This is going to be a very broad overview omitting some of the developments that diverge from the main thrust of what we know about the infancy of photography. Hopefully, what you read here will spur you to go on your own exploration of the development of the photographic process and meet your photographic grandfather.

The emotional need and achieving the ability to record images was one of the first intellectual achievements of the human race, somewhere between utilizing fire and the portable hairdryer. Before Cave Man Ogg learned how to build a shelter instead of living in a cave, he learned to communicate with his hunting partner, Cave Man Mogg, his images of the wild horse, buffalo or reindeer, by drawing on a cave wall with charcoal. I doubt that these drawings were used to decorate the cave. Maybe they were a part of religious symbolism used in the aid of the hunt. But for whatever purpose, it was man's need to communicate what he saw, that to this day form part of our ability to express ourselves to our fellow man. Cave drawings gave way to cave painting and the use of some form of brush and pigment, which at that time must have been a great leap forward from the charcoal stick. Other advances in image capturing came along over the 35 to 40,000 years afterwards. Paintings eventually broke free from the cave wall, onto stretched hides, clothing decorations, slabs of wood, and eventually stretched canvas. Pictures were carved onto rock surfaces and in South America gigantic images of birds that are only readable from aircraft were stamped into desert sands. Pictures were used for religious, political, historical and decorative purposes. All of these developments were probably, at their time, significantly important leaps forward in image recording.

At some point in history, someone noticed that if you were in a darkened room on a very bright day and there was a small opening in the wall, an image, inverted and reversed, of the outside world would form on the opposite wall. The phenomenon of this image formation was the result of the small opening acting as a glassless or pinhole lens focusing the image on the far wall. The important discovery was that light and light alone could be used to form an image. People could sit in a darkened room and observe the goings on outside as images created by the light focused through the small aperture projected onto the far wall. It was probably like sitting in a movie theater looking at an upside down motion picture in color, not that well focused and probably quite a bit dimmer than the outside illumination, but the important thing was that there was a way to look at life and re-create it as an image. The next thought was how do we fix this transitory image, capturing it at a point in time that can be preserved long after the original event.

One solution to capturing this image required placing material on the wall and tracing the image by hand onto it. The next development was creating a smaller version of this room (a large box) with a pinhole on one side of the light tight box and a frosted glass on the other, allowing an image to form which could be traced onto a piece of paper and later copied to some other medium. It was the development of this device, known as the Camera Obscura that helped artists see and understand prospective. Paintings of the time before and after the camera obscura reflect the new vision that artists gained from this device. For artists of the time the traced image from the camera obscura was akin to the Polaroid camera of our time.

In the early 1800s people started to think about how to use the light captured in the camera obscura to actually record and fix an image to some form of transportable material. It was noted that silver when exposed to light and air darkened proportionately to the amount of light that it was exposed to. This observation led to experiments into exposing material coated with silver solutions to the projected light inside the camera obscura and then causing the silver to darken proportionately to the amount of light that struck it. There were many people experimenting with using light and chemicals to capture a photograph (photo = light, graph = writing). The first really successful and widely accepted method was the daguerreotype. In the early 1830s this was a breakthrough method of capturing what you wanted to record without having to actually draw it. People bitten by the photography bug, and with the motivation to record their vision grew in great numbers as the process of the daguerreotype grew more sophisticated and easier to accomplish.

In 1839 a professor at New York University, Dr. William Draper, went up to the roof of the University and photographed his sister-in-law, making the first known photograph of a human face. His sister-in-law probably had to sit quite still for a number of minutes because of the long exposure time necessary. Nevertheless, man was now able to record a person's face by using light alone to paint the image. Photography had really arrived! People were now able to capture images of their loved ones, their properties, their cities, bowls of fruit and any other object of interest to them.

Look for Part II and Part III coming.

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