History of photography. The very first pictures. The first photographs in history The oldest photographs

Just some 30-40 years ago, a significant part of photographs, films, and television programs were black and white. Many people have no idea that color photography appeared much earlier than it became widely used in life. This post is about the development of color photography.

In fact, attempts to obtain color photographs began in the mid-19th century, shortly after. But the inventors faced many technical difficulties. In addition to just getting a color photo, there were big problems with correct color reproduction. It was precisely because of various technical difficulties that the widespread introduction of color photography into life lasted for more than a hundred years. However, thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts, today we can see fairly high-quality color photographs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Tartan Ribbon” is considered to be the world's first color photograph. It was shown by the famous English physicist James Maxwell during a lecture on the characteristics of color vision at the Royal Institution in London on May 17, 1861.

However, Maxwell did not take photography seriously, and the pioneer of color photography was the Frenchman Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron. On November 23, 1868, he patented the first method of producing color photographs. The method was quite complicated and involved shooting the desired object three times through light filters, and the desired photograph was obtained after combining three plates of different colors.

Photographs of Louis Ducos du Hauron (1870s)

In 1878, Louis Ducos du Hauron presented his collection of color photographs at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

In 1873, the German photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel made the discovery of sensitizers - substances that can increase the sensitivity of silver compounds to rays of different wavelengths. Then another German scientist, Adolf Mithe, developed sensitizers that made the photographic plate sensitive to different parts of the spectrum. He also designed a camera for three-color photography and a three-beam projector for displaying the resulting color photographs. This equipment was first demonstrated in action by Adolf Mithe in Berlin in 1902.

Photographs by Adolf Miethe (early 20th century)

The pioneer of color photography in Russia was Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, who improved Adolf Miethe's method and achieved very high-quality color rendering. At the beginning of the 20th century, he traveled around the Russian Empire, taking many excellent color photographs (about two thousand of them have survived to this day).

Photos by Prokudin-Gorsky (Russia, early 20th century)

Still, getting one color image out of three was inconvenient; in order for color photography to become widespread, the method had to be simplified. This was done by the Lumiere brothers, the famous inventors of cinema. In 1907, they demonstrated their Autochrome method, which produced a color image on a glass plate.

Some of the "autochromes" (early 20th century)

Over the next 30 years, Autochrome became the primary color photography method for the masses until Kodak developed a more advanced color photography method.

THE VERY FIRST
PHOTOS
IN THE WORLD

WORLD'S FIRST PHOTOGRAPHY: 1826

[view from window | photo clickable ]

The first fixed image was made in 1822 by the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, but it has not survived to this day. Therefore, the first photograph in history is considered to be the “view from the window” photograph taken by Niepce in 1826 using a camera obscura on a tin plate covered with a thin layer of asphalt. The exposure lasted eight hours in bright sunlight. The advantage of Niépce's method was that the image turned out to be in relief (after etching the asphalt), and it could easily be reproduced in any number of copies.

FIRST EROTIC PHOTO:: 1839

[to see the erotic photo in its entirety - click on it]

FIRST PHOTO UNDERWATER:: 1856 (1890)

The first underwater photographs were taken by William Thomas in 1856. Unfortunately, all footage from that year has been lost. Below - first published underwater photograph (Louis Boutant, 1890).

FIRST AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY: 1858 (1860)

In 1858, Gaspard Felix Tournachon, a cartoonist, took a camera into the basket of a hot air balloon and took several photographs from above of the French village of Petit-Becetre. However, time ruined these photographs too. Now the earliest photo taken from the air is frame from 1860, showing the city of Boston (USA).

FIRST COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY:: 1861

The first color photograph was taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Either the original quality of the photograph, or an inept scan, but one way or another, it is difficult to make out what exactly the object is in the frame. However, while I was writing the post, I managed to find out that it was a Scottish ribbon.

Also early color photographs include:

[ 1877 Louis Ducos du Hauron, France | photo clickable ]

[ 1909 Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, Russian Empire | photo clickable ]

FIRST PHOTOGRAPH FROM SPACE:: 1946

This photograph was taken in October 1946 in New Mexico. Nowadays, we are accustomed to colorful NASA photographs and video footage from Earth orbit. And then, in 1946, when the war had just ended, it was an unprecedented miracle to see this.

FIRST IMAGE OF THE EARTH:: 1968

THE FIRST PHOTO TAKEN ON ANOTHER PLANET: 1975

In October 1975, the Venera 9 spacecraft made a soft landing on Venus and took photographs.

FIRST PHOTO OF A PLANET LOCATED OUTSIDE THE SOLAR SYSTEM: 2005

[ PUBLISH LINK IN YOUR MAGAZINE ] To post a link in your journal, copy the text from the box below and paste it into a new post on your blog/magazine/website.
do not forget disable visual editor, otherwise the tags will not work.

THE WORLD'S FIRST PHOTOS
[first photo ever] [first erotic shot] [aerial photography]
[first underwater shot] [first photo in space]
[first photo outside the solar system]

:: HERE::

Let's look at the world's very first photographs.
An interesting collection of old, archival photographs.

One of the first recorded wedding photographs in the world. 1840, February 10.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

classic view of the Kremlin 1852

The photo is interesting because it shows the old Big Stone Bridge
buildings dating back to the 17th century, which will be dismantled in 1857

view inside the Kremlin walls in 1852

one of the most interesting photographs is the construction site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1852.

Petersburg 1861

Saint Petersburg. St. Isaac's Cathedral, 1852

In St. Petersburg in 1853, the wonderful photographer Ivan Bianki captured the Chain Bridge near the Summer Garden

Kyiv. View of St. Andrew's Church from Podol, 1852

Bruges (from which our trousers are named) has not changed much over the past 150 years. 1853

For the Roman Pantheon, which happily stood for 2000 years, a century and a half is not a long time at all! 1853

in Cologne, Germany in 1853, they suddenly decided to finish building something that had been abandoned in the 15th century after the first 200 years
construction of a gigantic cathedral - the most important long-term construction in Europe

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 18617

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 1861 6

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 1861 5

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 1861 4

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 1861 3

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 1861 2

Photopanorama of St. Petersburg 1861 1

The Piazza di Spagna in Rome seems to have not changed at all since 1855.
Gogol loved to walk here

Egypt. 1859

1854-55 can be appreciated from this work by Beato and Robertson, a view of the Ortakoi Mosque in Constantinople

Photo of Balaklava, the main base of the British Expeditionary Force in the Crimea, taken by Roger Fenton in 1854-55.

Panorama of Moscow taken on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 6

Panorama of Moscow taken on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 5

Panorama of Moscow taken on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 4

Panorama of Moscow taken on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 3

Panorama of Moscow taken on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 2

Panorama of Moscow taken on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 1

“View from the window on Le Grace” - the photograph was already very real.

The original image on the plate looks very specific:

digitization

Niépce photographed the view from the window of his own house, and the exposure lasted as long as eight hours! The roofs of nearby buildings and a piece of the yard are what can be seen in this photograph.

It was a photograph of a table set for a picnic - 1829.

Niépce's method was not suitable for photographic portraits.

But French artist he succeeded in this - his method conveyed halftones well, and a shorter exposure allowed him to take pictures of living people. Louis Daguerre collaborated with Niepce, but it took him several more years after Niepce's death to bring the invention to fruition.

The first Daguerreotype was made in 1837 and represented

photo of Daguerre's art studio

Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple 1838

(The world's first photograph with a person).

Holyrood Church, Edinburgh, 1834

1839 - the first photographic portraits of people, women and men, appeared.

On the left is the American Dorothy Catherine Draper, whose photograph, taken by the learned brother, became the first photographic portrait within the United States and the first photographic portrait of a woman with open eyes

The exposure lasted 65 seconds and Dorothy's face had to be covered with a thick layer of white powder.

And on the right is the Dutch chemist Robert Cornelius, who managed to photograph himself.

His photograph taken in October 1839 is the very first photographic portrait

in history in general. Both of these experimental photographic portraits, in my opinion, look expressive and relaxed, in contrast to later daguerreotypes, in which people often looked like idols due to excessive tension.

From surviving daguerreotypes

The first erotic photograph taken by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1839.

On the daguerreotype of 1839 - Port of Ripetta in Italy. Quite a detailed image, however, in some places the shadow ate everything into solid black.

And in this photo of Paris you can see the famous Louvre from the Seine River. Still the same year 1839. It's funny - many of the works of art exhibited in the Louvre and now considered ancient works of art had not yet been created at the time of photography.

Already in the first year of its existence, daguerreotype preserved many imprints of the past. The spread of the new technology was very intensive, surprisingly intense for such an unusual novelty at that time. As early as 1839, people were already photographing things like museum collections, like this collection of shells.

The next year came, 1840. Man increasingly became a subject for photographs. This is the first full-length photograph of a person (full-length, not a small blurry silhouette). On it we can see with our own eyes an attribute of the life of the elite of the past, which was already an ancient tradition at that time - a personal carriage ready for the trip and a smart servant inviting passengers to take their seats. True, he is not inviting us - we are a little late. About 170 years old.

But in this photo from the same year - the family of the great Mozart. Although this has not been proven, there is a 90% probability that the elderly woman in the front row is Constance Mozart, the musician’s wife. Both this and the previous photographs allow us to get at least a little in touch with those times that already in 1840 were considered the deep past.

The thought immediately arises that daguerreotypes can bring to us some traces of an even older era - the 18th century. Who was the oldest person captured in the oldest photographs? Can we see the faces of people who lived most of their lives in the 18th century? Some people live up to 100 years and even more.

Daniel Waldo, born September 10, 1762, was related to US President John Adams. This man fought during the American Revolution, and in the photograph we can see him at the age of 101.

Huche Brady, renowned American general, born July 29, 1768, had the honor of fighting in the War of 1812.

And finally, one of the first white people born on the American continent is Conrad Heyer, who posed for a photographer back in 1852 at the age of 103! He served in the army under the command of George Washington himself and participated in the Revolution. People from the era of the 17th century - from the 16xx - looked into the same eyes into which we look now!

1852 - the oldest person ever posed for a photograph by year of birth was photographed. Posed for a photographer at the age of 103!

Unlike Niepce, Louis Daguerre left his own photographic portrait as a legacy to humanity. He was such an imposing and handsome gentleman.

Moreover, thanks to his daguerreotype, a photograph of his competitor from England, William Henry Fox Talbot, has reached us. 1844

Talbot invented a fundamentally different photography technology, much closer to the film cameras of the 20th century. He called it calotype - an unaesthetic name for a Russian-speaking person, but in Greek it means “beautiful imprint” (kalos-typos). You can use the name “talbotype”. The commonality between calotypes and film cameras lies in the presence of an intermediate stage - a negative, through which an unlimited number of photographs can be produced. Actually, the terms “positive”, “negative” and “photography” were coined by John Herschel under the influence of calotypes. Talbot's first successful attempt dates back to 1835 - a photograph of a window in the Abbey in Lacock. Negative, positive and two modern photographs for comparison.

In 1835, only a negative was made; Talbot finally figured out the production of positives only in 1839, presenting the calotype to the public almost simultaneously with the daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were of better quality, much clearer than calotypes, but due to the possibility of copying, calotype still occupied its niche. Moreover, it cannot be said unequivocally that Talbot's images are not beautiful. For example, the water on them appears much more alive than on daguerreotypes. Here, for example, is Lake Catherine in Scotland, photographed in 1844.

The 19th century has seen the light. In the 1840s, photography became available to all more or less wealthy families. And we, almost two centuries later, can see what ordinary people of that time looked like and what they wore.

Family photo from 1846 - the Adams couple with their daughter. You can often find this photograph referred to as a posthumous photograph, based on the child’s pose. In fact, the girl is just sleeping; she lived until the 1880s.

Daguerreotypes are indeed quite detailed, making it convenient to study the fashion of decades gone by. Anna Minerva Rogers Macomb was filmed in 1850.

The first devices for human flight were balloons. The picture shows the landing of one of these balls in 1850 on a Persian square (now the territory of Iran).

Photography became more and more popular; newly-minted photographers shot not only prim portraits with starched faces, but also very vivid scenes of the surrounding world. 1852, Anthony Falls.

But this photo from 1853 is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. Charles Negre shot it on the roofs of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and the artist Henry Le Sec posed for him. Both belonged to the first generation of photographers.

The conscience of Russian literature, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy - this is how he looked in 1856. We will return to him later, and twice as much, because, despite the asceticism of this man and his closeness to ordinary people, advanced technologies surprisingly persistently reached out to him, trying to capture his image.

More and more new ways of photographing appeared. Here is a ferrotype from 1856 - a slightly blurry, but pleasant image in its own way, its soft halftones look more natural than the bold, clear contours of the daguerreotype.

Since photography became available to people, it means that at some point there must have been a desire to make changes to the resulting picture, to combine two different images or to distort them. 1858 is the year when the first photomontage was made. “Fading” is the name of this work, composed of five different negatives. It depicts a girl dying of tuberculosis. The composition is very emotional, although I still don’t understand why there is photomontage here. The same scene could have been done without him.

The first aerial photograph was taken that same year. To pull this off, it was necessary to attach a miniature camera to the legs of a tame bird. How helpless man was then...

A scene from the 60s... 1860s. Several people go on a trip using the only mode of transport available in those years.

The Brooklyn Excelsiors baseball team. Yes, America's favorite sport has a long history.

The first color photo - 1861.
Like most other experimental photographs, this image is not rich in content. A checkered ribbon from a Scottish outfit is the whole composition with which the famous scientist James Clerk Maxwell decided to experiment. But it is colored. True, like Leon Scott's sound recordings, experiments with color remained experiments, and it was necessary to wait several more years before the regular production of color images from nature.

By the way, in the picture is the photographer himself.

They also tried to find practical applications for the photo. Guillaume Duchesne, a French neurologist, used photography to present to the public his experiments on studying the nature of human facial expressions. By stimulating the facial muscles with electrodes, he achieved the reproduction of such expressions as joy or agony. His photo reports in 1862 became one of the first book photo illustrations that were not artistic, but scientific in nature.

Some of the vintage photographs look very unusual. The strong contrast and sharp outlines create the illusion that the lady is sitting in the middle of an environment entirely carved from stone. 1860s.

In the 1860s, real Japanese samurai were still in service. Not costumed actors, but samurai as they are. Soon after the photograph was taken, the samurai would be abolished as a class.

Japanese ambassadors to Europe. 1860s. Fukuzawa Yukichi (second from left) acted as English-Japanese translator.

Images of ordinary people have also been preserved, not just representatives of high society. The photo from the 1860s shows an American army veteran and his wife.

As I mentioned, vintage photographs were often very clear and detailed. A fragment of a photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken in 1863 - a close-up of his eyes. Overall, this photograph seems to be an echo of something very distant, but when you zoom in, everything changes. A century and a half after the death of this man, his gaze still seems very alive and insightful to me, as if I were standing opposite the living and well Lincoln.

A little more material about the life of an outstanding person. Lincoln's first inauguration in 1861 - this photograph is strikingly different from most photographic materials of the 19th century. The cozy atmosphere of family photographs in the middle of Victorian chambers and the monumentality of portraits of starched celebrities seem like something long gone, while the seething crowd turns out to be much closer to the noisy everyday life of the 21st century.

Lincoln during the American Civil War, 1862. If you wish, you can find a lot of photographic materials about the war itself, filmed directly on the battlefield, in the barracks and during the transfer of troops.

Lincoln's second inauguration, 1864. The president himself can be seen in the center, holding a paper.

Again, a Civil War tent serving as an Army local post office somewhere in Virginia, 1863.

Meanwhile, in England everything is much calmer. 1864, photographer Valentine Blanchard photographed the walk of ordinary people along the Royal Road in London.

Photo from the same year - actress Sarah Bernhardt posing for Paul Nadar. The image and style she chose for this photo is so neutral and timeless that the photo could be labeled as 1980, 1990 or 2000, and almost no one would be able to dispute this, since many photographers still shoot with black and white film .

First color photograph - 1877.
But let's get back to photography. It was time to shoot something more impressive in color than a piece of multi-colored rag. The Frenchman Ducos de Hauron tried to do this using the triple exposure method - that is, photographing the same scene three times through filters and combining different materials during development. He named his way heliochromia. This is what the town of Angoulême looked like in 1877:

The color reproduction in this photo is imperfect; for example, the blue color is almost completely absent. Many animals with dichromatic vision see the world in much the same way. Here is an option that I tried to make more realistic by adjusting the color balance.

Here's another option, perhaps the closest to how the photo looks without color correction. You can imagine that you are looking through a bright yellow piece of glass, and then the effect of presence will be most powerful.

A lesser-known photo by Oron. View of the city of Agen. In general, it looks quite strange - the color palette is completely different (bright blue), the date is also confusing - 1874, that is, this photograph claims to be older than the previous one, although the previous photograph is considered the oldest surviving work by Oron. It is quite possible that only a print remains of the heliochromia of 1874, and the original is irretrievably lost.

Still life with a rooster - another heliochrome by Oron, made in 1879. It is difficult to judge what we see in this color photo - a shot of stuffed birds, or a photocopy of a hand-drawn painting. At least the color rendition is impressive. Still, it's not good enough to justify such a complex photographic process. Therefore, the Oron method never became a widespread method of color photography.

But the black and white flourished. John Thompson was one of a breed of photographers who approached their work from an artistic point of view. He believed that smart and neat intellectuals, prim members of royal families, stern generals and pretentious politicians were not all that could be of interest to photography. There is another life. One of his most famous works, made in 1876 or 1877, is a photo of a tired beggar woman sitting sadly at the porch. The work is called “The Unhappy - Life on the Streets of London”.

Railroads were the very first urban mode of transport, and by 1887 they already had a history of fifty years. It was in this year that the photograph of the Minneapolis junction railway station was taken. As you can see, freight trains and the man-made urban landscape are not very different from modern ones.

But the culture and ways of presenting it in those years were completely different. Radio and television, the Internet and multimedia libraries - all this will appear later, many, many years later. Until then, people, without leaving their homes, could only get verbal descriptions of life, traditions and cultural objects of other countries from newspapers. The only opportunity to get more deeply in touch with the culture of the whole world, seeing its artifacts with your own eyes, is through travel and exhibitions, for example, the World Exhibition, the most grandiose event of those times. Especially for the Exhibition, on the initiative of the Prince Consort of England, the Crystal Palace was built in the mid-19th century - a structure made of metal and glass, huge even by the standards of modern shopping and entertainment centers. The exhibition ended, but the Crystal Palace remained, becoming a permanent place for the exhibition of literally everything - from antiques to the latest technical innovations. In the summer of 1888, the Handel Festival took place in the huge concert hall of the Crystal Palace - a luxurious musical performance with the participation of hundreds of musicians and thousands of singers. The collage of photographs shows the concert hall during the various years of the Crystal Palace's existence until its destruction in the fire of 1936.

Intercity passenger transport 1889

Canals in Venice "Venetian Canal" (1894) by Alfred Stieglitz

A very lively photo... but something else was missing. What? Oh yes, the colors. Color was still needed, and not as an experiment, but as a...

Saint-Maxime, Lippmann_photo_view

An exhibition dedicated to the origins of photography has opened at Tate Britain in London. It shows the earliest photographs taken from 1840 to 1860. See on FullPicture the very first photographs in history, which capture the amazing atmosphere and people of those times when the most effective and popular means of transmitting information of our time - photography - was born.

22 PHOTOS

1. Cart. The photograph was taken in Brittany around 1857. Photographer: Paul Mares. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 2. Newhaven Fishermen (Alexander Rutherford, William Ramsay and John Liston), circa 1845. Photography by Hill & Adamson. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 3. Mom and son. 1855 Photographer: Jean-Baptiste Frenet. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 4. The Photographer's Daughter, Ela Theresa Talbot, 1843-1844. Photographer: William Fox Talbot. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
5. Horse and groom. 1855 Photographer: Jean-Baptiste Frenet. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 6. Madame Frenet with her daughters. Circa 1855. Photographer: Jean-Baptiste Frenet. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
7. Pyramids at Giza. 1857 Photographers: James Robertson and Felice Beato. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
8. Portrait of a woman, taken around 1854. Photographer: Roger Fenton. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
9. Photographer - John Beasly Greene. El Assasif, pink granite gate, Thebes, 1854. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
10. Construction of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, 1844. Photographer: William Fox Talbot. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
11. Goods from China, 1844. Photographer: William Fox Talbot. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
12. Flood in 1856 in the Brotteaux area of ​​Lyon. Photographer: Edouard Denis Baldus. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
13. Parthenon at the Acropolis, Athens, 1852. Photographer: Eugene Piot. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
14. One of the streets of Paris in 1843. Photographer: William Fox Talbot. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 15. Group of Croatian leaders. 1855 Photographer: Roger Fenton. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 16. Captain Mottram Andrews, 28th Foot (1st Staffordshire), 1855. Photographer: Roger Fenton. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 17. Canteen. [A woman who accompanied the army and sold various goods to the soldiers, and also provided services, including sexual ones]. 1855 Photographer: Roger Fenton. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
18. Five fisherwomen from Newhaven, circa 1844. Photographers: David Hill and Robert Adamson. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
19. "Fruit sellers." The photograph was most likely taken in September 1845. The author of the photo is most likely Calvert Jones, but it is possible that William Fox Talbot. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)
20. At the foot of the obelisk (Obelisk of Theodosius in Constantinople), 1855. Photographer: James Robertson. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography) 22. Daisies (Margaret and Mary Cavendish), circa 1845. Photographers: David Hill and Robert Adamson. (Photo: Wilson Center for Photography)