History of Photography & Its Cultural Impact

From one point of view, the cultural impact of photography arises from the fact that it appeared in history. That is because photography is a technical, mechanical, chemical process that, in its earliest configuration did not necessarily lend itself to anything like cultural impact. "Photography is possible," says Coe, "because of the fact, known to the chemists of the eighteenth century, that most chemical compounds of silver darken on exposure to light" (Coe 9). The question of how to manipulate the compounds and the light, as well as the question of medium for creating and displaying the image, remained unresolved until 1837, with the appearance of the Daguerreotype, the name given to images created on printing plates treated with a compound of light, mercury vapor, silver, salt, and iodine or bromine (Coe 10). While the Daguerreotype represented an important technical advance in what could be called photographic science, the next 25 years saw an explosion of experimentation with light-sensitive media ranging from paper to glass to metal to gelatin, and with instruments designed to render images. By 1860, the daguerreoty

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vice of what Jeffrey refers to as an effort to "qualify" the materialism of the emergent Industrial Age, "or to suggest a possible realm beyond the prosaic world. . . . Her subjects are removed from mundane actuality, from the circumstances of their merely physical lives, and projected into a spirit world of her own devising" (Jeffrey 40). For all their otherworldliness, however, Cameron's images were not social commentary but rather perfectly in keeping with what Freund describes as "the sentimental and expressive aspects of [the] late nineteenth century" (43). An important transformation in how photography was employed in the culture appears to have taken place in the 1860s, largely as a consequence of the Civil War. Taft says that some organized effort at war photography had taken place during the Mexican War and in the Crimean War in the 1850s (224). However, it was during the Civil War that war photography came into its own. The principal photographer of the war was Mathew Brady, who "early in his professional career regarded himself as the pictorial historian of the times" (Taft 225). What is important about this characterization is not so much what is on the pictorial record, although of course Brady's photographs are widel
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Approximate Word count = 3660
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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