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We take modern popular digital photography and the manipulation of images so much for granted that
we find it hard to believe that the first photograph was created only less than 200 years ago, even
though the principles had been known for many centuries.
The early development of photography in the 1830s came not from the scientific community, but from
artists experimenting with ways to create images on canvas, a kind of Photo Art
which would enable them to make faithful copies of live subjects or landscapes on canvas before applying paints.
The fathers of Photo Art were painters
Advances in scientific theories of optics and the practical grinding of lenses for telescopes to study
the stars came together in the serendipitous notion that real life objects could be projected and recorded
for posterity onto a medium that could be saved.
Two men, working independently, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, and William Henry Fox
Talbot, an English scientist and amateur landscape painter, both used the “camera obscura” specifically
for the purpose of making painting easier and more accurate. Daguerre’s partner in developing and patenting
a photographic process was Joseph Nicephore Niepce, an amateur inventor who experimented in photography through
his interest in lithography, or copying drawings onto stone, glass, zinc and pewter to be used to print images from nature.
The “black box”
The camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber) is a dark room or a box with a small hole in one wall.
Under these conditions, due to an optical phenomenon, the light coming into the hole projects an inverted
image on the opposite wall of the chamber. The invention of camera obscura is attributed to an Islamic
mathematician, astronomer, and physicist known as Alhazen, in the 11th Century in Egypt, although the
principle of camera obscura was very likely known to thinkers as early as Aristotle (300 BC).
The camera obscura was used as an aid in drawing (the artist would trace the outline of the image on a
canvas hung on the wall opposite the hole), the first photo art. He could then paint on the drawing,
and the result would be a very natural and realistic painting – the first Photo Art.
The definition of Art
So, can Photo Art still be defined as Art? Most definitely. Just as artists apply the principles of perspective,
mechanical tools, and the chemical mixtures of dyes and paints, photography is another tool for creating original
and genuine works of art.
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