Photography

About

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce fixed a camera image around 1826–27, but photography was announced to the world in 1839, when Louis Daguerre's detailed pictures on silvered copper plates were made public in Paris and William Henry Fox Talbot presented his paper process in London. Talbot's method, making many positive prints from one negative, became the basis of most film photography until the digital era.

Its uses multiplied quickly: portraiture, war, exploration, science and art. Julia Margaret Cameron made intense, soft-focus portraits in the 1860s; Eadweard Muybridge stopped motion; Alfred Stieglitz campaigned for photography as a fine art and later backed sharp, unmanipulated pictures. The 20th century brought small cameras, picture magazines, colour film and conceptual uses, from August Sander's portraits of German society to Cindy Sherman's staged self-portraits. Phones and digital sensors have since made photographs almost uncountable, while many artists still choose film and the darkroom.