Photography Timeline
1856: Mathew Brady created what’s known as the first modern advertisement which was placed an ad in the New York Herald paper offering to produce "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes."
1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.
1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
1907: First commercial colour film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.
1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first colour multi-layered colour film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera World War II:
Development of multi-layer colour negative films
Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and white film
1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
1963: First colour instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US)
1986: First picture of the earth from the moon.
1987: The popular Canon EOS system
1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.
1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
1907: First commercial colour film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.
1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first colour multi-layered colour film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera World War II:
Development of multi-layer colour negative films
Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and white film
1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
1963: First colour instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US)
1986: First picture of the earth from the moon.
1987: The popular Canon EOS system