone had to have one, especially famous people.
Frenchmen made two significant technical improvements on Talbot 's basic calotype process. The first was described by Gustave Le Gray as waxing the paper for negatives before applying to it the sensitizing solutions. The second improvement to the calotype made possible the mass-production of prints for publication in books and albums in quantity exceeding the production of the Talbotype Establishment in Reading (Beaumont Newhall: 1982: 54).
The increasing of photographic establishments reflects photography 's growing popularity; from a simple handful in the mid '1840s the number had grown to 66 in 1855, and to 147 two years later. In London, a favourite place was Regent Street where, in the peak in the mid 'sixties there were no less than forty-two photographic establishments! In America the growth was just as dramatic: in 1850 there were 77 photographic galleries in New York alone (Robert Leggat: 1995).
In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Fredrick Scott Archer from United Kingdom, who introduced the collodion process. This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in photography (ibid). 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 (Rebecca Easby).
In 1871 a new age in photography began when an amateur English photographer, R.L. Maddox, made a successful dry plate that recollected its light-sensitivity after drying. Other inventors followed his lead, and soon fast, reliable dry plates, much more convenient to use than the earlier wet plates, were offered at a reasonable cost. The dry plate represented a turning point in photography (scphoto.com).
Rebecca Easby stated that prepared glass plates could be purchased, eliminating the need to fool with chemicals. In 1878, new advances reduced 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).
Finally in 1888 George Eastman developed the dry gelatin roll film, making it easier for film to be carried. Eastman also produced the first small inexpensive cameras, allowing more people access to the technology. As a result, in 1889 he presented the first Kodak camera with the slogan, "You push the button and we do the rest." Thus was launched the era of mass-market photography (scphoto.com).
Stereoscopic photography also became extremely popular during this period. A special stereo camera with two lenses was used to take two simultaneous photographs of the subject from viewpoints separated by about the same distance as a pair of human eyes. When the resulting pictures were viewed through a special viewing device, they merged to create a three-dimensional image (ibid). Also, Beaumont Newhall (1982: 115) remarks that stereographs of the late 1850s first showed us, in what were called "Instantaneous views", phases of actions in the stride of animals and humans never seen before.
Photographers in the 19th century were pioneers in a new artistic attempt, blurring the lines between art and technology. Frequently using traditional methods of composition and combining these with innovative techniques, photographers created a new vision of the material world. Despite the struggles, early photographers must have had with the limitations of their technology; their artistry is also noticeable (Rebecca Easby).
As mentioned before, photography had a great contribution to recording history, and those who volunteered to do that, were eager to engage in wars and dangerous battlefields to take pictures.
The first extensive photographic coverage of war was undertaken by Roger Fenton, an Englishman who came to photography from the legal profession, first as an amateur and then as a professional. Later he became the founder of the Photographic Society of London; he then became official photographer to the British Museum (Beaumont Newhall: 1982:85). There were also some photographers who were pioneers of Europe to take part in wars and risky places. When the Civil War broke out in America in 1861, the photographic fraternity took the news lightly. Brady, the former daguerreotypist, had a significant role in dangers and difficulties of combat photography (ibid). His sense for photographic documentation led him to undertake the recording of Civil War. Also, most important was the many portraits Brady made of Abraham Lincolin. There were several other photographers with Brady who were involved in such issues. This clearly proves why the emphasis of historians was on the progress of this medium in Europe and
America.
It is so obvious that the invention of photography was received in Europe so eagerly, perhaps because it was an idea that people were primed and ready for in the age of discoveries and innovations. We have in photography a combination of science and art to produce a perfect, as they thought then, a perfect rendition of a scene or person. Furthermore, Collins cited that it is very clear why people of the period were so concerned with this idea when we reflect that in the 1840s the machine age was apparently spread. Science was leading to new and better inventions, and the machine was thought to be the great response to all the world 's problems. Western European people revered science, and photography was a product of scientific experiment, i.e. chemical and optical experiment. Accordingly, the history verifies the reason of focusing on the growth of photography in Western Europe countries.
Early Cinema
Cinema is a complicated and highly technical medium, primarily combining the chemistry of photographic film with the mechanics of producing a visual illusion. "Over a 100-year period it has moved from fairground novelty to fine art and high finance by way of the studio system, the power of the stars, and a ruthless business approach" (Roger Parry: 2011:267). Consequently, it paved the way for many of the economic models of the new media industry. Cinema in its beginning as a novelty in several big cities -- New York, Paris, London, and Berlin -- the new medium quickly found its way around the world, attracting larger and larger audiences wherever it was shown and taking the place of other forms of entertainment as it did so, stated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1996).
Numerous countries lay claim to the invention of moving pictures, but the cinema, like so many other technological innovations, has no specific originating moment and its birth belongs to no particular country and no particular person. In fact, one can date the origins of cinema back to such varied sources as sixteenth-century Italian experiments with the camera obscura, several early nineteenth-century optical toys, and a host of practices of visual representation such as dioramas and panoramas. Moreover, Robert Pearson refers that:
"In the last decade of the nineteenth century, efforts to project continuously moving images on to a screen intensified and inventors/ entrepreneurs in several countries presented the ‘first’ moving pictures to the marvelling public: Edison in the United States; the Lumie`re brothers in France; Max Skladanowsky in Germany; and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain. None of these men can be called the primary originator of the film medium, however, since only a favourable conjunction of technical circumstances made such an ‘invention’ possible at this particular moment: improvements in photographic development; the invention of celluloid, the first medium both durable and flexible enough to loop through a projector; and the application of precision engineering and instruments to projector design."
In its early period, films were seen mostly through temporary storefront spaces and travelling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. The length of a film could be under a minute and would often present a single scene, authentic or staged, of daily life, a public event, a sporting event and the like. There was a lack of cinematic technique, no editing and usually no camera movement, and flat, theatrical arrangements. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to thrive before the end of the century, in countries around the world (en.wikipidia.org.).
Among the various people working to develop motion pictures in the late 1800s, the most successful were the partnerships between Thomas Edison and William Dickson in America and the Brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière in France (earlycinema.com). Their experiments, prompted by motion capture work by photographer Eaedward Muybridge and Etienne Marey, provided the foundation for motion picture photography and presentation, and their techniques can still be seen in the capture and projection of motion pictures today. In 1893, Thomas Edison patented a machine called Kinetoscope, a type of peep-show device launched commercially, it had already become a prominent filmic presence in slideshows, penny gaffs and Kinetoscope parlours across the US and Europe. However, Edison’s machines were designed for the individual to experience moving pictures in private, not for a public display. As declared by Simon Popple and Koe Kember (2004: 7) that Edison 's control of the emerging market was soon threatened by a group of competitors struggling to develop their own film-making and projection technologies. Nevertheless it was in Europe that the main threat to Edison monopoly emerged.
In Britain, photographer Birt Acres and electrical engineer Robert Paul together developed their own motion picture camera to create films for use with copies of Edison 's Kinetoscope. Acres and Paul 's brief partnership led to the production of the first successful British film in March 1895.
Paul Burns (1997) points out that the success of Edison 's machines stimulated other experimenters to improve on his devices and make efforts to find a way of projecting films for big audiences. In 1895 a number of new motion-picture cameras and projection devices, some within the same machine, were demonstrated in the United States and Europe. The most successful was by the two brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, Cinematographe, from which cinema derives its name was a combination of camera and projector, stated by Simon Popple and Joe Kember (2004: 7). They gave their first private film show in March 1895, and in December they began public showings at the Grand Café in Paris. These were almost instantly popular, and in 1896 the Lumière 's converted a room at the café into the world 's first cinema theatre. The Cinématographe spread rapidly through Europe, and in 1896 it was imported into the United States (Paul Burns).
As affirmed by Robert Pearson that the Lumieres probably were not first to project moving pictures on a screen to an audience; this honour perhaps belongs to German inventors Max and Emil Skladanowsky, who projected their apparatus "Bioscop", had done the same in Berlin two months before the Cinematographe’s renowned public show. Despite the competition, the Lumieres’ business and marketing skills permitted them to become nearly instantly known throughout Europe and the United States and secured a place for them in film history. Whereas "Europe brought the audiences into the newly created cinema theatres, America stuck with Edison’s technology and his films were mostly used by traveling carnivals and fairground operators in peep-show booths." (Roger Parry: 2011: 268). As Manely declared that the Sklandowsky 's Bioscope was a camera/projector which was never demanded in the market due to its awkwardness and could not compete with what was occurring in England, France, and eventually, the America.
Other devices were developed, remarkably the Mutoscope, by Henry Morton Marvin and Herman Casler. It was a peepshow device which employed a flip-book principle, and it was perfected and patented on November 21st 1894. Furthermore, the Vitascope, developed by Thomas Armat and Charles Jenkins which employed similar principles as Edison 's Kinetoscope but with the extra benefit of the ability to project the moving pictures (Simon Popple and Joe Kember) .
In these early years Edison had two main local rivals. In 1898 two former vaudevillians, Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith, founded the Vitagraph Company of America initially to make films for exhibition in conjunction with their own vaudeville acts (Robert Pearson).
In 1897, major production companies founded and the construction of "purpose-built" studios started throughout Europe and America. In the UK James Willilamson and George Albert Smith began production of films on south coast and Robert W. Paul founded The Paul Animatograph Company. On the other hand, in France, Pathe Freres began production and established a new company named "The General Company of Cinematographs, Phonographs and Film" (Simon Popple and Joe Kember).
The person who created one of the biggest excitements in the earliest movements of movies was the French magician Georges Méliès, who was influenced by both Dickson’s initial works and the films of the Lumières. Méliès began incorporating special effects through his use of editing based on his stage tricks. The magician was the first filmmaker to bring fantasy, science fiction, horror and dark comedy to the cinema, as well as one of the first to begin writing skits with actors, ignoring the idea of shooting actualities (Brian Manely). Georges Méliès always shot in his studio, staging action for the camera, his films showing fantastical events that could not happen in ‘real life’. Although all his films conform to the standard period tableau style, they are also full of magical appearances and disappearances, achieved through what cinematographers call ‘stop action’, that is, stopping the camera, having the actor enter or exit the shot, and then starting the camera again to create the illusion that a character has simply vanished or materialized (Robert Pearson).
In the first decade of cinema the tendency to rent films slowly replaced direct sales as the market enlarged and the technology of film projection became more and more "standardized". Edison 's efforts would describe attempts to control the technological development of cinema through patent law, and would include attempts to protect American markets inside and outside, even to the extent of avoiding European films being seen in US (Simon Popple and Joe Kember).
Although French, German, American and British pioneers have all been credited with the 'invention ' of cinema, the British and the Germans played a relatively minor role in its world-wide exploitation. It was above all the French, followed by the Americans, who were the "most ardent exporters of the new invention", serving to embed the cinema in China, Japan, and Latin America as well as in Russia. In terms of artistic development it was again the French and the Americans who took the lead among the other nations (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith). The struggle and competition to further achievements and developments of films in Europe and America is evidenced by almost all historians. The contribution to the cinema continued in 1890s and each year some improvements were added, almost all the developments and enhancements were by the inventors of Western European countries and North America who were pioneers to such great medium, and their impact is still seen today 's world of cinema.
Conclusion
In this essay, we discussed and explained the improvements and developments of photography and cinema in their early history. As a result, we discovered enough proofs and evidences from several historians of different sources who emphasized the progress of these two great mediums in Western countries and North America. In one hand, photography was seen as a scientific product, thus, European people from different countries, such as Niépce and Daguerre in France, Talbot and Archer from United Kingdom found their path to experience and invent and enhance new techniques to photography. As a medium of communication, history recording and entertainment, photography was welcomed by people.
Regarding cinema in its early years, it was a medium which rapidly developed by the prominent inventors and founders in America and Europe. Like so many other technological innovations, cinema has no specific originating moment and its birth belongs to no particular country and no particular person. Of the many great inventors and contributors to cinema were Edison in the United States, the Lumie`re brothers in France, Max Skladanowsky in Germany, and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain and etc. Consequently, we could to a good extent provide sufficient evidences to the reason why standard histories of mass communication have focused on developments in Western Europe and North America, besides with explanations for each phase in the history.
Bibliography
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