Photography holds a unique place as a mainstream art media type that, unlike more traditional media has a well-documented early history, full of interesting and colorful key players, intrigue, controversy, and discourse. The medium’s major early inventors include William Henry Fox Talbot, Nicéphore Niépce, and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. The first photographs were taken in the late 1820s. The earliest known photograph is Nicéphore Niépce's 1827 point de vue. Thus, the history of photography is generally considered to begin in the 1820s, though thinkers and inventors from the 18th century and earlier had considered the possibility of a tool capable of capturing images from life.
An excellent, basic, introductory timeline of major events in photographic history can be found below. Simply click the image or title to view a static copy of the page. A live copy of the page can be found here.
Harvard's History of Photography Timeline (1826 - 2004)
Photography began with camera obscuras, and cameras that were little more than boxes with holes in them for shutters. Today we have cameras capabable of capturing video footage, shooting photos under the ocean, in space, in extreme cold and heat, at extremely magnified sizes, and a extremely distant distances. Modern cameras offer a plethora of features to aid the modern photographer in getting the best shots, but even these cameras still operate on the same principles of function that characterized cameras from the beginning, allowing the photographer to "paint with light".
The photograph is now a ubiquitous part of our lives. Photographs decorate our physical and digital spaces, advertise products and services to us, delight us, inform us, entertain us, and document the world around us (and beyond). Everyone can be a photographer with a simple tap of their phone screen or press of a shutter, and any photo can have near infinite reach with the power of the internet. Anyone can use the camera to document their experiences and their lives, keeping records of both the monumental and the intimate with ease. Thus, it only makes sense that a body of scholarship and artistic expression has followed the camera and its users.
Museums with photography collections and resources of interest:
- The Art Institute of Chicago
- The George Eastman House Museum
- The Victoria & Albert Museum
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- The Smithsonian American Art Museum
- The Musée Nicéphore Niépce
- The J. Paul Getty Museum
- The Museum of Contemporary Photography
- The Museum of Modern Art
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