How photography came about

The word "Photography" is derived from the Greek words for light and writing. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel, who first used the word in 1839.

Beginnings of Photography
For centuries, these were just ideas on capturing the image until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura (darkroom) sometime in the 11th Century. Even then, the camera did not actually record images; They simply projected them onto another surface. Artists used them to help them draw more accurately.


Artists used camera obscura to help them in drawing.

Photography as we know it today began in the late 1830s in France when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable camera obscura.


The camera obscura was a popular sketching instrument in the 18th century. A lens in the draw tube and a mirror at 45 degrees to the horizontal focussed the image onto a ground glass screen on the top of the box. A piece of paper was put onto the screen and the image was copied directly.

This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly. However, not all people welcomed this exciting invention; At that time some artists saw in photography a threat to their livelihood and some even prophesied that painting would cease to exist.

There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible.
1) The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence for at least 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.

2) 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.


Tent camera obscura, 19th century.


In the 19th and early 20th centuries is seems that the pier at every seaside resort in the United Kingdom had a camera obscura. The camera obscura on the Jetty at Margate England was listed in this location by 1898. The sign on the side reads "Beautiful Effects Caused by Reflection" "Charge Two Pence". The card on the left is one of four postcards of Margate in our collection. It was mailed in 1904.

Even till now in 2008, almost every household at least has a camera. Photography has not been able to replace Painters / Artists. It is just another form of art that can be expressed by the artists / designers.