2023-02-01
The first successful, permanent photograph was created in 1826 by the French physicist and inventor Joseph Niépce; Louis Daguerre also worked on the invention, and it is from his name that the technique is named daguerreotype. How did the history of photography, including artistic photography, develop? We will answer this question in the following article.
In the 1870s, photography took a huge leap forward. Richard Maddox improved on an earlier invention by creating dry gelatine plates that could be stored rather than manufactured when needed. This also allowed the manufacture of smaller cameras that could be held in the hand. It was 10 years later that Kodak began its activities and the production of cameras available to a slightly wider audience. However, it wasn't until the 1940s that film became cheap enough for photography to become commonplace. In the 1960s, the Polaroid company became a hit, producing cameras that printed pictures instantly. In the 1980s and 1990s, many manufacturers worked on cameras that stored images electronically. In 1991 Kodak produced the first digital camera.
Fine art photography, unlike documentary photography, it does not have rigid rules. The earliest examples of fine art photography date back to the 19th century. The first photographers fought for their work to be recognised as 'high' art. For example, as late as the 1960s in Britain, photography was not generally recognised as such. Things seem to have been somewhat different in the USA. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA in New York) began collecting contemporary photography in 1930, and in 1940 it created its first photography department. Today, the museum's collection comprises over 25,000 works and is one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary photography in the world.
It is difficult to choose the most famous artists-photographers. For the sake of the article, we will try to name at least a few. They all had their own unique style, sometimes experimented, and went down in the history of the field: Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Henri Cartier Bresson, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky.