The History of the Camera
Dieter Wälzholz on the metamorphosis of the camera from the daguerreotype to the digital. Optical phenomena had captured the interest of people already in the earliest civilisations. As the knowledge of them increased, and –along with that growing knowledge - the skills to produce optical instruments were slowly acquired, optics, this relatively small branch of physics, grew into a vast scientific field about which no one person today knows everything. From simple magnifiers to sophisticated lenses with which even X-rays can be refracted, a huge array of optical devices play a major part in our daily lives, mostly unnoticed by us. The optical apparatus, however, of which we are all aware is the “camera”, short for “camera obscura” which is Latin for “dark room”. The earliest description we have of a camera obscura dates from about 1000 AD by the Arab scientist Alhazen. How a camera obscura works can be observed when we are in a room, darkened e.g. by a heavy curtain that has a small hole: on the wall opposite the curtain an upside down picture of the scenery outside appears. This is what Alhazen may have noticed - and it is what we now call a pinhole camera. In 1550, Girolami Cardona substituted the small hole with a lens - and made a perfectly usable photographic camera. However, the camera obscura was used mainly by artists only as a drawing apparatus where the “wall” opposite the lens was replaced by a glass plate. On to this plate a sheet of paper was placed which acted as a screen, thus making the image visible. Later and for greater convenience, a mirror was often placed at a 45° angle behind the lens to reflect the image on to a glass plate on top of the camera obscura – thereby creating what we now call a single lens reflex camera (SLR). But we were still far away from photography, because, at that time, nobody knew of substances which could chemically be altered by exposure to light, within a reasonably short time. In 1727, the German Johann Schulze observed how silver salts turned black under the influence of light; but it did not occur to him to project an image on to those salts by using a lens, and to see what would happen. That is what Thomas Wedgewood did in 1802 when he took a photograph, only to find that the picture he saw faded as he looked at it in daylight. The problem was, he could not fix the image he had created. Independently from each other, Henry Talbot in England and Nicephore Niepce in France tried and succeeded in solving the problem of fixing that image. In 1826 Niepce took the first photograph, processed it so that it would not fade. Because he had obtained a “negative” picture but really wanted a “positive”, he turned to other processes that resulted in photographs known as Daguerreotypes. These were positive, but unique pictures, meaning they could not be copied. Talbot, on the other hand, pursued the “negative” process, and eventually also discovered how to make “positives” of his
pictures, i.e. his photographs could be copied, and in principle also enlarged, but that came later when the quality of small pictures had much improved. 1839 is the official birth year of photography. During the 70 following years, if one wanted a big picture one needed a big camera. Almost all cameras of that period were made of wood in small furniture workshops, many of which grew into big camera manufacturers. Progress in camera design went hand in hand with progress in photographic chemistry, often one “fertilizing” the other. In 1885, that combined progress enabled the American George Eastman to introduce the first rollfilm. In all three branches which make up photography (i.e. chemistry, optics, and precision engineering) the aim was and still is firstly, to increase convenience and speed of handling which led to more and more automation and almost fail-safe equipment, and secondly, to enhance picture quality. The way towards that aim began slowly, but with the progress in technology, inventions and new designs appeared more and more rapidly. The pictures you see in the current display at the Bermuda National Gallery are an attempt to demonstrate the development of the photographic camera; some of them are important milestones along that way. But of course, this display had to remain incomplete. Some cameras are so rare that they could not yet be located and photographed. And a few hitherto overlooked cameras, holding important places in this evolution, are surely waiting to be discovered. After all, well over 40,000 different camera models may have been made, not counting the different versions of each model.