Page 24 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Nicéphore Niépce: Heliographs 1827.
Niépce was above all an inventor - he invented the ‘velocipide’ - a kind of early bicycle, and he and his brother had invented the first internal combustion engine (c 1837) but weren’t successful in productivising it. From c1816, Niépce had been experimenting (like Wedgwood a few years before him) with light-sensitive materials. Niépce was impressed with the new printing technique of lithography, and perhaps imagined how he could somehow use the camera obscura to capture an image and print it as a lithograph. It was around 1816 that he began using silver-chloride (as a photo- sensitive solution coated onto paper), but - again like Wedgwood - could not find the means to fix the image on an exposed plate - as soon as the paper was viewed in daylight, the image turned a universal black. Niépce went on to experiment with light-sensitive bitumen of Judea - where sunlight hardened the bitumen and the unexposed areas could be washed away with a solvent - leaving a masked area that could be etched with acid, to produce an etched printing plate. (He called this new process heliography or sun-drawing). Between 1824-1827 Niépce succeeded in fixing the exposed litho-stone and making the first photograph. The earliest surviving camera heliograph of the real world is this View from the Window at La Gras (centre above 1827), and from the period (1822 - 1823), we also have a copy he made of an older etched or engraved print of Cardinal d’Ambrose - one of the earliest cameraless contact prints( above right). From 1826 onwards Niépce replaced 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 Niépce’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 Niépce’s research and Daguerre’s experiments with distillate of Lavender Oil - this results in a process called the Physautotype. Niépce dies age 68 in 1833. Six years later, after perfecting his reversal process , Daguerre launches his Daguerreotype to world-acclaim.
While neither the heliograph nor the physautotype were ultimately successful - as processes they played an important role in the development of photography. During the 1830s the English researcher and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot pursued an equally wide-ranging series of experiments trying to capture an image on paper - he called this ‘painting with Light’.
These early stages in the development of what was soon to be called ‘Photography’ (a word coined by John Herschel in 1839), are fascinating - just the kind of art-media-science that really forms the basis of much of 21st century digital media-art, where a balance of aesthetic, narrative and technical knowledge and skills has proven a fascinating laboratory of innovation.