Technology through Time
"A Mirror with A Memory"
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From Pinholes to Film
The camera has a long history, one that reaches back into Ancient times. The technology’s first form was the camera obscura. Latin for “dark” “room” the camera obscura was literally that: a room made completely dark except for one small pinhole of light. The scene from outside would project itself onto the wall opposite the pinhole. Often times, the opposite wall was made of paper, onto which artists would trace the scene that the camera obscura was focused on. Many artists used this trick to make their paintings more life like—to make them more photographic.
While scientists and artists have long known about the physics of the camera, the chemistry of permanently capturing the image in a camera obscura was a more difficult matter. In fact, the first successful photograph ever made was not taken until 1822 by a Frenchman named Joseph Niepce. The drawbacks of Niepce’s process were clear: the long exposure time limited what the camera could capture, the quality was lacking, and the process of developing the photograph was complex and dangerous. Daguerre’s solution to the problem, which he aptly named the daguerreotype created a much higher quality image. Whereas Niepce’s photograph was on paper, Daguerre put his image on sheets of metal. While the daguerreotype may have solved the problem of quality, long exposure time, the complexity of the process, and the inability to reproduce the metal images were still drawbacks. Despite these drawbacks, the daguerreotype was a huge success, especially in France, but also in Europe and the United States.
While Daguerre was working on his invention in France, Henry Fox Talbot was at work in England. Rather than putting images on metal, however, Talbot found a way to make a paper negative, and therefore, he found a way to make photographs reproducible. Talbot named his process the calotype. The quality of Talbot’s prints remained a problem and therefore, daguerreotypes, with their superior quality remained popular.
Rather than metal daguerreotypes or thin paper negatives, Frederick Scott Archer’s collodion process relied on glass negatives, which could be reproduced like the calotype but whose quality matched the daguerreotype. However, like the previous processes, collodion was a long, labor intensive, and expensive process that required the photographer to carry a portable dark room.
The dry plate process was pioneered by British photographers in the 1870’s and was later perfected and marketed by George Eastman in 1880, thus replacing the wet plate process almost completely.
George Eastman
George Eastman is informally known as the grandfather of modern photography. He developed the revolutionary dry plate in 1880, and patented the first viable roll film in 1886 to use in his very own cameras. His company, Eastman Kodak founded in Rochester, New York, quickly became the largest retailer of standardized photographic equipment in the world. By 1910, Kodak had a virtual corner on the photographic market with staggering sales of its Brownie camera and other products.
“You push the button, we do the rest,” sums up Eastman’s genius marketing and advertising abilities. He forever linked the name Kodak with photography and helped foster a brand new industry. His desire to allow the average person to take photographs through affordable and easy to use technology, and gave millions of people the chance to document their every day lives. Thus the snapshot was born.
Eastman was also a renowned philanthropist in his day. Over his lifetime, he gave away twenty million dollars to various organizations including the University of Rochester and M.I.T. He was a man of many interests and talents and wished to share his great fortune with others. George Eastman funded music, dentistry, education, and much, much more.
Early Eastern Montana Photographers
That photography’s popularity grew at the same time of the first permanent white settlement on the Upper Great Plains is more than just a passing coincidence. Photography helped define the character of the Upper Great Plains, especially in the mind of outsiders. One reason for this is the presence of three talented photographers who took Eastern Montana as their subject: L.A. Huffman, Evelyn Cameron, and F.J. Haynes.
Evelyn Cameron, who moved from England to a horse ranch just outside Terry with her husband Ewen in 1889, is perhaps the best known of these photographers, if only because she has received the latest attention. That attention has come mainly through Donna Lucey’s 1991 book Photographing Montana, which explores Cameron’s photographs and journals, thus providing not only a portfolio of her work but also a biography of her life. Lucey came across Cameron’s glass plate negatives in the basement of Janet Williams’ home, a friend of Cameron’s, in 1979. Those negatives now reside safely in the Prairie Museum in Terry, Montana. A Montana PBS documentary featuring Evelyn Cameron premiered nationally in April 2006. For more on this pioneering photographer visit the Evelyn Cameron Foundation website at http://www.evelyncameron.com/.
L.A. Huffman’s photographs are part of the tale that cemented the myth of Cowboys and Indians on the Wild West. Hired as post photographer at Fort Keogh, Montana Territory in 1878, Huffman made his living by taking official photographs for the Fort as well as doing his own freelance work. Mark H. Brown and W.R. Felton’s two books, The Frontier Years and Before Barbed Wire, displayed below, show Huffman’s two major subjects: ranchers on the open range and cowboys and Indians.
F.J. Haynes, employed for part of his career by the Northern Pacific Railroad, propagated another myth with his lens: that the plains of Eastern Montana was a hospitable place, full of amenities, for tourists and settlers alike, and only a short Northern Pacific train ride away. Haynes signed on with the Northern Pacific in 1876 and is also well known for his photographs of Yellowstone National Park that he took while serving as the park’s official photographer.
The Wet Plate Photographic Process
- Coat the glass plate with collodion that is a base for the light sensitive photographic emulsion.
- Dip the coated plate in silver nitrate solution. The silver nitrate binds with the iodine and bromide to make a silver halide coating, which is sensitive to light. This step must be done in a completely dark area.
- Put the plate in a light proof holder and insert it into the camera.
- Expose the plate in the camera by removing the dark slide of the lightproof holder.
- The plate has to be kept in the lightproof holder and then taken into a completely dark area shortly after exposure so the collodion will not dry out. In the dark area pour developer on the plate to remove the silver halide that was not exposed in the camera. The image left behind is the negative image of the original scene.
- The plate then needs to be fixed in a sodium thiosulfate solution to ensure the permanence of the image.
- After fixing the plate wash and varnish it to protect the delicate image.
- The glass plate negative is now ready to be used to make a positive photographic print.
The wet plate process required a massive amount of equipment on photographic expeditions. Many photographers, even those documenting the Civil War, lugged hundreds of pounds of equipment to process their wet plate negatives. The dry plate process pioneered by George Eastman eliminated the need for the wet plate process, which was only available to very experienced photographers. Instead of having to process negatives on the spot, dry plates could be stored until the photographer could get to his or her darkroom to process them. This revolutionized the availability of photography and paved the way for flexible film processes.