Page 8 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 8/146
William Henry Fox Talbot: Calotype Photogenic Drawing (Photographic Process) 1839-1841.
Spurred by Daguerre’s announcement of his Daguerreotype process in January 1839, Fox Talbot
published his half-decade-long investigations into photography in February - a month later.
Daguerre’s celebrated invention was a positive-reversal process - you made a positive exposure
on a sensitised copper-plate - it gave very sharp-focussed images. Fox Talbot’s process used a
sensitised paper negative from which any number of positive photographic prints could be made.
Although less-sharp than Daguerreotypes, Talbot’s Calotypes could be reproduced easily, and
many artists preferred the more ‘painterly’ qualities of the Calotype. It was Talbot’s basic idea that
eventually won out - although daguerreotypes continued to be valued - and made - for the rest of
the century. Talbot’s process was modified significantly by F. Scott Archer (the Wet-Collodion Pro-
cess, 1851), who used glass-plate negatives coated with a photo-sensitive collodion mixture, and
achieved a sharpness similar to the daguerreotype. By the late 19th century, a transparent and
flexible celluloid-based film substrate was replacing glass, and by 1900 amateur cameras were
sold pre-loaded with 100-frame roll of film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calotype
So, with Wedgwood, Humphry Davy, Niepce, Herschel, Fox-Talbot and others inventing and estab- lishing the technics of photography, slowly the armoury of this revolutionary medium expanded - in new forms of content, impacting upon traditional media - especially at first the art of portraiture. In this intensely entrepreneurial age the key expansions of photography were not long in following - in micro-photography, blue-prints, scientific visual records, artistic reference, as a compositing tool, as mono-prints, in the wet collodion process, pictorial visiting cards, family albums, flash photography, aerial photography, half-tone reproduction, criminal and social records, photo-ID systems, social commentary, photographic post-cards, colour photography, national and global ethnographic records, society portraiture, motion-capture, moving pictures, cinematography, fashion photography, celebrity photography, action photography, modernist and avant-garde pho- tography, stroboscopic lighting, photomontage, abstract photography, exhibition-design, immers- ive photography, commercial colour photography... This is the territory we’ll be exploring in this ebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedgwood_(photographer)