- FROM HELIOGRAPH TO DAGUERREOTYPE
The course of human conflict has spurred the development of many inventions, including photography. In fact, if one young Frenchman had not joined Napoleon's fateful march to Waterloo, the birth of photography might have been years delayed.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a Frenchman from Chalons-sur-Saone, was an avid enthusiast of the new art of lithography. Studying the work of the pioneering lithographer Alois Senefelder, he tried to improve the process by using tin plates. But Niepce lacked a critical skill: he couldn't draw. So he relied on his talented son to render images for the lithographs. When the army drafted the young man in 1814, Niepce was left without an illustrator.
Hearing of the work done with photochemical drawing, he turned his attention to silver salts. For the next decade Niepce struggled to perfect a primitive form of photo lithography. Research advanced slowly and drained the funds of his considerable trust. Still, he enjoyed just enough success to forge on. Significantly, he found a way to fix images using acid baths.
Niepce's big breakthrough came in 1822 when he made a permanent image using a camera obscura. After exposing coated pewter plates to a camera image, he used the vapors from heated iodine crystals to darken the silver and heighten contrast. The method would inspire Louis Daguerre's highly successful mercury vapor development process. In fact, within a few years, the two inventors would be partners.
Louis-Jacques-Mandee Daguerre is often credited as the inventor of modern photography. This is not precisely true. Daguerre combined existing technologies and processes and made them work.
Before turning to photography, Daguerre was a theater set painter renowned for the incredible hyper realism of his mammoth canvases. In fact, he made a successful career of showcasing his paintings in popular spectacles called Dioramas. Daguerre's artistic obsession for capturing the real world in all its minute detail led to a fascination with the camera obscura and later, the work of Niepce.
Forming a partnership with Niepce in 1829, Daguerre set out to improve his methods and create a practical photographic process. The elder Niepce was in failing health and contributed nothing new beyond his original body of research. He died penniless in 1833.
By 1837, after nearly a decade of trials, Daguerre devised a revolutionary type of image. He called it the Daguerreotype. Adhering a thin sheet of polished silver to a copper plate, he made it light sensitive by exposing it to the vapors from heated iodine crystals. Camera exposures of 15-30 minutes were needed to make an impression. The latent image was fully developed by treating it with mercury vapor. Fixed in a solution of salt and hot water, the positive image became permanent.
Daguerre officially unveiled his invention in 1839. The Daguerreotype could only be seen in certain lights and from particular angles. And it could not be mass produced. Each image was singular and unique.
Despite the drawbacks, Daguerreotypes offered images of extraordinary clarity and beauty. There was no comparison between Daguerre's pictures and the crude, grainy photos produced by Talbot.
A consummate showman and entrepreneur, Daguerre turned his energies to marketing and licensing his new invention. In a partnership with his brother-in-law, Daguerre began manufacturing the Giroux camera. The instrument, packaged with Daguerre's 79-page instruction manual, was immediately in high demand. Giroux cameras were soon shipped around the globe.
Enthusiasts and entrepreneurs improved Daguerre's basic methods. The introduction of fast achromatic lenses, large apertures, and an improved development process utilizing mercury and bromide chlorine vapors, brought exposure time down to two minutes. Innovations continued over the next decade as the Daguerreotype became firmly established. Yet by 1851 this novel and celebrated new art form would be all but forgotten.
