History and Evolution of Photography
Written by Abin Alex and Anu Joseph.
Abstract
Photography developed through eight overlapping steps: seeing an image, fixing it, copying it, making it cheap, adding colour, improving the camera body, counting light with sensors and computing the final picture. This guide follows these steps from early observation of images to current mirrorless and computational cameras. Each step changed the surface that holds the image. The guide argues that present-day cameras are best understood as the result of this chain of technical choices. It is written for students and practitioners who want a historical frame for the equipment they use.
Keywords: history of photography; film; colour photography; digital photography; computational photography
- How did people first see an image of the world?
- Who made the first photograph and how was it fixed?
- How did photography become reproducible?
- How did photography reach everyone?
- How did colour photography develop?
- How did the camera body develop?
- How did digital photography begin?
- What changed with mirrorless cameras and computation?
- What are the eight eras of photography?
How did people first see an image of the world?
Short answer. People formed images with a small hole in a dark room long before they could keep them. This is the pinhole and the camera obscura.
- Light passing through a tiny hole in a dark room projects an inverted image of the outside scene. Mozi in China recorded this effect in the 5th century BCE.
- Aristotle watched a solar eclipse projected through gaps between leaves. Ibn al-Haytham ran experiments in his Book of Optics showing that light travels in straight lines.
- Camera obscura is Latin for dark room. It began as a room, then became a tent, then a box.
- Around 1550 Cardano added a biconvex lens to the hole, which made the image brighter and sharper. In 1585 Benedetti described a mirror at 45 degrees that turned the image the right way up.
- Artists used the obscura to trace perspective. By 1800 the optical half of photography was complete, and only the chemistry was missing.
Cham tipRemember the order: a hole forms the image, a lens makes it bright, a mirror makes it upright.
Cham taskMake a pinhole box from a shoe box and greaseproof paper. Look at a bright window through it.
Check yourself: Why is the image from a pinhole upside down?
Light rays cross at the hole, so the top of the scene lands at the bottom of the image.
Who made the first photograph and how was it fixed?
Short answer. Niépce made the first surviving camera image around 1826 to 1827 on a bitumen-coated pewter plate. Daguerre and Talbot then made photography practical in 1839 (Gernsheim and Gernsheim, 1969).
- In 1717 Schulze showed that silver salts darken in light, not in heat or air. The darkening could not yet be stopped.
- Around 1800 Wedgwood and Davy made silhouettes and photograms, but daylight made them vanish.
- Niépce used a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea in a camera obscura. The exposure is traditionally given as about eight hours, though some researchers argue it took several days. This process is called heliography.
- Daguerre announced his process to the French Academy of Sciences on 7 January 1839. It gave a unique, mirror-like image on a silvered copper plate, with no negative.
- Talbot announced photogenic drawing in January 1839 and the calotype in 1841. A paper negative could print many positives.
- Herschel found in 1819 that hypo dissolves silver salts. In 1839 he showed that it fixed images permanently. He also helped popularise the words photography, negative, positive and snapshot.
| Point | Daguerreotype | Calotype |
|---|---|---|
| Support | Silvered copper plate | Paper |
| Image | Unique positive | Negative that makes many positives |
| Sharpness | Very fine detail | Softer, paper fibres diffuse light |
| Legacy | Faded by about 1860 | Negative and positive idea lived on |
Table 1. The two roads out of 1839.
Cham tipLink each name to one idea: Niépce fixed it, Daguerre made it sharp, Talbot made it copyable.
Cham taskWrite one line on how a daguerreotype and a calotype differ, then explain which idea photography kept.
Check yourself: What did Talbot's calotype introduce?
The negative and positive principle: one negative can make many prints.
How did photography become reproducible?
Short answer. From 1842 to the 1870s glass negatives and paper prints made one exposure into many copies, and photography became a medium and a business.
- Herschel invented the cyanotype in 1842 using iron salts and no silver. Anna Atkins used it in 1843 to publish the first book illustrated with photographs.
- Frederick Scott Archer published the wet collodion formula in 1851 without a patent. Glass negatives gave sharp, fast and reproducible images, but had to be coated, exposed and developed while wet.
- The ambrotype and the tintype were one-of-a-kind collodion positives for the masses.
- Albumen prints and the carte-de-visite (1854, Disdéri) made portraits cheap, collectable and social.
- Carbon, Woodburytype and platinum prints improved permanence for books, archives and art.
| Year | Process | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 1842–43 | Cyanotype and Atkins | Blueprints and first photo book |
| 1851 | Wet collodion | Sharp negatives, free to all |
| 1854 | Carte-de-visite | Portraits for everyone |
| 1873 | Platinum print | Very stable art prints |
Table 2. Processes that multiplied the image.
Cham tipReproducibility is the key word for this era.
Cham taskMake a cyanotype or a sun print with a leaf on sensitised paper if you can, and note the blue colour.
Check yourself: What made the carte-de-visite possible?
A multi-lens camera could expose several small portraits on one glass plate.
How did photography reach everyone?
Short answer. The dry plate in 1871 and the Kodak in 1888 took photography out of the studio. Eastman separated taking a photograph from making it.
- In 1871 Maddox proposed gelatin as the binder for silver halides, so plates could be made in a factory and stored dry. Exposures dropped to fractions of a second and the shutter became necessary.
- In 1878 Muybridge used a battery of cameras to show that a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground at once.
- The Kodak No. 1 in 1888 was pre-loaded with film. The slogan was "You press the button, we do the rest". Celluloid roll film followed in 1889.
- The Brownie of 1900 cost a dollar and began the snapshot era.
Cham tipDry plates made the camera faster, roll film made it simple.
Cham taskList three things the Kodak No. 1 made easier for ordinary people.
Check yourself: What did Eastman separate in 1888?
Taking the picture from processing it.
How did colour photography develop?
Short answer. Colour came first as a physics proof in 1861, then as the Autochrome plate in 1907, and finally as layered colour film from 1935 (Coote, 1993) (Coe, 1978).
- In 1861 Maxwell showed that colour can be recorded and rebuilt from three pictures taken through red, green and blue filters. Thomas Sutton made the photographs (Coote, 1993).
- The three-colour idea is still the principle behind modern sensors, screens and projectors (Coote, 1993).
- The Lumière brothers' Autochrome (patented 1903, on sale 1907) used potato-starch grains dyed in three colours on a glass plate. It was a unique colour transparency (Coote, 1993).
- Kodachrome (1935) was a three-layer transparency film. Agfacolor Neu (1936) built couplers into the emulsion. Kodacolor (1942) brought the negative and positive idea to colour (Coe, 1978).
Cham tipThree filters, three records, one colour picture.
Cham taskShoot a coloured object three times through red, green and blue filters (or channels in editing software). Combine them.
Check yourself: What did Maxwell show in 1861?
Colour can be recorded and rebuilt from three pictures taken through red, green and blue filters.
How did the camera body develop?
Short answer. From 1913 to 1985 inventors solved three problems: seeing before the shutter, making the camera portable and making it respond automatically (Peres, 2013).
- Rangefinder: the Kodak 3A Autographic Special (1916) had a coupled rangefinder. The viewing window was beside the lens, so you never saw the true frame.
- Leica: Oskar Barnack turned 35 mm cine film sideways to build a compact camera. The Leica I reached the market in 1925.
- Twin-lens reflex: the Rolleiflex of 1928 had one lens to view and one lens to record.
- Single-lens reflex: one lens, a mirror at 45 degrees and later a pentaprism. The Kine Exakta (1936), Contax S (1949) and Nikon F (1959) mark its rise.
- Polaroid Model 95 (1948) put the darkroom inside the film packet. The Konica C35 AF (1977) made autofocus practical, and Minolta added system autofocus in 1985.
| Type | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Rangefinder | Small, quiet, sharp at wide angles | Parallax: you never see the true frame |
| Twin-lens reflex | Bright screen, no blackout | Bulky, parallax |
| Single-lens reflex | What you see is what the film gets | Mirror noise, blackout, bulk |
Table 3. Three answers to the viewfinder problem.
Cham tipThe question across the whole era is: can I see what the film will get?
Cham taskLook through a viewfinder, then through the lens of a DSLR. Notice the difference between the view and the lens position.
Check yourself: What is parallax?
The difference between what the viewfinder shows and what the lens records.
How did digital photography begin?
Short answer. Digital cameras came from four inventions: the MOSFET, the CCD, the Bayer filter and the CMOS active-pixel sensor (Bayer, 1976) (Fossum, 1993).
- 1959 MOSFET: the transistor became the foundation of the chip. 1969 CCD: charge shifts out of silicon pixel by pixel.
- 1976 Bayer filter: a mosaic of red, green and blue filters lets silicon record colour (Bayer, 1976).
- 1993 CMOS active-pixel sensor: each pixel gains its own amplifier (Fossum, 1993).
- In 1975 Steven Sasson built the first digital camera from a Super 8 lens, a CCD and a cassette recorder. It was 100 × 100 pixels, took 23 seconds to record a frame and weighed about 3.6 kg.
- The Kodak DCS 100 (1991) had 1.3 MP. The Nikon D1 (1999) had 2.7 MP in an integrated professional body. Camera phones followed in 1999 to 2000.
| Year | Invention | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1959 | MOSFET | Basis of the chip |
| 1969 | CCD | Moves charge pixel by pixel |
| 1976 | Bayer filter | Gives colour |
| 1993 | CMOS APS | Amplifier in each pixel |
Table 4. The four inventions behind the sensor.
Cham tipDigital photography combines transistor, charge, colour and amplification.
Cham taskFind the megapixel count of the Kodak DCS 100 and of your phone. Calculate how many times larger the phone is.
Check yourself: Which invention lets a silicon sensor record colour?
The Bayer filter mosaic.
What changed with mirrorless cameras and computation?
Short answer. From 2004 to 2026 the mirror disappeared and software began to build the photograph from many measurements (Peres, 2013).
- Without a mirror the sensor can show the view continuously. Benefits are a smaller body, silent shooting, focus across the frame and live exposure preview. The costs are the direct optical view and battery life.
- Computational photography merges bursts, HDR frames and night mode shots, and computes depth for selective blur.
- The 2026 sensor is a layered system: a stacked back-illuminated sensor, global shutter and AI-assisted autofocus.
- C2PA content credentials can sign capture and edit history cryptographically.
- The open question: when a picture is reconstructed, where does recording end and interpretation begin?
Cham tipKnow which parts of your image are measured and which are computed.
Cham taskShoot a high-contrast scene with HDR on and off. Describe the difference.
Check yourself: What does a mirrorless camera remove?
The reflex mirror and the optical prism viewfinder.
What are the eight eras of photography?
Short answer. Photography moved from seeing the image to fixing, copying, spreading, colouring, composing, counting and computing it.
- Era 0 Seeing: image formed. Era 1 Fixing: image kept. Era 2 Multiplying: image copied. Era 3 Industrialising: image for everyone.
- Era 4 Colour: image in colour. Era 5 The body: image composed. Era 6 Digital: image counted. Era 7 Computed: image calculated.
- Each era changed the surface that holds the image: wall and paper, metal plate, sensitised paper, glass, film, sensor and file.
- A daguerreotype in a drawer can last 180 years. A file survives only if someone keeps copying it forward. See the Library for guides on storage and backup.
| Era | Name | Core idea |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Seeing | Image formed |
| 1 | Fixing | Image kept |
| 2 | Multiplying | Image copied |
| 3 | Industrialising | Image for everyone |
| 4 | Colour | Image in colour |
| 5 | The body | Image composed |
| 6 | Digital | Image counted |
| 7 | Computed | Image calculated |
Table 5. The eight eras.
Cham tipUse the one-word names to remember the order.
Cham taskMake a timeline on one page with the eight eras and one date for each.
Check yourself: Which era is called "image counted"?
Era 6, Digital.
Questions beginners ask
Who took the first photograph?
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the first surviving camera photograph around 1826 to 1827 on a pewter plate coated with bitumen.
When was photography announced?
Daguerre announced his process in January 1839, and the process was made public in August 1839. Talbot announced photogenic drawing in the same year.
What is the difference between a daguerreotype and a calotype?
A daguerreotype is a unique, sharp positive on a silvered copper plate. A calotype is a paper negative that can print many positives.
Who made the first digital camera?
Steven Sasson built the first digital camera prototype in 1975. It used a CCD and recorded a 100 × 100 pixel image.
What did the Kodak No. 1 change?
It was pre-loaded with film and sent back to Kodak for processing, so users no longer needed a darkroom.
Why did mirrorless cameras replace the DSLR?
The sensor can show the view continuously, which allows a smaller body, silent shooting, live preview and focusing across the frame.
References
- Bayer, B.E. (1976) Color imaging array. US Patent 3,971,065. Washington, DC: US Patent and Trademark Office.
- Coe, B. (1978) Colour Photography: The First Hundred Years, 1840–1940. London: Ash & Grant.
- Coote, J.H. (1993) The Illustrated History of Colour Photography. Surbiton: Fountain Press.
- Fossum, E.R. (1993) ‘Active pixel sensors: are CCDs dinosaurs?’, Proceedings of SPIE, 1900, pp. 2–14.
- Gernsheim, H. and Gernsheim, A. (1969) The History of Photography from the Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Peres, M.R. (ed.) (2013) The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography. 4th edn. Oxford: Focal Press.
How to cite this guide. Alex, A., & Joseph, A. (2026). History and evolution of photography: A guide for photographers and cinematographers. Creative Hut Academy. https://creativehut.org/library/history-and-evolution-of-photography/
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