アート学習
A Short History of Photography: From Daguerreotype to Phone Camera
Six technical turning points that explain why photographs look the way they do, and what to check when you look at an original, a later print, or a copy.
Photography’s history is usually taught as a list of inventions. Six technical turning points are enough to explain most questions about why a photograph looks the way it does.
Technology is not background here. It sets what an image can be: how long an exposure takes, whether a camera can leave the studio, how many copies exist, and whether colour can be fixed at all.
Six turning points
| Date | Technology | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1839 / 1841 | Daguerreotype, calotype | Images could be fixed; the calotype’s negative allowed many prints from one exposure |
| 1851 | Wet collodion | Exposure fell to seconds; portraiture became a business |
| 1871 / 1888 | Dry plate, Kodak roll film | No coating on site; photography moved from profession to amateur practice |
| 1925 | 35 mm camera | Cameras became portable; street and news photography became possible |
| 1935 / 1948 | Kodachrome, Polaroid | Colour became reproducible; images could arrive instantly |
| From 1975 | Digital sensors | Capture, transmission, editing, and deletion all became immediate |
Each shift produced new kinds of photograph, not merely better ones. Street photography only makes sense once cameras are small. Instant film is what gives family pictures their particular intimacy.
Three threads worth more than dates
Reproducibility
The negative lets one image be printed indefinitely. Two consequences follow: photography is inherently a reproductive medium, and the idea of “the original” becomes complicated — the same image may exist as many prints made decades apart.
Portability
The smaller the camera, the closer photography gets to daily life. After 35 mm, no studio or assistant was required; a photograph could be made in the street, in a car, in a meeting. News, street, and snapshot photography all belong to this thread.
Immediacy
Polaroid and digital capture removed the wait. Images became something you see, adjust, and send immediately, which changed photography’s role in public events.
How genres formed
- Portrait. The earliest commercial use. Watch studio sets, posture, and hands.
- Landscape. Bound up with surveying, tourism, and railway expansion.
- Documentary. Nineteenth-century urban surveys and social reform.
- Photojournalism. Grew with the picture press and professionalised from the 1930s.
- Street. A product of small cameras and fast film.
- Art photography. From Pictorialism (imitating painting) through straight photography (the camera’s clarity) to the New Topographics (cool recording of built environments).
Ask which genre a photograph belongs to before judging it. Applying art-photography criteria to a news picture usually produces the wrong answer.
Four things to separate when looking
- When was it made? Capture date and print date can be decades apart.
- What process is it? Gelatin silver, colour negative, dye transfer, and inkjet look and age completely differently.
- Which print is it? Photographs are often issued in editions (1/5); edition and signature affect value.
- Is it an original? Large prints in exhibitions are often later display prints, not contemporary ones.
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Met’s open access collection both record process, print date, and edition separately. Read a few side by side.
Where to look
- MoMA. A canonical modern photography collection with thorough records.
- The Getty. Wide historical coverage, including many nineteenth-century process samples.
- Fotografiska Stockholm. Contemporary photography and large-scale exhibitions.
- Myanmar Photo Archive. Twentieth-century images and family albums from a non-Western perspective.
- Tbilisi Photo and Multimedia Museum. An online archive of photography from the Caucasus.
Together these cover both the “canonical” and the “regional” story. Use only the first and you would conclude that photography happened exclusively in Europe and North America.
Common mistakes
- Confusing capture date with work date. An old negative may have been printed recently.
- Ignoring process. The same image in silver gelatin and in inkjet is a different viewing experience.
- Assuming digital images have no materiality. Screens, file formats, and compression all shape them.
- Periodising by style alone. Technical conditions often explain a photograph better than style does.
- Judging news pictures as art. Different function, different standard.
A route in
- Pick one genre — street or documentary, say — and read three introductory essays.
- Filter a collection database by date, choose five landmarks, and record process and print date.
- Compare different prints of the same image.
- Write 300 words on which technical conditions that genre depends on.
To go deeper into prints, editions, and value, read Photography collections and exhibitions. For the medium in its contemporary form, read Digital art and media archives.