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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 7/146
cumbersome lithographic stones with copper and tin plates - both could be etched after being coated with bitumen solution and then exposed to light. and he also used silver-plates to make similar heliographs - though all his processes required exposure times of many hours - even days - of direct sunlight. So Niepce’s experiments had progressed to the point of near-success when he met Jacques-Louis Mande Daguerre in 1829, and they formed a partnership to develop a reversal photographic process based upon Niepce’s research and Daguerre’s experiments with distillate of Lavender Oil - this results in a process called the Physautotype. Niepce dies age 68 in 1833. Six years later, after perfecting his reversal process , Daguerre launches his Daguerreotype to world- acclaim.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre: Boulevard du Temple 1838
Daguerreotypes, though sharp and jewel-like as images, were created by a reversal process - there was no ‘negative’ - they were ‘one-off’ photographs. Talbot’s calotype negative however could be used to print several - indeed hundreds - of positive prints if desired. So Fox Talbot’s process, later significantly improved by Frederick Scott Archer (the ‘wet collodion’ process), be- came the dominant photographic medium until the invention of film-substrates and ready-pack- aged roll-film in the 1890s (the famous Kodak Box (from 1888) and Brownie cameras (from 1900). Like the Daguerreotype and other early, now superseded, forms of photography, the calotype prin- ciple, embodied in the wet-collodion process is now the preserve of art-photographers and enthu- siasts. And as the first modern mass medium, the Daguerreotype had set a precedent that has been followed by many more ‘new media’ since then. In 1995, the sci-fi author and cyberpunk chronicler Bruce Sterling proposed a Dead Media Handbook, which would be about “the failures, collapses and hideous mistakes of media” - his idea was taken up by Tom Jennings in http:// www.deadmedia.org a short-lived web archive. The essential point here is that in our era of rapid technological change, we can no longer expect a stable, long-lasting media-platform (such as 35mm movie film - lasting nearly a century) and content-makers and publishers must design for continuous change. This is what makes our role so interesting and exciting...it combines techno- logical and aesthetic innovation - seeking the magic of mixed media fusion., and the kind of hy- brids of content and form like Adobe's pdf format.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boulevard_du_Temple_by_Daguerre.jpg