By Allan Porter
1979 ©
Once upon a time, long long ago at the very beginning of the world, man discovered that light from the sun gave him body warmth and light in order to see in the daytime. Without the sun, he would be cold, and it was very difficult to see in the darkness. It was not long before he tried to copy what nature and natural sources gave him. How many years went by between the time that he discovered the sun, the great source of warmth and light, and the time when he found that he could create his own light, I do not know; but one day he found out that he could create sparks by rubbing two stones together and, after this,it was not long before he was able to use the sparks to make a fire.This fire replaced the sun in the dark nighttime, and man was very proud of being able to create his own kind of sun in his little primitive world. In fact, fire was probably one of the most important inventions to be made by man in olden times. Many, many years went by and many, many inventions were made.
After discovering how to make his own light, man created the wheel and numerous other practical things to make his life more comfortable, including different types of food, clothing and buildings.There were also men who thought of more than just their work, and these thinkers were constantly working with new ideas and new inventions.
If one observes the moments and hours of toil and activity, hunting, fishing as an example, and adds to his instruments the fabrication of a few bits of color. or notches forming a design to express his satisfaction or his own personality; one could assume the non-representative art and this decoration became a part of his life. He then may have turned to painting his own body in an array of colors or imitating impressions made by leaves or nuts impressed in the warm moist mud or clay.
Whether it was clay, mud, sand; whether it was representative figures of himself or a doll modeled and formed by his hands and recognized by others, a new morning dawned for the human soul.
Thus arose the act of representation, the putting of sign for substance, semblance for reality or a swift outline creating an image. This was the beginning of sculpture, painting, writing and printing- then emerged the later course advancing with equal pace beside symbolism, articulate speech. Of imitation art in the western world, we can trace early representative art to the days of cave dwellings.
As the Neanderthal man was replaces by the Homo sapiens some 20,000 years ago he was able to reproduce nature in the form of drawings and cave paintings in an enormous underground art gallery in the canyon of the Ardeche River near the town of Vallon Pon-d'Arche, 260 miles south of Paris. These wonderful images of Bisons, Rhinoceroses, Lions and the landscape vegetation inspired them to reproduce what was before them.This find in January 1995 now precedes the Lescaux-cave discoveries early in this century with dates of only 16'000 years of age
Thus the recorder-priest and seer was no longer a mere saga story teller and had to be present, but his pictures which had carried his ideas remained millenniums after him
During the time of Greece and the time of the Egyptians before Christ was born, there were great thinkers such as Aristotle (35-322 B.C.) who was a great thinker and philosopher who also realized that it was possible to project images onto other surfaces.Then there was a man by the name of Alhazen Ibn Al Haitem (95-1035) who, when he saw he sunlight coming through the trees and the lightreflecting on the sand, and the moon passing over the sun in an eclipse reflected on the sand, he realized that something special was happening when the light passed through the small opening
between the leaves of the tree above and projected the images ontothe sand.
We also know that Leonardo da Vinci, the famous artist and inventor (1452-1519), and Giovanni Battista della Porta (1538-1615) were the first men to make a darkened room with a small pinhole in itswalls. They called this room"Camera Obscura," which means 'dark room'in Latin, and as they moved this dark room around in the countryside and the cities,they projected the scenes outside into that darkened room upside down onto the inner walls of the camera obscura.
They could then take a pencil or crayon and make an exact copy over the projected image of nature,buildings or even portraits of people on the opposite wall in dark room. But it was difficult to move this dark room around because of its size, and so some men invented glass-lenses, which are discs of glass,rounded and hollowed to make things appear larger or smaller when you look through them. When you think that a microscope makes it possible for us to see things which are so small that that they are almost invisible to the human eye, and a telescope enables us to see things so far away that we cannot see them at all without,
a telescope, then you can understand the importance of these lenses. With their aid, it became possible to make a camera obscura no larger than a bread box. This type of invention is called a physical invention. The next question was how to keep and fix this image in a little camera obscura without having to copy it with a pen or pencil.
Now we come to the chemical part of photography. There lived in Germany a chemist, called Heinrich Schultz who was interested in experimenting with silver, a metal, and salt, a mineral. He made many different mixtures of these things, and one morning he came into his laboratory and found a bottle that he had placed in the window was colored a blackish-purple on the side facing the light, and white on the side facing the laboratory. He repeated the experiment several times, and he realized that it was the natural sunlight which darkened the silver salts..Many, many years later, a man called Josiah Wedgwood made cut-outs of designs and patterns and decorated his pottery and dishes with the aid of these silver salts.In fact, he was one of the first men to use the idea of the silver salt chemical for practical purposes. It was not until shortly before the middle of the l9th century, however, that four men decided to try and find away of keeping the image permanent on the silver salt.Up till this time, men could make images in the camera obscura,but as soon as they took them into the daylight, the negative area of the image would become dark and the positive image would disappear with continued exposure to daylight. William Henry Fox Talbot in England: Nicephore Niepce, Jacques Louis Mande, Daguerre,and Hippolyte Bayard from France, and Hercules Florence from Brazil all set out independently to discover ways of keeping the image permanent. They all gave differerent names to this, invention, and it was Sir William Herschel in England who thought of the Greek name photography which means 'writing'(graph) with 'light' (photo).It was to be a long cooperation between Daguerre and Niepcebefore the world realized that they discovered photography, and in the year 1839, the French Society announced the Daguerreotype one of the first official types of photography to the world.A few months later,Henry Fox Talbot announced the Talbotype,but in few short years the word 'photography' was known throughout the world. The first photographs, called Daguerreotypes were pictures of nature, portraits of people, and images of buildings on silver metal plates, and made with a good camera obscura with the help of good lenses, they were exact and precise.
There was only one problem, and that was that you could only look at the pictures when the light directed towards them at a certain angle and they were one of a kind.Henry Fox Talbot, on the other hand, made negatives from paper and was thus able to make manypositive copies of his pictures using only one negative. Fox Talbot is considered to be the discoverer and father of modern photography as we know it today Although everyone was keen to have a Daguerreotype portrait taken,they were unable to have copies made for their relatives and friends.At the same time as the invention of photography,the Industrial Revolution was taking place and Photography was in fact a part of this Revolution.For the first time in history, man was able to make a visual record of his achievements such as the railway, electricity, the motor car, turbines, architecture and bridges. Photography provided active help in the new inventions, as well as considerably improving communications.
Writing with light, or photography as it is called, was as great an invention as the writing and setting of type for books by Gutenberg.And it was also the first time in the history of mankind that art and science joined together to a common end: photography.
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Now that we know how it all began, and now that we have learned something about photography's technical innovations, lets go on and see what photography has achieved in the past 140 years. Firstly, it has brought us the whole world in pictures, as well as the space of the universe and beyond It has shown us how people live, what they eat and drink, who they are, and what they look like. It has shown us the rich and the poor,the happy and the sad, the healthy and the sick and the young and the old.It has shown us all sorts of new inventions, and it made us aware of how different the trees and the mountains are on the different continents of the earth. It educates us and gives us information about many, many things which we may never see with our own eyes. Most important of all, it records and documents so the we are able to know what things are like and what they were like.There is one thing about photography that we should never forget: it is not only an instrument of reality, but also of fantasy; with a camera and film, with your imagination there is no end.