کتاب تاریخچۀ عکاسی: از دوربین های تاریک تا اینستاگرم

When Sir John Herschel, the noted scientist and astronomer, delivered his lecture to the Royal Society in London on 14 March 1839, entitled ‘Note on the Art of Photography, or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Representation’, he effectively gave the name to the new medium that was about to change things forever, transforming how we understand and represent the world around us, and ushering in a new age where the visible realm became a dominant form of communication.

He could not have foreseen how ubiquitous the photographic image would become just over 175 years, with an estimated 1.3 trillion images taken in 2017, of which a staggering 24 billion were selfies taken with smartphones. Taken from the Greek roots owτóc (photos), meaning ‘light’, and ypaon (graphe), meaning ‘drawing’, photography exploded in popularity almost instantaneously, in one of the fastest adoptions of a new technology in human history.

The earliest practitioners of the medium, arguably an early form of ‘open source’ technology, who included Herschel, along with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, Hippolyte Bayard and William Henry Fox Talbot, rapidly established the fundamental characteristics that continue today, with some form of optical lens focusing light reflected from the subject on to a light sensitive surface that can record the image permanently. In their work, they also effectively established the terrain of photographic inquiry and its application as both a science and an art, as well as a documentary representation of the world.