POLICE PHOTOGRAPHY HISTORY

Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham) - a great authority on optics in the Middle

Ages who lived around 1000 AD, invented the first pinhole camera,
(also called the Camera Obscura } and was able to explain why the
images were upside down.

Angelo Sala - a self educated chemist, he discovered that when paper

contained powdered silver nitrate it would react with sunlight, causing it to darken. These
pioneering experiments with silver salts were a
crucial step towards the later invention of photography. He published
his findings in a pamphlet in 1614.

Anna Atkins - (1799- 1871) an English Botanist, she is considered

to be the first female photographer.

Aristotle - he observed and noted the first casual reference to the

optic laws that made pinhole cameras possible, around 330 BC, he
questioned why the sun could make a circular image when it shined
through a square hole.

Arthur Fellig - (Weegee) became famous because of his frequent,

seemingly prescient arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies
were reported to authorities.

Carl William Scheele - (1742-1786) Swedish scientist, self-educated.

He used to work as an assistant in pharmacies and showed a talent in
chemistry from a very young age. In spite an offer made to him to
study in London or Berlin, he operated a pharmacy in Kφping where he spend the rest of his
life and made all his important inventions.
He was especially interest on chemical analysis and worked particularly
with the chemical reactions between silver nitrate and sunlight, therefore making a break
through in the chemistry of photography.
The records from his experiments were of a great importance for the
next generations of scientists.

Digital photography - uses an array of electronic photo detectors to

capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure on
photographic film.

Emulsion - is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally

immiscible (nonmixable or unblendable). Emulsions are part of a more
general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids.
Exposure - is the amount of light per unit area (the image plane illuminance times the
exposure time) reaching a photographic film,
as determined by shutter speed, lens aperture and scene luminance.

Frederick Scoff Archer - an English sculptor who invented the wet

plate negative in 1851. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he
coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass
and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.

George Eastman - he invented in 1889 a film with a base that was

flexible, unbreakable, and could be rolled. Emulsions coated on a cellulose nitrate film
base, such as Eastman's, made the mass-produced
box camera a reality.

Hamilton Smith - he patented in 1856 the Tintypes, another medium that

heralded the birth of photography. A thin sheet of iron was used to
provide a base for light-sensitive material, yielding a positive image.

Henry Fox Talbot - an English botanist and mathematician and The inventor of the first
negative from which multiple postive prints
were made.

Hercules Florence - (1804-1879) Few details are known for his life.
In 1824 goes to Brazil and takes part in a scientific mission at the
Amazon, where he becomes preoccupied with the idea of recording images
from his trip. From 1830 devotes himself to research and
experimentation for photography. The above, gives Brazil the ability
to claim that is one of the places in the world, where photography
was found.

Hippolyte Bayard - (1807-1887) The most unfortunate from the pioneers

of photography. Discovered one direct positive photographic method.
He was the first person to hold a photographic exhibition (for
humanitarian reasons) and the first who combined two negatives to
created one print (called Combination Printing). As a civil servant
and with five hundred franks that received as financial help from
Arago for improving his method, prevented him from presenting the
discovery of photography at the French Academy of Sciences.

Timeline of Police Photography

Ancient Times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in

darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole

16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by

enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens
17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made
portable in the form of sedan chairs

1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in

a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight.
Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.

1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects

on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated
rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.

1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with

photosensitive paper

1826: Niépce creates a permanent image

1827: Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first known photographic

image using the camera obscura. The camera obscura was a tool
used by artists to draw.

1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using

paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution.
Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another
sheet of paper.

1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated

with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is
awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for
publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use
the Daguerreotype process.

1841: Talbot patents his process under the name "calotype".

1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves

photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion
(nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on
sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper
than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited
reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.

1853: Nadar (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris

1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris,

leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade
1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era

1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal

(tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.

1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color

photography system involving three black and white photographs, each
taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned
into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color
filters. This is the "color separation" method.

1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American
Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives

1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods

for color photography.

1870: Center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers

out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William
Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.

1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of

an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the
"dry plate" process.

1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge,

settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once"
bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of
Leland Stanford's horse.

1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.

1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in
Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily
newspaper, the New York Graphic.

1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough

for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.

1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper

1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of
tenament life in New york City
1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.

1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in

New York City

1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and

therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P.
Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of
the North American Indian.

1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates,

manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France

1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to

photograph children working mills.

1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz,

develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm
movie film.

1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon,

established in Tokyo.

1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing

objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a
distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to
photograph the brothels of Paris

1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as

the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.

1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he
begins an 11-year project photographing street life

1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful,

close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects;
Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6
cm image on rollfilm.; Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature

1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton

at MIT
1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and
white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters;
Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston,
et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought
and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a
60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman,
aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and
shoots himself.

1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit

1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and
lenses in addition to film.

1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a

historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange,
Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next
six years. Roman Vishniac begins his project of the soon-to-be-killed
-by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.

1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color

film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex
(SLR) camera
World War II: Development of multi-layer color negative films
Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene
Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine

1940s - in the early 1940's commercially viable color films

(except Kodachrome, introduced in 1935) were brought to the market.
These films used the modern technology of dye-coupled colors in
which a chemical process connects the three dye layers together
to create an apparent color image.

1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the
photographer-owned Magnum picture agency

1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for

commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm;
Polaroid sells instant black and white film

1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an
unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's
Museum of Modern Art

1959: Nikon F introduced.

1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of

New York City.

1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic

released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the
Nikonos

1970: William Wegman begins photographing his Weimaraner, Man Ray.

1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame

1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22

1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife
and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds
the first working CCD-based digital still camera

1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern

Art, William Eggleston's Guide

1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed

in 1980; Jan Groover begins
exploring kitchen utensils

1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins work on seascapes.

1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid.

1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera

1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same
as in the Minox spy camera)

1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called
"Maxxum" in the US); In the American West by Richard Avedon

1988: Sally Mann begins publishing nude photos of her children

 1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new
all-electronic lens mount

1990: Adobe Photoshop released.

1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3

1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD

1993: Founding of photo.net (this Web site), an early Internet online

community; Sebastiao Salgado publishes Workers; Mary Ellen Mark
publishes book documenting life in an Indian circus.

1995: Material World, by Peter Menzel published.

1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics

1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR
design by a leading manufacturer.

2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone

2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt

2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with

the Olympus E-1; Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000

2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras

2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR,

with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000; Portraits by Rineke Dijkstra

Johann Heinrich Schulze - (1687 - 1744) he was a German professor at

the University of Altdorf. He was the first person to produce
Photograms, which were created by using paper masks in direct contact
with a jar containing a mixture of silver nitrate powder and chalk.
Schulze proved that the darkening of silver nitrate was caused by light
and ruled out the possibility of the change being caused by temperature,
by observing no tonal change to silver nitrate when heated in an oven.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce - made the first photographic image with a
camera obscura.

Louis Daguerre - a Frenchman and A professional scene painter, was

able to reduce exposure time to less than 30 minutes and keep the image
from disappearing afterwards. He was the inventor of the first practical
process of photography.

Sir Humphry Davy - (1778-1829) Chemistry genius, friend and assistant

of Wedgwood in his experiments whose results were published at Royal
Society, in 1802 by Davy. The problem of "fixing" the images remained
in spite of Davy's breakthroughs in chemistry.

Sir John F.W. Herschel - a scientist who first used the word photography
in 1839. The word photography was derived from the Greek words Photos,
which means light and Graphein, which means to draw.

Thomas Wedgwood - (1771 - 1805) an Englishman who made good ground

creating Photograms and recording images from his Camera Obscura
or pinhole camera, However, he never overcome the problem of fixing
the image and therefore the prints produced had to be viewed for very
short periods of time in a darkened environment.