The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce. His photographs were produced on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea, which he then dissolved in white petroleum. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a positive image with light regions of hardened bitumen and dark regions of bare pewter.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce
The daguerreo type proved popular in response to the demand for portraiture that emerged from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil
painting, added to the push for the development of photography. In 1847, Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky designed a bellows camera which significantly improved the process
of focusing. This adaptation influenced the design of cameras for decades and
is still found in use today in some professional cameras. While in Paris,
Levitsky would become the first to introduce interchangeable decorative
backgrounds in his photos, as well as the retouching of negatives to reduce or
eliminate technical deficiencies. Levitsky was also the first
photographer to portray a photo of a person in different poses and even in
different clothes (for example, the subject plays the piano and listens to
himself.
By 1849, images captured by Levitsky on a mission to the Caucasus,
were exhibited by the famous Parisian optician Chevalier at the Paris
Exposition of the Second Republic as an advertisement of their lenses. These
photos would receive the Exposition's gold medal; the first time a prize of its
kind had ever been awarded to a photograph. In 1851, at an exhibition in Paris,
Levitsky would win the first ever gold medal awarded for a portrait photograph.
Oldest photographic portraits
Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the
first 20 years. In 1884 George
Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no
longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888
Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the
button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the
complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for
the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.
Brownie is the name of a long-running popular series of simple and
inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the
concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900 was a very basic cardboard box camera
with a simple meniscus lens
that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 roll film. With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended
to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, hence the slogan, "You
push the button, we do the rest." The camera was named after the popular
cartoons created by Palmer Cox.
One of the most popular Brownie models was the Brownie 127, millions of which were sold between 1952 and 1967. The Brownie 127 was a simple Bakelite camera for 127 films which featured a simple meniscus lens and a curved film plane to compensate for the deficiencies of the lens. Another simple camera was the Brownie Cresta which was sold between 1955 and 1958. It used 120 films and had a fixed focus lens.
Example Brownie Cresta
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