The
History of the Family Album – work in progress
§
Research
notebooks- 1830-40
The family album
history is grounded in the origins of photography itself. In the 1830’s photography as a medium was
widely regarded as a means of recording and indexing/cataloguing nature and
specimens as well as people. Check Darwin
Photographs of plants, people and architecture replaced and were added to
drawings and sketches in research journals of the day. Proof. Even
experimental and amateur photographers of the time, saved their successful
experiments in photography in small albums like journals of their work. As soon
as photographs were no longer limited to glass, the format and materiality of
them seemed exceptionally suited to pages and books. Their very flatness
dictated the means of storage and display.
§
Women’s
keepsake albums- 1830-40
Women had, previous
to photography, kept ‘keepsake albums’ which included drawings and verse to
demonstrate and practise skills that were considered valuable to the modern
Victorian young lady.
In the sixteenth century the
commonplace book was used to record “good sayings and notable observations”,
for the owner it served as a personal repository of wisdom and information
The development of scrap books and
albums date from the 18th century, they contained a wide variety of printed
material, as well as paintings, drawings and “...a medley of scraps, half verse
and half prose and something’s not very like either, where wise folk and simple
alike to combine, and you write your nonsense, that I may write mine”. (Warrington, 2012)
With its elaborately embossed binding
the scrap album or scrap book was an object of appreciation, giving endless and
agreeable activity for its owner. Early albums, compiled mainly by young ladies
of some social standing, were carefully arranged with poetry and original
writings, often extravagant and sentimental together with the other
accomplishments expected of every intelligent and well informed young lady -
drawing and painting. Appropriate items were added with care and enthusiasm for
when the book was complete it would be her most precious possession commanding
a place next to the family bible upon the drawing-room table.
In the early nineteenth century
beautiful albums of high quality were produced having ornately hand-tooled
leather covers, engraved clasps and brass locks.
Other albums and scrapbooks had blind
embossed covers carrying elaborate designs of great detail, spines tooled in
gold decoration, pages with gilt edgings and pretty end-papers to excite
interest in the most genteel of young ladies.
In the final decades of the century
these gave way to highly decorated covers, in great and wonderful variety,
carrying lavish designs and colourful illustrations.
The high quality of paper used was for
the mounting of prints and lithographs or thicker paper was provided for
drawings and water colours. Others had decorations printed or blind embossed
onto the pages with blank spaces in the shape of circles, ovals or squares into
which small scraps or prints would be pasted.
Early scrap albums were prized possessions,
intended to be handed down through the family over many generations, whose
purpose was for the recording of personal mementoes, poems, religious texts and
contributions from friends and family.
§
Album page, arranged around a central
engraving, using plain and hand-coloured lithographs and cut-out anecdotes and conundrums from
contemporary magazines and journals.
Numerous leaves, in this album, bear the watermark “G H Green 1830” and “Dobbs & Co”. Circa 1835
Numerous leaves, in this album, bear the watermark “G H Green 1830” and “Dobbs & Co”. Circa 1835
In the early 19th century,
Victorian autograph albums were embellished
with
hand-painted flowers and figures and were adorned with needlepoint. Sentiments, prayers and serious thoughts
were inscribed into these albums and
shared between friends, family and teachers. Some writers would articulate their sentiments with a
favourite poem or a hand drawn picture.
Some autograph albums were
bestowed with mementos. This was also a time when it was all the rage to share
a lock of hair with a special friend or a loved one. Some friends would share their lock by fastening it to
an album page along with a verse. Locks of hair from family and friends were
also treasured and used to make jewellery such as earrings and bracelets, and many
were encased in lockets for remembrance.
§
Daguerreotypes-
1839-1850
Daguerreotypes were
glass and came in their own hinged cases, each one kept individually from the
others. There may have been collections of daguerreotypes kept by individuals,
but the storage of them due to their size and weight would have been cumbersome
and difficult. Explore daguerreotype collections
Unlike today's photography where one can make
many photographic prints from a single negative, the Daguerreotype was the negative. There were no
duplicates. If you own a daguerreotype it is a '1-of-1.' These photographs were
delicate and held in special cases. These cases vary in design and are often
stylish and colourful.
The public was enamoured with these images. The
prices however were prohibitive, and subjects and owners were usually
middle-class to rich.
As with the Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes and
Tintypes have a black backing to correct the contrast, and the images are in
mirror reverse. While the Ambrotype was short-lived, the tintype was an
especially cheap way to make photography and lasted until the early 20th
Century. Many people collected Tintypes and housed them in special albums. Were these the first family albums or did the
tradition begin at an earlier stage?
§
Medical,
police, transport, post office
The Victorian age was
a time of discovery and invention and social changes were taking place which
utilised the new photographic technology. The modern police force was just
beginning and photography was utilised to make identification of criminals
easier. Mention John Tagg writings. The
transport systems such as trains were now available, and so the images of
criminals could be dispersed throughout the country, facilitating police and
prisons to identify criminals in a way that had been previously impossible,
lowering crime rates but bringing with it the possibility of wrongful arrest,
due to the images being altered in the taking by the criminals themselves. The
first postage stamps and postal service had just newly been invented and as
such, people could send their images and cartes de visites with letters to
friends and family across the country and later, the world. Basic historical context- merely touch on this to place in
context.
“In a somewhat bizarre inversion of the aristocratic
tradition of furnishing the halls with family portraits, they were also
displayed within institutions themselves for the supposed benefit of their own
subjects.[....] to provide therapeutic entertainment for the inmates of the
asylum as part of the then fashionable ‘moral treatment’”. (Green-Lewis, 1996)
§
Wet
plate- 1850’s
Collodion technology made
photographic images a common sight in the shop windows of Regent Street and
Piccadilly in London and the commercial boulevards of Paris. In London, for example, there
were at the time some 130 commercial establishments (besides well-landscapes,
genre scenes, and photographic reproductions
of works of art could be bought in regular and stereograph formats. This appeal
to the middle class convinced the elite that photographs would foster a taste for verisimilitude instead of
ideality, even though some critics recognized that the work of individual
photographers might display an uplifting style and substance that was harmonious
with art. ()
Find how to reference un-authored website
Due to the difficulties
of wet-plate photography, the image making was still limited to either the
studio or the portable studio, it was still a recreation of the wealthy;
limited to the upper classes with time on their hands to practice and the means
to learn the skills involved and purchase the equipment needed.
§
Cartes
de Visite- 1854
Albumen Photographs were made on especially lightweight paper
and were usually glued to a mount. A large one of these 'cards' was a
Cabinet Card, so called
because it was often displayed in a cabinet. A miniature version is called a Carte de Visite. These Cabinets and Cartes pictured
hundreds of subjects from Presidents to actresses, family members to nature
scenes and cityscapes. Cartes were intended for use as calling cards. For
example, a man may leave his Carte de Visite (with his photograph) with a
business associate or friend. Local stores often sold Cabinets or Cartes of
famous people. Collecting these and placing them into albums was a fashionable leisure
pursuit.
Cartes were incredibly similar in pose, costume and props and
similarities can be drawn between the conventions of cartes and conventions of
contemporary family album photography in general. Link to Siegel Quote
The carte de visites
that came into fashion around this time extended the collection opportunities
of the upper and middle classes. People collected photographs of famous people
as well as friends and family. Indeed, some albums were arranged in order of
importance, with the most highly regarded at the front of the album and friends
and family at the rear. The more popular and important the collected
dignitaries within the album, the more affluent the family who owned them were considered;
it was akin to knowing the person portrayed. Cartes might be seen as the
beginnings of fascination with celebrity.
Despite the name, cartes de visite
were rarely used as visiting cards. Given the number of calls a lady or
gentleman made during a day or week, imagine the extraordinary number of photographic
visiting cards they would have to buy. Contemporary writers do give us some tantalizing
indications of where they did maintain the role of social mediator. Although a
writer in 1862 did say the carte de visite had come to "overshadow the
contents of every card basket," it is likely visitors left their
photograph there because the photograph album was still somewhat of a rare item
at the time. By 1862, the fashion of "having one's likeness photographed
upon his visiting card," according to Scientific American, had been
modified into the custom of distributing dozens of small portraits among
friends. Every young lady expected to receive photographs from a relative, a
love interest or friend and then with the aggressiveness of a "lady
beggar" as Vanity Fair put it; she overwhelms all of her acquaintances
with requests for personal photographs in order to form her collection. Cartes
de visite were often autographed with a signature at the bottom of the card
just below the image for handing out to guests by a variety of well-known
persons such as politicians, reverends, actors and dancers. Find who quoted this
Due to its small size the carte de
visite proved easy to handle and view without the use of an optical instrument
or a special viewing angle, giving it advantages over the stereo photograph and
the daguerreotype correspondingly. The small images were ubiquitous and
collected by nearly everyone who could afford them. The Victorians were avid
photograph collectors, every parlour having its share of carte de visite albums
brimming with the images of family, friends and celebrated persons.
§
Queen
Victoria
Around
1842, the Queen asked Alfred Chalon, Court painter, if he was worried that the
new art of photography would ruin his profession of miniature painting. Chalon was confident that it would not. Replying in his heavily accented English he
said: "Ah non, Madame; photographie can't flatte're." And flattery
was Chalon's stock in trade; his portraits of the young Queen bear little
resemblance to her real appearance. But
Chalon had misread the needs of his subjects, who, in a choice between flattery
and believability demanded the seemingly magical reality of the daguerreotype.
In addition to commissioning
photographers, the Royal couple were assiduous in the collecting of images. Queen
Victoria had her own collection of Cartes, and used to send her ladies in
waiting out across London to collect them from affluent families, for her to
place in her collection. This must have had a great deal of impact on the
fashion of collecting amongst the ladies of the upper and middle classes,
desiring to emulate the Queen herself. One of Queen Victoria's
ladies-in-waiting, the Hon. Eleanor Stanley, wrote home on 24 November 1860:
"I have been writing to all the fine ladies in London for their and their
husbands’ photographs for the Queen. I
believe the Queen could be bought and sold, for a photograph." (Jay, 1988)
The
Queen and her Consort obviously derived much pleasure from examining and
arranging the photographs in their albums.
Few days passed without Victoria sending for one volume or another, all
of which were methodically catalogued with their contents arranged in
systematic order. Photographs for these albums were commissioned, bought at
exhibition, exchanged with related royal families abroad, or simply requested.
On
Victoria's death there was a massive house-cleaning under the direction of her
son, now King Edward VII. Thousands of
loose photographs which his parents had treasured were burnt, but even the
remains will indicate the extent of the Royal passion for photography - over
100,000 photographs survived in 110 albums.
The
Royal taste in photography was extensive, and the subjects include family
portraits, likenesses of practically every Victorian with a claim to
distinction, all European heads of state, reproductions and documents of
paintings, engravings, sculptures, silver and other treasures of the Royal
archives, memorials of Royal events such as christenings, confirmations,
weddings and anniversaries, military campaigns, royal residences, prize bulls
and pigs on the royal farms, servants who had worked for the Queen for a long
period, visiting, and the Royal pets.
The
Queen not only commissioned and collected photographs but presented prints on
every possible occasion. In particular,
anniversaries were always commemorated with the giving of photographs.
By
the 1880s the problematic, unwieldy and messy wet-plate process had given way
to dry-plates and hand cameras - more suitable for the Royal ladies. Princesses Beatrice, Louise, Victoria, Maude,
Princess Christian of Hesse and Princess Henry of Battenburg, were all
accomplished amateur photographers. But
undoubtedly the most successful and enthusiastic photographer in the Royal
household from the late 1880s was Princess Alexandria, wife of Bertie. She made snapshots of practically every
member of the Royal family, on all of their excursions. Her work was exhibited in 1897 side by side
with the most celebrated photographers of the day (including H. P. Robinson,
George Davison, Frederick H. Evans, J. Craig Annan, and A. Horsley Hinton). Her
pictures were published in The Graphic in August 1905 and in book form in
1908. (Jay, 1988)
§
First
commercial photo albums 1860’s
Albums were a direct result of the development of
photographic prints, displacing the more ornate frames used for Daguerreotypes.
The first albums were produced in France in 1857/8, by which time
the carte de visite (patented there in 1854) was becoming fashionable.
Entrepreneurs across the English Channel were quick
to seize this new business opportunity and photograph albums were being
advertised in the British trade press by 1861. This was the year that witnessed
an explosion in carte de visite sales, the phenomenon known as ‘cartomania’.
The active promotion of and growing interest in the novel albums in turn
encouraged the taking and collecting of more photographs. During the early 1860s,
cartes were known as ‘album portraits’, demonstrating the close connection
between these new photographs and the fashion for displaying them in albums. (Shrimpton, 2011)
§
Social
class, upper ten thousand, social political season, town and country estates
‘Upper
Ten Thousand’,
or simply, The Upper Ten, is a phrase coined in
1852 by American poet Nathaniel Parker Willis to describe the upper circles of New York, and hence of
other major cities.
The
phrase first appeared in British fiction in The Adventures of Philip by William
Thackeray, whose eponymous hero contributed weekly to a fashionable New York
journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten Thousand”. In 1875, both Adam Bissett Thom and Kelly's Directory
published books entitled ‘The
Upper Ten Thousand’, which listed members of the aristocracy, the gentry,
officers in the British Army and Navy, members of Parliament, Colonial
administrators, and members of the Church of England (the Victorian
equivalent of ‘Who’s Who’, if you will). The usage of this term was a response
to the broadening of the British ruling class which had been
caused by the Industrial
Revolution.
The social
and political scenes were firmly interwoven. Parliament would be in session in
late spring, early summer and during this time, the upper classes would convene
in their London homes, taking part in the circles of social parties and gatherings
arranged with the main purpose of facilitating the introduction of young people
and the arrangement of possible marriages. In the autumn they would retreat to
their country homes and estates, where the women had more time on their hands
to work on their Photocollage albums, and other feminine pastimes.
§
Photocollage
albums – 1860’s 70’s
·
Detail from album page
·
Pressed grass, leaves and flower
·
Lands End & Logan Rock
·
July 9, 1883
Photographs themselves were mainly
taken in studios by professional photographers, although a few very affluent
families had cameras of a professional nature and took their own posed
photographs around their gardens and outside of their homes. Around this time,
album collecting and collating became a hobby of the upper and middle class
women. They would create and often hand paint and decorate the albums, then cut
up photographs and create collages similar in fashion to scrapbooking. It was
an activity saved for evenings and rainy days and the resulting books were left
on tables in reception rooms for visitors to peruse at their leisure. Was it a way of showing off? Self
Expression in a time when women had little voice?
“Early albums were ‘knowing’. These
women were using photographs ‘to give materiality to their own culturally and
socially specific desires and pleasures’”.(Di Bello, 2004)
It was also an aide memoire for personal and
collective storytelling. This links in to the belief of the oral tradition of
storytelling. Family stories and histories would have been passed down through
the family by word of mouth. The trigger for these would previously have been
the commissioned paintings of families, hung on the walls of the well to do
homes. The tradition of only the richest having their portraits painted has not
died out, in fact it is having a resurgence in modern times, due to photography
being classed as more common nowadays. Question this.
The ability and
skills necessary for album making were seen as refinement and talent as well as
having the monetary ability to pay for the private lessons required for
learning those skills.
Where regular Carte
albums and studio photographs levelled the field and made every sitter seem of
the same standing, Photocollage albums went some way to correcting this; “What
was supposed to be indicative of individual character instead had a levelling
effect, supplying all sitters with the same signs of gentility: when collagists
later attacked cartes de visite with their scissors, they in effect restored
the primacy of the sitter to the image”. (Siegel and Weidemeyer, 2009)
§
Fashion,
suffrage.
With women escaping
from the confines of the home in pursuit of photographs with their hand held
cameras, the fashion began to change. The easiest way for a young woman to get
about independently was on a bicycle; however the fashion of long dresses was not
suited to riding a bike. They took to altering their dress and began to wear
bloomers to ride their bikes, making it easier to get around. Suffrage- explore.
§
Literature
Nonsense rhyme and
literature had a huge influence on the albums and creativity of Victorian
ladies. Lewis Caroll, Edward Lear, Grimm and Andersen fairytales first make an
appearance and can be seen to have had a great influence over the art and
content of albums, particularly the Photocollage albums. Knowing allusions were
made to Victorian visual culture in an attempt to demonstrate the wealth of
education available to the upper and middle classes. People had images of their
heads pasted onto animal bodies and the use of imagery including playing cards,
croquet, and the like gave reference not only to the leisure activities that
were partaken, but of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
§ Flash- 1860’s Blitzlicht- 1887
Early
History of Artificial Lighting
In the
early days of photography, the only source of light was, of course, the sun.
Mostly photography depended upon long days and good weather. It was obvious
that artificial light would be indispensable: not dependent on the sun anymore,
pictures could be taken where natural light wasn’t sufficient, or on dull days
when studio work was impossible.
The first
artificial light photography dates back to 1839, when L. Ibbetson used
oxy-hydrogen light (also known as limelight, discovered by Goldsworthy Gurney)
when photographing microscopic objects. Limelight was produced by heating a
ball of calcium carbonate in an oxygen flame until it became incandescent.
Despite
being used widely around 1839-1840, the results of using the chemical were
rather poor: chalk-white pale faces and a harshly lit picture, an effect
created due to the imperfection of the light source and differentiation of the
reflectance of different parts of the scene (due to different distances and
materials).
Attempts
of using limelight and other chemical sources for lighting the picture can be
considered to have been a failure, either because they did not contain the rich
blue, that the plates of the day required, as well as due to the chemical’s low
intensity.
Other
possibilities had to be explored. Nadar for example, photographed the sewers in
Paris, using battery-operated lighting. Later the arc-lamps were introduced to
aid photographers, but it was not until 1877 that the first studio using
electric light was opened.
Powered
by a gas-driven dynamo the studio by Van der Weyde in Regent Street, had the
light sufficient to allow exposures of 2 to 3 seconds.
Flash Powder
Despite
being quite a step forward in artificial lighting development, the early
chemicals could not provide the satisfying result for the photos. Producing a
shorter and therefore more predictable flash became the goal. There was one
solution: magnesium.
In 1862
Edward Sonstadt began experiments to prepare the metal on a commercial basis
and by 1864 magnesium wire was finally placed on sale.
The wire
was extremely expensive, but following a successful demonstration in February
the same year, where a photograph was produced in a darkened room in only 50
seconds, the highly actinic light proved ideal for photography and became
incredibly popular.
The technology of the wire wasn’t too
complicated. Magnesium was burned as a wire or ribbon twisted into tapers or
clockwork lamps with a reflector. There were different lamp designs, each for
different use. Despite different ways of using the magnesium, there were no
ideal variant for this method.
Burning was often incomplete and
unpredictable. Exposures varied considerably and the air remained laden with
grey, opaque fumes, making the method unsuitable for studio use.
Even more, the technique was not
without its obvious dangers and it also released a lot of smoke, smell and a
fall-out of white ash.
Nevertheless, magnesium lamps gained
in popularity through the 1870s and 1880s despite the expenses and danger.
Trying to solve the unpredictability of the popular magnesium technique,
Charles Piazzi Smyth, experimenting in the pyramids at Giza, Egypt, in 1865,
had attempted to ignite magnesium mixed with gunpowder. The resulting picture
was quite poor but the principle of combining magnesium with oxygen-rich
chemical resulting in combustion was developed.
In 1887, Adolf Miethe and Johannes
Gaedicke mixed fine magnesium powder with potassium chlorate to produce
Blitzlicht. This was the first ever widely used flash powder. Blitzlicht gave
the photographers the ability to produce instant photographs at night at a very
high shutter speed. This caused quite an excitement in the photography world.
Being the explosive that it is, flash
powder accidents were obviously inevitable. Simply grinding the components was
dangerous enough, and a number of photographers died while either preparing the
flash powder or setting it off.
In the beginning of the 20th century,
the flash powder formula was refined and improvements were made to make the
process simpler and safer. The flashes now lasted for 10 milliseconds only, so
subjects no longer closed their eyes during the exposure which helped portrait
photography.
There were still a sufficient amount
of disadvantages to the method; for example, the smoke continued to cause
trouble, making studio work quite difficult, so another invention was awaited.
Flash Bulbs
In his experiments in underwater
photography in the 1890s, Louis Boutan – a French zoologist and a pioneer
underwater photographer – used a cumbersome magnesium lamp. Powdered magnesium,
sealed in a glass jar fixed to a lead-weighted barrel to supply oxygen during
burning, was ignited by means of an alcohol lamp.
Paul Vierkötter used the same
principle in 1925, when he ignited magnesium electronically in a glass globe.
In 1929 the Vacublitz, the first true flashbulb made from aluminium foil sealed
in oxygen, was produced in Germany by the Hauser Company using Johannes B.
Ostermeier’s patents.
It was quickly followed by the
Sashalite from the General Electric Company in the USA.
The flash bulb was an oxygen-filled
bulb in which aluminium foil was burned, with ignition being accomplished by a
battery. The light of the bulb, although powerful, was soft and diffused,
therefore less dangerous to the eyes than flash powder.
Using a flash bulb produced neither
noise nor smoke when the charge was fired. This provided an opportunity to
using flash in places where flash powder use was questionable or simply
dangerous. The first photos using the “Sashalite” flashbulb were published by
The ‘Morning Post’.
The pictures were of the engine-room
and other compartments of a submarine. These were not only interesting as
unusual subjects, but they indicated a high technical standard. It was not to
be until 1927, however, that the simple flash-bulb was to appear for sale.
Flashbulbs were a big step forward.
They weighed little, were easily fired electrically and were extremely powerful
and, therefore, convenient. Another important aspect of the technique was that
it was extremely safe, especially compared to the widely used before flash
powder.
§
Dry
plate gelatine- 1870’s 80’s
Gelatin papers were introduced in
the 1870s and started gaining acceptance in the 1880s and 1890s as the gelatin
bromide papers became popular.
However, as with all technological
innovations, the public increasingly demanded outdoor and candid photographs
with enlarged prints which they could frame or smaller unmounted snapshots they
could collect in scrapbooks.
In no
small part owing to the immense popularity of the affordable Kodak Box Brownie camera,
first introduced in 1900, the public increasingly began taking its own
photographs and thus the popularity of the cabinet card declined.
When
George Eastman introduced the Brownie camera in 1888, the family album really
came into its own. People started taking a large amount of images (100 per
camera load) and the freedom to take as many as they liked (but only outside in
daylight, as flash had not yet been invented) released them from the formality
of the studio. It was still an event to take photographs but it was not such an
event as dressing up and making a day of the studio sitting had been. The
affluent still took more photographs than the poorer classes as they had more
money to refresh their camera and pay for development, but less well off
families still had the opportunity to start creating their own family albums
and recording their history, albeit at a slower pace. The ever expanding
collections of photographs meant there was a need for expandable photograph
albums. Explore the editing process, what went in and
what stayed out of the albums when the amount of images was too large to put
ALL in the album.
Eastman's experiments were directed to
the use of a lighter and more flexible support than glass. His first approach
was to coat the photographic emulsion on paper and then load the paper in a
roll holder. The holder was used in view cameras in place of the holders for
glass plates.
The first film advertisements in 1885
stated that "shortly there will be introduced a new sensitive film which
it is believed will prove an economical and convenient substitute for glass dry
plates both for outdoor and studio work."
This system of photography using roll
holders was immediately successful. However, paper was not entirely
satisfactory as a carrier for the emulsion because the grain of the paper was
likely to be reproduced in the photo.
Eastman's solution was to coat the
paper with a layer of plain, soluble gelatine, and then with a layer of
insoluble light-sensitive gelatine. After exposure and development, the
gelatine bearing the image was stripped from the paper, transferred to a sheet
of clear gelatine, and varnished with collodion -- a cellulose solution that
forms a tough, flexible film.
As he perfected transparent roll film
and the roll holder, Eastman changed the whole direction of his work and
established the base on which his success in amateur photography would be
built.
Eastman's faith in the importance
of advertising, both to the company and to the public, was unbounded. The very
first Kodak products were advertised in leading papers and periodicals of the
day -- with ads written by Eastman himself.
Eastman coined the slogan,
"you press the button, we do the rest," when he introduced the Kodak
camera in 1888 and within a year, it became a well-known phrase. Later, with
advertising managers and agencies carrying out his ideas, magazines,
newspapers, displays and billboards bore the Kodak banner.
Space was
taken at world expositions, and the "Kodak Girl," with the style of
her clothes and the camera she carried changing every year, smiled engagingly
at photographers everywhere. In 1897, the word "Kodak" sparkled from
an electric sign on London's Trafalgar Square -- one of the first such signs to
be used in advertising.
In 1883, Eastman startled the trade
with the announcement of film in rolls, with the roll holder adaptable to
nearly every plate camera on the market. With the KODAK camera in 1888, he put
down the foundation for making photography available to everyone.
The KODAK camera, pre-loaded with
enough film for 100 exposures, could be easily carried and handheld during
operation. It was priced at $25. After exposure, the whole camera was returned
to Rochester. There the film was developed, prints were made and new film was inserted
-- all for $10.
·
1891 - The company marketed its first daylight-loading camera,
which meant that the photographer could now reload the camera without using a
darkroom.
·
1900 - The first of the
famous BROWNIE Cameras was introduced. It sold for $1 and used film that sold
for 15 cents a roll. For the first time, the hobby of photography was within
the financial reach of virtually everyone.
§
Journalism,
print presses.
With
the invention of hand held cameras and instant photo taking, the opportunity to
take candid images became easier. Amateur photographers taking snapshot images
became rife and complaints were heard far and wide. Detective cameras were used
by many a photographer and the rise of pornography was made easier.
“By 1900 it was
estimated that there were four million “camera fiends” who were “kodaking”
everywhere and creating a major nuisance of themselves in the process of
filling their albums.”
Bibliography
Jay B. (1988) Queen
Victoria's Second Passion. Available at: http://www.billjayonphotography.com/QnVictoria2ndPassion.pdf.
Shrimpton J. (2011) Family
photos: the family photo album. Available at: http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/tag/history-of-photos/.
No comments:
Post a Comment