Since the early nineteenth century, the term camera has been used to describe a tool that, while highly variable in its physical composition and its functioning, has generated a consistent result: a photographic image. If one interprets camera in this colloquial, modern sense, the camera’s importance for the history of information has been predicated on the functions of storage and transmission: it has depended on the camera’s ability to generate photographs that are permanent rather than transient, and on cameras’ connections with communications networks that have enabled photographic images to circulate widely and to be consumed across a range of contexts.
Cameras have a history that extends beyond photography, encompassing not only ancient and *early modern iterations of the camera obscura—a dark chamber or box with a small lens that admits light, creating an inverted image of the visual material outside the chamber—but also cameras used to make motion pictures. However, the present essay concentrates on cameras used to make photographs.
Photographs, whose name, deriving from the Greek, denotes a process of drawing with light, are recorded through the camera’s lens and displayed on metal plates, paper, or, beginning in the late twentieth century, digital screens. Identifying a single origin point for the photographic camera is bound to fail, because “photography” denotes a heterogeneous array of inventions, but the diverse experiments toward photography that occurred in early nineteenth-century continental Europe and Britain were united by an interest in discovering a system of chemical formulas and material supports that would enable the permanent mechanical recording of the fleeting images that appeared in the camera obscura. Ultimately, these experiments resulted in two distinct approaches to registering and fixing images generated by light, which were both made public in the late 1830s: in France, the daguerreotype, introduced by Louis Daguerre but owing a substantial debt to his predecessor and collaborator Nicéphore Niépce’s heliograph, and in England, the calotype, invented by Henry Fox Talbot.
Of these two processes, daguerreotypes prevailed, becoming the first widely practiced form of photography. Daguerreotypes, images on polished metal plates that were sharp and intricately detailed, combined positive and negative images in one and therefore were unique rather than *reproducible images. A decisive factor in daguerreotypes’ success was the way that instructions on their production were allowed to circulate: in 1839, the French government purchased the rights to the process and offered it as a gift free to the world, though Daguerre obtained a patent for the process in England. Daguerre’s instructions were published in a manual that quickly appeared in many editions and translations, enabling the process to spread widely, and the first commercially produced cameras, licensed by Daguerre and manufactured by Alphonse Giroux, went on the market immediately.
The exactitude and precision of the daguerreotype drew enthusiastic responses, but the camera had something of a divided identity: contemporaries discussed—and in some cases balked at—the camera’s use as an artistic tool, but they also avidly discussed its potential importance in many fields of scientific inquiry. Early uses of photography reflected these plural priorities: cameras were swiftly applied to portraiture, but they were also used to make images of objects of scientific interest ranging from botanical specimens to astronomical phenomena.
In scientific as well as artistic discourses, the camera was often described as a tool that would allow for the direct and unmediated capture of reality. Influential early accounts of the medium downplayed the importance of human labor in the production of the photographic image, instead ascribing agency to natural or technological forces. Early descriptions of photography by Daguerre and Talbot framed it as a process by which nature reproduced itself. Other readings emphasized the mechanical qualities of photography, suggesting that photographs were the products of neutral technological processes rather than the creations of human photographers. These discourses, which elided the role of human actors and human work in the production of photographs, had a lasting impact, supporting a positivist image of photographic objectivity that helped to legitimize the use of photographs as visual evidence across many fields, including some that used photography’s purported evidentiary power to repressive ends, like criminology and physiognomy.
Starting in the 1850s, paper photographs made using collodion processes began to replace daguerreotypes. Collodion processes, which used glass negatives, generated reproducible photographs, and this signaled an important shift in the camera’s cultural role, aligning it with the production of inexpensive, standardized images rather than unique ones. Sliding-back cameras that accommodated multiple plates without the need to reload between each exposure helped support an understanding of photographs as multiple and sequential rather than singular and static. As large volumes of portrait photographs were sold in small, paper-based formats as cartes de visite and cabinet cards, photography came to be understood as an industrially produced commodity and, arguably, a mass medium.
With photographs circulating in unprecedented quantities, some contemporaries began to speak of photographic representation superseding embodied experience. Stereographs, double photographs or photomechanical prints that, when viewed through an optical device called a stereoscope, simulated three-dimensional vision, presented spectators with seemingly lifelike views that afforded vicarious visual access to places, events, and people that they might not be able to see by other means. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote that with this technology, cheap and transmissible “form”—the photographic image—was decisively divorced from “matter,” the physical referent of the photograph. “Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing … and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please,” he wrote. According to Holmes, the capacity to generate lifelike, reproducible, and transmissible photographs of the world meant that the physical substance of the world’s places and people became less important than their availability as visual representations—an observation that prefigured twentieth-century discussions of spectacle culture and pseudoevents.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the camera itself became a consumer product targeted to a mass market of buyers. While cameras had been commercially available since photography’s earliest years, their technical complexity and expense prevented most people from using them. In the 1880s, however, camera manufacturers began to market compact and affordable box cameras for general use, including the Kodak cameras sold by the Eastman Company from 1888 onward with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” Kodaks were black boxes both literally and figuratively: they appeared preloaded with rolls of film, a new invention, and were mailed back to Eastman headquarters for processing, printing, and reloading. This system foregrounded the camera’s role in the photographic process: cameras were framed as picture-taking machines while virtually all the technical labor that produced photographs was rendered invisible to consumers. Advertisements and manuals encouraged new legions of photographers to use their cameras as a kind of visual diary, chronicling everyday experiences and stepping out into the public realm to take pictures.
It took longer for professional photographers to adopt compact, mobile cameras. Starting in the 1920s, news photographers, accustomed to using larger-format cameras that necessitated glass plates and tripods, gradually began to adopt 35 mm film cameras like the Leica. The use of compact film cameras opened up the possibility of capturing events as they unfolded and made it possible for photographers to move about freely while photographing. They also enabled photographers to work discreetly, and some photographers used this capability to photograph public figures without their consent. Popular discourses surrounding these “candid camera” photographs cast them as possessing special *epistemic value because they divested their subjects of the ability to pose. In a culture glutted with cameras in public space, the discernibly posed photograph began to appear, to professionals and amateurs alike, less truthful than the candid image.
Photographs had been appearing in the press since the halftone process came into use in the late nineteenth century; this image reproduction technique allowed newspapers and magazines to publish photographs alongside text. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, photographs became far more central to print journalism. The interwar period saw the flourishing of photographically illustrated magazines that featured photo-essays, in which multiple photographs and brief captions were placed in dialogue to create a story. The introduction of services for the instantaneous wire transmission of photographs, like the Associated Press’s Wirephoto service, launched in 1935, allowed periodicals to incorporate photographs that were timely, matching the temporal structures of textual news. Another important shift in photography’s relation to time occurred with the introduction of instant cameras. Beginning with the first Polaroid cameras in 1948, the processes of exposure and development were integrated fully into the camera, allowing images to be viewed immediately.
The introduction of digital cameras beginning in the late twentieth century elicited lively popular discussion about the altered epistemic value of the photograph in a digital age. Some cultural critics contended that digitization signaled the “death” of photography, nullifying the camera’s status as an information source; these critiques often focused on the widespread availability of tools for digital manipulation. However, the numerous connections between cameras’ *analog and digital functions suggest that these death reports were premature, and that narratives that have presented the relationship between past and present photography in terms of radical rupture may have elided some important affinities. In an age of networked, camera-equipped smart phones, certain features present in predigital modes of photography—such as cameras’ integration with communications networks enabling rapid image transfer, and cameras’ capacity to generate instantly viewable images—have become more central than ever to photography rather than going into abeyance.
Moreover, the manipulability of the photograph in an age of digitization should be seen as an acceleration of existing capacities rather than an existential shift: photographic manipulation is virtually as old as photography itself, though the tools required to manipulate photographs convincingly have now become more widely accessible. And in spite of the cliché, in the twenty-first century, that the camera can “lie,” the continued institutional uses of photographic images as visual evidence in many realms—from closed-circuit television to face-recognition technologies—suggest that even if individuals may distrust the camera’s veracity, its practical epistemic power remains significant in an era of digital imaging.
Annie Rudd
See also digitization; manuals; media; networks; newspapers; observing; printed visuals; surveilling