OPEN FOR BUSINESS

In 1840, a photographer named Alexander Wolcot opened America's first portrait studio in New York City; the following year a coal merchant named Richard Beard opened one in London. The "nobility and beauty of England" were soon flocking to his studio to have their pictures taken; by 1842 he was making as much as £35,000 a year (in modern U.S. currency that is $2,653,415).

Other studios soon sprang up in the major cities of Europe and the United States. By the late 1840s, nearly every city in the U.S. had a "daguerrean artist," and smaller towns were served by itinerant photographers traveling by wagon.
Photography was starting to realize its promise.

GETTING IT BACKWARD

For all of the improvements that had been made to them, daguerreotypes and calotypes still had a lot of problems. Daguerreotype images not only could not be duplicated, they were also reverse images: any writing that appeared in the picture, be it on a street sign, in a shop window, or on the stern of a ship, appeared backward, something that was terribly distracting to the viewer.

Calotype images did not have those problems—they were printed from negatives, so 1) the images were not reversed, and 2) you could make as many prints as you wanted. However, calotype negatives were made of opaque paper. The resulting image was blurrier than a daguerreotype, and the grainy surface of the photographic paper used to make prints only made things worse.

People wanted the best of both worlds: pictures as sharp and clear as a daguerreotype that could be easily duplicated like a calotype. The obvious solution was to replace the calotype's paper negatives with negatives made of smoothsurfaced glass. Figuring out how to do this was a challenge, however, because the nonporous surface of the glass was so slippery that photographic chemicals wouldn't stick to it. Scientists tried everything to get them to stick (including smearingglass with snail slime), but nothing seemed to work.

EGGING THEM ON

Then in 1847, Claude-Felix-Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor, nephew of photographic pioneer Joseph Niepce, finally found something that did the trick: egg whites, also known as albumen. It got the chemicals to stick, and the images that resulted were as crystal clear as daguerreotypes and as easy to duplicate as calotypes. But the exposure times for albumen plates were so long that the plates couldn't be used for portraits.

In 1851 English sculptor and photography buff Frederick Scott Archer used a substance called collodion to glue together some broken glass photographic plates. Made from guncotton (an explosive) dissolved in ether and alcohol, collodion formed a tough, waterproof skin when it dried; doctors us'ed it to seal burns and wounds while new skin grew in underneath.

As Archer pieced together the broken glass, it occurred to him that collodion might be as good as egg whites for getting photosensitive chemicals to stick. He used it to apply a photosensitive emulsion to some photographic plates...and it worked. Not only that, but the plates had exposure times that were 20 times shorter than daguerreotypes (two minutes) or calotypes (one and a half minutes). With good lighting, an exposure of just a few seconds would result in a good picture.

THE WET LOOK

The only drawback to the collodion process was that the photographic plates only worked while the collodion was still wet, because once it dried into its tough waterproof skin it was impervious to the developing chemicals. Photographers had to prepare their plates before they took photographs, and develop them immediately afterward. There was no time to waste.

That meant that a photographer had to bring all necessary equipment—chemicals, darkroom, and everything else—along for every picture. This, of course, was a huge hassle, but the "wet-plate process," as it came to be known, produced such beautiful photographs that it quickly passed the daguerreotype and the albumen calotype to become the most popular form of photography. It remained so for more than 30 years.

Now there was only one thing left that kept people from having their pictures taken: the price.

ACCENTUATE THE NEGATIVE

As he worked on his wet collodion process, Archer noticed that when he held one of his negatives against a black piece of paper, it didn't look like a negative—it looked like an ordinary photograph, very similar to a daguerreotype.

Archer made note of his observation, but didn't do much with it. But other photographers did—they grabbed the idea as a way to make portraits cheaper. Why go to the trouble and expense of making a positive print, when a negative backed with black paper or some other dark material—soon to become known as an "ambrotype"— worked just as well?

In 1854 Boston photographer James Cutting patented an improved method of making ambrotypes and began selling them. Other photographers followed suit, and in the price war that followed, pressure from ambrotype photographers drove the price of a single daguerreotype from $5 down to 50 cents. Ambrotypes sold for as little as a dime, and though they were lower in quality they were much easier and quicker to produce: a person could pose for an ambrotype and receive the finished portrait in less than 10 minutes. Higher-quality daguerreotypes quickly began to lose ground to the speed and affordability of the ambrotype.

THE TINTYPE

If viewing a glass negative against a black background gave it the appearance of a photograph, why not just make the negative out of something black to begin with, like a thin sheet of tinned iron painted with black varnish? You would get the same effect for less money because you would be leaving out the glass, which was expensive.

That is what Hamilton Smith was thinking when he invented what became known as the "tintype process" in 1856. Tintypes were cheap—they sold for a fraction of the cost of an ambrotype — and because they were made of iron they could take a lot of abuse. You could carry them in your pocket, send them through the mail, and collect them in photo albums. The images were still reversed, but with simple portraits no one seemed to mind.

As it turned out, you could even carry tintypes into war: In four years' time, Union and Confederate soldiers would bring tintypes of their loved ones with them into battle; between skirmishes they would line up outside the photographer's tent to pose for pictures of themselves to send back home.

MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES

As popular as they were, tintypes never came close to matching the craze of another type of photograph, the cartes-devisite. Invented by French photographer Andre Disderi in 1854, the cartes-de-visite was, like the ambrotype and the tintype, an extension of the collodion process. Disderi's idea was to use a special camera with four lenses to divide a single large photograph into many smaller photographs. Some cartes-de-visite cameras only let the subject pose for one photograph, which was then duplicated eight or more times; others allowed several poses. Either way the effect was the same: for the price of a single photograph, the customer got as many as 24.

Disderi intended that the tiny pictures, which were printed on paper and backed by stiff cardboard, would serve as photo versions of traditional calling cards to be given as a memento of a visit with friends    

A PERMANENT RECORD

Perhaps the most impressive but underappreciated early contributor to photography was Sir John F. W. Herschel, an Englishman. When Herschel learned of Daguerre's discovery, he set out to see if he could duplicate the results without knowing anything about the process, which was still a closely guarded secret.
In several weeks Herschel accomplished what had taken Daguerre several years to do; he even improved on the process by remembering an 1819 experiment in which he had observed that hyposulfate of soda dissolved silver salts. He tried the experiment again, hoping he could use the chemical to "fix" his images permanently, something Daguerre had been unable to do. It worked— and hyposulfate of soda, now known as sodium thiosulfate, is used to fix photographic images to this day.

NO-MAN'S-LAND

In 1837 Louis Daguerre discovered how to create a lasting detailed photographic image. Within months of the groundbreaking publication of his photographic process in 1839, people started taking cameras to Greece, to the Middle East, to Africa, to Central and South America, and to every other corner of the world to photograph the wonders they saw there.

However, if you look at these early photographs, you will notice that no matter what the scene, there is always one thing missing from the picture: people. These first photographs appear barren and empty, completely devoid of human or even animal life. It is as if each had been taken in a ghost town.

STILL SHOTS

It turns out that there were plenty of people in these scenes when the pictures were taken; they just cannot be seen because they were moving. The early photosensitive chemicals took so long to form an image—30 minutes on a sunny day, an hour or more when it was cloudy—that pedestrians and street traffic passed in and out of the picture without registering.

The American inventor Samuel Morse noted this when he was invited to look at some of Daguerre's first photographs in 1839. One daguerreotype was a view of a busy Paris street, taken in the middle of the day when there must have been hundreds of people out. Only one person—quite possibly the first ever to be captured on film—was visible in the picture, and this only because he had been standing relatively still. Morse wrote to his brother:
Moving objects leave no impression. The boulevard, though constantly crossed by a flood of pedestrians and carriages, appeared completely deserted, apart from a person who was having his boots polished. His feet, must of course, have remained immobile for a certain time, one of them being placed on the boot-black's box, the other on the ground.

FACE TIME

The irony was that people living in the late 1830s and early 1840s wanted pictures of themselves and their loved ones more than any other photographic subject. Mortality rates were much higher then, and the pain of a death in the family was made worse by the fact that families frequently had no images of the deceased to remember them by. Only the wealthy were able to commission portraits of themselves. Now photography, with its promise of "automatic" portraits, seemed to offer the possibility of making portraiture available to everyone.

Understanding this need, photographers started looking for ways to take photographic portraits. They located their studios in rooftop glass houses to maximize available sunlight; they crammed those studios with mirrors to bring in even more light. They even filtered the sunlight through blue glass or bottles of blue liquid to take advantage of the fact that early photographic plates were especially sensitive to blue light (the lightbulb was not invented until 1879).

SAY "CHEEEEEESE"

Even with all of these measures, exposure times remained quite long—20 minutes or more—leaving the aspiring portraitist little choice but to resort to desperate measures. Since there was no easy way to stare at a fixed point in space for such a long time, many photographers instructed their subjects to pose with their eyes closed...and that was just the beginning: "Paint the face of the patient dead white," one daguerreotypist advised in 1839. "Powder his hair, and fix the back of his head between two planks attached to the back of an armchair and wound up with screws."

Posing for a portrait in such a studio was almost unbearable, something akin to having your picture taken inside a hot car with the windows rolled up and your head in a vise. The heat trapped by all that glass sent the temperature soaring, and the light from the mirrors was blinding. Looking "natural" under these conditions—sweating profusely, eyes squinting or closed, hair powdered, face painted white, head held immobile by boards while sitting perfectly still for 20 minutes or more—was just about impossible. Even when the pictures did come out, they were usually disappointing.

NEW AND IMPROVED

Fortunately, the first major improvements in daguerreotype photography came quickly. In 1840 Hungarian
mathematician Jozsef Max Petzval invented a lens that let 22 times more light into the camera, reducing exposure times from 40 minutes to 2 ½ minutes. That same year, English scientist John Frederick Goddard discovered that exposing daguerreotype plates to bromine vapors increased their photosensitivity, further shortening exposures to under a minute.

So what does Daguerre's process have to do with the modern photograph? Almost nothing. Daguerre became world famous, but his process was flawed—it only resulted in a single unique image. Daguerreotypes could not be reproduced, and ultimately the process fell into disuse.

The true father of modern photography was English physicist William Henry Fox Talbot. In a sense, what Talbot did was invent the negative—a reverse image on photosensitive paper that could be used to make any number of positive prints, or "calotypes" as they came to be called. Talbot invented his process in 1835, but never published his findings or patented his original process. Therefore, when Daguerre came along two years later, he got all the credit for inventing photography. It turns out that Daguerre was not just smart, he was also very lucky.