Photography.History of photography

Antecedents

The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a dark chamber or room with a hole (later a lens) in one wall, through which images of objects outside the room were projected on the opposite wall. The principle was probably known to the Chinese and to ancient Greeks such as Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. Late in the 16th century, the Italian scientist and writer Giambattista della Porta demonstrated and described in detail the use of a camera obscura with a lens. While artists in subsequent centuries commonly used variations on the camera obscura to create images they could trace, the results from these devices depended on the artist’s drawing skills, and so scientists continued to search for a method to reproduce images completely mechanically.

In 1727 the German professor of anatomy Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts, a phenomenon known since the 16th century and possibly earlier, was caused by light and not heat. He demonstrated the fact by using sunlight to record words on the salts, but he made no attempt to preserve the images permanently. His discovery, in combination with the camera obscura, provided the basic technology necessary for photography. It was not until the early 19th century, however, that photography actually came into being.

Photogenic drawing

The antecedents of photogenic drawing can be traced back to 1802, when Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, reported his experiments in recording images on paper or leather sensitized with silver nitrate. He could record silhouettes of objects placed on the paper, but he was not able to make them permanent. Sir Humphry Davy published a paper in the Journal of the Royal Institution, London, in June 1802, on the experiments of his friend Wedgwood; this was the first account of an attempt to produce photographs.

In 1833 the French-born photographer Hercules Florence worked with paper sensitized with silver salts to produce prints of drawings; he called this process “photography.” However, since he conducted his experiments in Brazil, apart from the major scientific centres of the time, his contributions were lost to history until 1973, when they were rediscovered. Others in Europe, including one woman, claimed to have discovered similar photographic processes, but no verifiable proof has come to light.

William Henry Fox Talbot, trained as a scientist at the University of Cambridge, could not draw his scientific observations, even with the aid of a camera lucida; this deficiency inspired him to invent a photographic process. He decided to try to record by chemical means the images he observed, and by 1835 he had a workable technique. He made paper light-sensitive by soaking it alternately in solutions of common salt (sodium chloride) and silver nitrate. Silver chloride was thus produced in the fibres of the paper. Upon exposure to light, the silver chloride became finely divided silver, dark in tone. Theoretically, the resulting negative, in which tonal and spatial values were reversed, could be used to make any number of positives simply by putting fresh sensitized paper in contact with the negative and exposing it to light. Talbot’s method of fixing the print by washing it in a strong solution of sodium chloride was inadequate, however, and the process was not successful until February 1839, when his astronomer friend Sir John Herschel suggested fixing the negatives with sodium hyposulphite (now called sodium thiosulfate) and waxing them before printing, which reduced the grain of the paper.

When news of Daguerre’s process reached England in January 1839, Talbot rushed publication of his “photogenic drawing” process and subsequently explained his technique in complete detail to the members of the Royal Society—six months before the French government divulged working directions for the daguerreotype.

Heliography

Nicéphore Niépce, an amateur inventor living near Chalon-sur-Saône, a city 189 miles (304 km) southeast of Paris, was interested in lithography, a process in which drawings are copied or drawn by hand onto lithographic stone and then printed in ink. Not artistically trained, Niépce devised a method by which light could draw the pictures he needed. He oiled an engraving to make it transparent and then placed it on a plate coated with a light-sensitive solution of bitumen of Judea (a type of asphalt) and lavender oil and exposed the setup to sunlight. After a few hours, the solution under the light areas of the engraving hardened, while that under the dark areas remained soft and could be washed away, leaving a permanent, accurate copy of the engraving. Calling the process heliography (“sun drawing”), Niépce succeeded from 1822 onward in copying oiled engravings onto lithographic stone, glass, and zinc and from 1826 onto pewter plates.

In 1826/27, using a camera obscura fitted with a pewter plate, Niépce produced the first successful photograph from nature, a view of the courtyard of his country estate, Gras, from an upper window of the house. The exposure time was about eight hours, during which the sun moved from east to west so that it appears to shine on both sides of the building.

Niépce produced his most successful copy of an engraving, a portrait of Cardinal d’Amboise, in 1826. It was exposed in about three hours, and in February 1827 he had the pewter plate etched to form a printing plate and had two prints pulled. Paper prints were the final aim of Niépce’s heliographic process, yet all his other attempts, whether made by using a camera or by means of engravings, were underexposed and too weak to be etched. Nevertheless, Niépce’s discoveries showed the path that others were to follow with more success.

Portraiture

From the medium’s beginnings, the portrait became one of photography’s most popular genres. Some early practitioners such as Southworth and Hawes and Hill and Adamson broke new ground through the artistry they achieved in their portraits. Outside such mastery, however, portraiture throughout the world generally took on the form of uninspired daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and ambrotypes, and most portraitists relied heavily on accessories and retouching. Such conventions were broken by several important subsequent photographers, notably Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a Parisian writer, editor, and caricaturist who used the pseudonym of Nadar; Étienne Carjat, likewise a Parisian caricaturist; and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Nadar took up photography in 1853 as a means of making studies of the features of prominent Frenchmen for inclusion in a large caricature lithograph, the “Panthéon Nadar.” He posed his sitters against plain backgrounds and bathed them with diffused daylight, which brought out every detail of their faces and dress. He knew most of them, and the powers of observation he had developed as a caricaturist led him to recognize their salient features, which he recorded directly, without the exaggeration that he put in his drawings. When Nadar’s photographs were first exhibited, they won great praise in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, then the leading art magazine in France.

Carjat depicted the prominent Parisian artists, actors, writers, musicians, and politicians of his day. These portraits display dignity and distinction like those of Nadar, his contemporary and rival, but with a sometimes startling level of intensity in the sitters’ gazes.

Cameron took up photography as a pastime in 1864. Using the wet-plate process, she made portraits of such celebrated Victorians of her acquaintance as Sir John F.W. Herschel, George Frederick Watts, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For her portraits, a number of which were shown at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Cameron used a lens with the extreme focal length of 30 inches (76.2 cm) to obtain large close-ups. This lens required such long exposures that the subjects frequently moved. The lack of optical definition and this accidental blurring was criticized by the photographic establishment, yet the power of her work won her praise among artists. This can be explained only by the intensity of her vision. “When I have had these men before my camera,” she wrote about her portraits of great figures

Besides these memorable portraits, Cameron produced a large number of allegorical studies, as well as images of children and young women in costume, acting out biblical scenes or themes based on the poetry of her hero, Tennyson. In making these pictures, Cameron was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who portrayed similar themes in their work.

Early developments

Photographic societies—made up of both professionals and amateurs enticed by the popularity of the collodion process—began to form in the mid-19th century, giving rise to the consideration of photography as an aesthetic medium. In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the present Royal Photographic Society, was formed in London, and in the following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in Paris. Toward the end of the 19th century, similar societies appeared in German-speaking countries, eastern Europe, and India. Some were designed to promote photography generally, while others emphasized only artistic expression. Along with these organizations, journals promoting photography as art also appeared.

At the first meeting of the Photographic Society, the president, Sir Charles Eastlake (who was then also president of the Royal Academy), invited the miniature painter Sir William Newton to read the paper “Upon Photography in an Artistic View” (Journal of the Photographic Society, 1853). Newton’s argument was that photographs could be useful so long as they were taken “in accordance [as far as it is possible] with the acknowledged principles of Fine Art.” One way the photographer could make his results more like works of art, Newton suggested, was to throw the subject slightly out of focus. He also recommended liberal retouching. (Eastlake’s wife, Lady Eastlake, née Elizabeth Rigby, was one of the first to write lucidly about the artistic problems of collodion/albumen photography.)

In response to this desire to create photographs that would fit an established conception of what “art” should be, several photographers began to combine several negatives to make one print. These consisted of compositions that were considered too complicated to be photographed in a straightforward manner and thus pushed photography beyond its so-called mechanical capabilities. A famous example of this style was by O.G. Rejlander, a Swede who had studied art in Rome and was practicing photography in England. He joined 30 negatives to produce a 31-by-16-inch (79-by-41-cm) print entitled The Two Ways of Life (1857), an allegory showing the way of the blessed led through good works and the way of the damned through vice. Rejlander, who described the technique in detail in photographic journals, stated that his purpose was to prove to artists the aesthetic possibilities of photography, which they had generally denied. The photograph was shown in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 and was purchased by Queen Victoria for Prince Albert.

Rejlander’s technique stimulated Henry Peach Robinson, a professional photographer who had been trained as an artist, to produce similar combination prints. He achieved fame with a five-negative print, Fading Away, produced in 1858. The subject, a dying girl, was considered by critics as too painful a subject to be represented by photography. Perhaps the implied authenticity of the camera bothered them, since painters had long presented subjects of a far more sensitive nature.

Robinson became an articulate member of the Photographic Society, and his teaching was even more influential than his photography. In 1869 the first of many editions and translations of his book, Pictorial Effect in Photography, was published. Robinson borrowed compositional formulas from a handbook on painting, claiming that use of them would bring artistic success. He stressed the importance of balance and the opposition of light against dark. At the core of his argument was the assumption that rules set up for one art form could be applied to another.

So long as photographers maintained that the way to photography as art was the emulation of painting, art critics were reluctant to admit the new medium to an independent aesthetic position. Portraits, when done as sensitively and as directly as those produced by Hill and Adamson, Nadar, and Cameron, won praise. But sentimental genre scenes, posed and arranged for the camera and lacking the truthfulness thought to be characteristic of photography, were the subject of considerable controversy. This debate would reach a crescendo at the end of the century.

Photography of movement

A few years before the introduction of the dry plate, the world was amazed by the photographs of horses taken by Eadweard Muybridge in California. To take these photographs, Muybridge used a series of 12 to 24 cameras arranged side by side opposite a reflecting screen. The shutters of the cameras were released by the breaking of their attached threads as the horse dashed by. Through this technique, Muybridge secured sets of sequential photographs of successive phases of the walk, the trot, and the gallop. When the pictures were published internationally in the popular and scientific press, they demonstrated that the positions of the animal’s legs differed from those in traditional hand-drawn representations. To prove that his photographs were accurate, Muybridge projected them upon a screen one after the other with a lantern-slide projector he had built for the purpose; the result was the world’s first motion-picture presentation. This memorable event took place at the San Francisco Art Association in 1880.

Muybridge, whose early studies were made with wet plates, continued his motion studies for some 20 years. With the new gelatin plates, he was able to improve his technique greatly, and in 1884–85, at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania, he produced 781 sequential photographs of many kinds of animals as well as men and women engaged in a wide variety of activities. He was aided in this project by painter Thomas Eakins, who also made motion studies.

Muybridge’s photographic analysis of movement coincided with studies by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to develop chronophotography. Whereas Muybridge had employed a battery of cameras to record detailed, separate images of successive stages of movement, Marey used only one, recording an entire sequence of movement on a single plate. With Marey’s method, the images of various phases of motion sometimes overlapped, but it was easier to see and understand the flow of movement. Marey was also able to record higher speeds at shorter intervals than Muybridge. Both his and Muybridge’s work greatly contributed to the field of motion study and to the development of the motion picture.

Documentary photography

From the earliest days of the medium, landscape, architecture, and monuments were appealing subjects for photographers. This sort of photography, which was collected by artists, scientists, and travelers, was impelled by several factors. In Europe one powerful factor was the maneuverings among western European powers for control of portions of North Africa and Asia. From the late 1850s through the 1870s, British photographers were particularly active in recording the natural landscape and monuments of the empire’s domains: Francis Frith worked in Egypt and Asia Minor, producing three albums of well-composed images; Samuel Bourne photographed throughout India (with a retinue of equipment bearers); John Thomson produced a descriptive record of life and landscape in China; and French photographer Maxime Du Camp traveled to Egypt with Gustave Flaubert on a government commission to record landscape and monuments.

Both for patriotic reasons and as a commodity for travelers, photographers also were active in recording the landscape of western Europe in the 1850s and ’60s. Important British photographers included Roger Fenton, who worked in England and Wales; Charles Clifford, who worked in Spain; Robert Macpherson, who photographed Rome; and George Washington Wilson, who photographed Scotland. French photographer Adolphe Braun recorded the landscape around his native Alsace, as well as the mountainous terrain of the French Savoy, as did the brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson. Herman Krone in Germany and Giacchino Altobelli and Carlo Ponti in Italy were also intent on recording the beauties of their regional landscapes.

Photographs of specific historical buildings were made for a number of purposes: to satisfy antiquarian curiosity, to provide information for restoration, to supply artists with material on which to base paintings, or to effect preservation efforts. Practically from photography’s inception, such documentation was commissioned by public and private authorities. In western Europe and the United States, photographs captured the building of the industrial infrastructure, from bridges to railroad lines, from opera houses to public places to monumental statuary. In the early 1850s Philip Henry Delamotte was hired to document the progress of the construction of the Crystal Place in London, and a few years later Robert Howlett depicted the building of the Great Eastern transatlantic steamship. Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon worked for the Society for Photographing Old London, recording historical buildings and relics. In the 1850s the French government commissioned several photographers to document historical buildings. Working with cameras making photographs as large as 20 by 29 inches (51 by 74 cm), Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, and Charles Nègre produced remarkable calotypes of the cathedrals of Notre-Dame (Paris), Chartres, and Amiens, as well as other structures that were being restored after centuries of neglect. An establishment was set up in Lille, France, by Blanquart-Evrard at which these paper negatives could be printed in bulk.

In the United States explorations of the lands beyond the Great Plains led to the apogee of landscape photography during the period. Before the Civil War, relatively few exceptional images of the Western landscape had been made. In the postwar era railroad companies and government commissions included photographers among their teams sent to determine mineral deposits, rights of way, and other conditions that would be suitable for settlement. Of the photographers confronting the spectacular landscape of the American West in the 1870s and ’80s, William Henry Jackson, O’Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins produced particularly notable work. Both O’Sullivan, who helped survey Nevada and New Mexico, and Watkins, who worked in California and Oregon, were able to convey through their work a sense of the untamed and extraordinary quality of the Western landscape. As a testament to the power of his images, Jackson’s photographs of the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone River were influential in getting public land set aside for Yellowstone National Park. The work these and other photographers of the American West produced usually was made available in several sizes and formats, from stereographic images to mammoth-sized works.

Pictorialism and the Linked Ring

The ideas of Newton, Rejlander, Robinson, and Emerson—while seemingly varied—all pursued the same goal: to gain acceptance for photography as a legitimate art form. These efforts to gain acceptance were all encompassed within Pictorialism, a movement that had been afoot for some time and that crystallized in the 1890s and early 1900s, when it was promoted through a series of international exhibiting groups. In 1892 the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring was founded in Britain by Robinson, George Davison, a leader of the Art Nouveau movement, and others dissatisfied with the scientific bias of the London Photographic Society. The group held annual exhibitions, which they called salons. While the members’ work varied from naturalism to staged scenes to manipulated prints, by the turn of the century it was their united belief that “through the Salon the Linked Ring has clearly demonstrated that pictorial photography is able to stand alone and that it has a future entirely apart from that which is purely mechanical.” Similar Pictorialist groups formed in other countries. These included the Photo-Club of Paris, the Trifolium of Austria, and like associations in Germany and Italy. Unity of purpose enabled members to exchange ideas and images with those who had similar outlooks in other countries.

The Photo-Secession

At the turn of the 20th century, one of the most influential Pictorialist groups was the Photo-Secession, founded in New York City in 1902 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The Secession’s name was taken from the avant-garde secessionist movements in Europe that sought to differentiate themselves from what they considered outmoded ways of working and thinking about the arts. With the help of Edward Steichen, Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession—popularly known as “291” after its address on Fifth Avenue—which exhibited the work of Modernist painters and sculptors as well as that of photographers who used a wide variety of printing processes, including gum-bichromate and bromoil printing. These procedures required considerable handwork and resulted in one-of-a-kind prints that in their softening effects resembled etchings or lithographs rather than photographs. Among the members of the Photo-Secession were Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, and Clarence H. White. Between 1903 and 1917 Stieglitz published 50 issues of the beautifully printed journal Camera Work, which contained, among other works, fine gravure reproductions of American and European photographs and halftone reproductions of artwork by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Over the 15-year period of the Photo-Secession’s existence, the outlook of Stieglitz and individual members changed, reflecting the general move away from the more artificial aspects of Pictorialism as the 20th century began. Increasingly, photographers wanted their work to look like photographs, not paintings, and valued the qualities that were unique to photography. Over time, 291 began to show more painting than photography, and, as Stieglitz became even more convinced of the value of “straight,” rather than manipulated, photographic printing, several original adherents fell away, among them Käsebier and White. The final two issues of Camera Work were devoted to “straight” work by Paul Strand, who was the only photographer Stieglitz considered promising at the time. Strand’s images, consisting mainly of New York views and close-up portraits (made with a 45-degree prism lens so that the subject was unaware of being photographed), combined pure formal qualities, such as beautiful tone and sharp focus, with intense feeling.

The New Objectivity

In the period immediately following World War I, much photography was characterized by sharply defined imagery, especially of objects removed from their actual context. The clean lines and cool effects of this style—variously called the “New Objectivity,” the “new vision,” or “Precisionism”—was a reflection, perhaps, of the overarching role of industry and technology during the 1920s. Strand, continuing in the direction he had unveiled in 1917, produced powerful, highly detailed close-ups of machines and organic matter and made sparkling landscapes in Gaspé, Quebec, and the American West. His approach changed again when he was invited to Mexico to produce educational films for the government. There he made a series of portraits (again with the prism lens) and landscapes, which he published in 1940 as gravure prints. Steichen, who had been in command of aerial photography for the American Expeditionary Forces, abandoned his earlier impressionistic handling in favour of crisp, sharply focused celebrity, fashion, and product images, which appeared in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. Others whose sharp, well-designed images of industrial products appeared in advertising brochures and magazines included Margaret Bourke-White, Paul Outerbridge, and Charles Sheeler.

A preference for a straight, highly detailed presentation of natural and manufactured forms also characterized the work of California photographer Edward Weston. Using large-format (8-by-10-inch [20.3-by-25.4-cm]) equipment with lenses stopped down to the smallest aperture, Weston, whose earlier career had been in commercial portraiture, formulated a method of “rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” Further, Weston, like Strand, did not approve of cropping or hand work of any kind on the negative; both held that the final image should be composed in the ground glass of the camera prior to exposure.

Several Californians, a number of whom looked to Weston as a mentor, took up the concentration on organic forms and objects and the preference for using the smallest aperture of the lens to create maximum depth of field and sharpness. Known as Group f.64, for the smallest lens aperture, the group included, besides Weston and his son Brett, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. After seeing Strand’s negatives, Adams decided to pursue photography as a profession, specializing in photographing Western wilderness areas such as Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. His dramatic photographs masterfully captured the beauty of such natural wonders, and the popularity of his photographs helped raise awareness of the importance of preservation efforts. He also was a teacher of great persuasiveness who advocated the exact control of tonal quality through what he called the “zone system.”

In Europe this approach of favouring extremely sharp definition was known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Its outstanding proponents were the German photographers Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Blossfeldt made highly detailed and magnified images of plants, removed from their natural habitat. Renger-Patzsch, a professional photographer in Essen, was fascinated by the formal qualities of everyday objects, both organic and manufactured. Like those of his American counterparts, his images featured strong design components and stressed the materiality of substances rather than the maker’s emotional attitude toward the subject. He too believed that the final image should exist in all its completeness before the exposure was made and that it should be an unmanipulated record. His ideas and images, published in 1928 in Die Welt ist schön (“The World Is Beautiful”) and translated into a number of languages, exerted considerable influence on European photography of the time. Hans Finsler, of Swiss origin and working in Germany, Piet Zwart in the Netherlands, and Emmanuel Sougez and Florence Henri in France were among the many producing highly defined close-ups of objects and people in a style similar to that of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Colour Photography

The Autochrome process, introduced in France in 1907 by Auguste and Louis Lumière, was the first practical colour photography process. It used a colour screen (a glass plate covered with grains of starch dyed to act as primary-colour filters and black dust that blocked all unfiltered light) coated with a thin film of panchromatic (i.e., sensitive to all colours) emulsion, and it resulted in a positive colour transparency. Because Autochrome was a colour transparency and could be viewed only by reflected light, however, researchers continued to look for improvements and alternative colour processes.

In 1935 Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, two American musicians working with the Kodak Research Laboratories, initiated the modern era of colour photography with their invention of Kodachrome film. With this reversal (slide) film, colour transparencies could be obtained that were suitable both for projection and for reproduction. A year later the Agfa Company of Germany developed the Agfacolor negative-positive process, but owing to World War II the film did not become available until 1949. Meanwhile, in 1942 Kodak introduced the Kodacolor negative-positive film that 20 years later—after many improvements in quality and speed and a great reduction in price—would become the most popular film used for amateur photography.

Photography c. 1945 to the 21st century Postwar developments

With the improvement in colour materials and processes, photographers became more interested in its creative possibilities. Beginning in the 1940s, American photographer Eliot Porter produced subtle studies of birds and nature in which colour allowed him to render an unparalleled level of nuance. Appreciated for both their scientific and their aesthetic value, these photographs embodied the potential of colour. Austrian photojournalist Ernst Haas first used colour in the photo-essay New York for Life magazine in 1953. Through this and similar projects he challenged the standard of using only black and white in photojournalism, and his use of colour added vibrancy to images of everyday life. While these and other experiments achieved some success, it was not until later in the century that colour dominated photographic output and was incorporated into daily newspapers.

In the period after World War II, as the United States entered a period of domestic peace and prosperity, many photographers there moved away from documentary realities and focused instead on the intrinsic qualities of photography; such experiments paralleled the ascendancy of the Abstract Expressionist art movement, which similarly looked at the intrinsic quality of painting. Minor White combined ideas about photography’s incomparable descriptive power, taken from Edward Weston, with those about its emotional expressiveness, taken from Alfred Stieglitz. Through his long career as an influential teacher and founding editor of Aperture, White developed the idea that a photograph should contain an inner message that might not be immediately visible on the surface.

Other American photographers influenced by the Abstract Expressionist style of the era included Aaron Siskind, who found formal configurations in graffiti, weathered wood and plaster, and torn billboards (what he called the “detritus of the world”), and Harry Callahan, whose work demonstrated a highly developed sense of linear form. Siskind and Callahan inspired a generation of young photographers through their teachings at the Institute of Design, the school that had been started in 1937 in Chicago by Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. Barbara Crane, Ken Josephson, and Garry Winogrand were among students who later achieved fame. In England Bill Brandt created expressive photographs of nudes, shooting his subject matter at such close range that the human body took on the appearance of series of patterns and abstract designs. In Germany Otto Steinert led the Fotoform group of photographers, who created close-up views of nature that were also nearly abstract in their effects.

By the 1960s similar styles and ideas in photography had spread to Asia, in part because photographic magazines became widely available. Japanese photographers had been aware of Modernist currents before World War II, but afterward they pursued them more openly. Among the important photographers of this generation were Shōmei Tomatsu, who made vivid images on the streets of Tokyo; Eikō Hosoe, who captured imagery evoking human sensuality; and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who was entranced by images conveying stillness and emptiness. For a period the government in China exerted control over photographic imagery, but by the late 20th century photographers had found some freedoms. Chen Changfen was able to indulge his interest in colour abstractions, and Xie Hailong produced photographic documentations of problems in contemporary Chinese society, such as the difficulties faced by rural students seeking an education.

Developments from the 1970s to the 1990s

Continuing the example set by Arbus, a gritty sort of social documentation emerged beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, when photographers such as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin documented alternative lifestyles involving drug addiction, transvestism, and casual sex. In particular, Goldin created an elaborate series titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, through which she compiled an evolving record of the people she and her camera encountered. Such direct, unflinching photographs established intimate documentary work as an important genre in the late 20th century. Photographers such as Sally Mann and Tina Barney extended this genre to portray intimate, sometimes unsettling images of their own families.

Goldin usually photographed in colour, which added to the harsh sense of reality in their work; this represented a general move toward colour among photographers of their generation. William Eggleston pushed the artistic boundaries of colour by using it to explore the banality of small-town existence; along these same lines, Candida Höfer used colour to emphasize the tedium of institutional life. Richard Misrach created a massive project, known as the Desert Cantos, in which he photographed desert scenes in colour, sometimes juxtaposed against sinister elements such as nuclear sites. Barbara Norfleet, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Barbara Kasten, and Franco Fontana were among the other prominent photographers of the period who used colour expressively in landscapes, interiors, still lifes, and street scenes.

From the 1970s on, as the advent of television news began to affect the popularity of picture magazines, many photojournalists whose work had been published in magazines began to take advantage of a burgeoning interest in photographic picture books. These, often produced in conjunction with exhibits, comprised photographs of newsworthy events or topics of social interest along with informative texts. Working in black and white, Swiss-born photographer Claudia Andujar (working in Brazil) and Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide portrayed indigenous peoples—groups they believed were becoming marginalized by society—and their customs. Other important figures included English photographer Don McCullin, who portrayed the devastation brought about by wars in Vietnam and in Africa; French photojournalist Raymond Depardon, who worked in Asia, Africa, and Europe; American Mary Ellen Mark, who photographed street performers and prostitutes in India, depicted street children in Seattle, Washington, and spent time documenting the inmates of a mental hospital; and Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who examined work and workers throughout the world, exhibiting and publishing a number of books on that topic. For his ability to make world events come pictorially alive, American James Nachtwey was three times the winner of the International Center of Photography’s photojournalism awards. By the end of the century, the technology used by these photojournalists had changed. Digital cameras sent images directly to computers, and programs allowed images to be altered seamlessly, making newspaper and magazine darkrooms obsolete.

The documentation of artifacts, begun in the 19th century, continued to interest late 20th-century photographers. Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico and American photographer Lewis Baltz concentrated on architecture and the built environment. The German duo Bernd and Hilla Becher produced an extensive portrayal of industrial buildings such as mine tipples and factories, which they usually displayed in carefully planned arrangements of multiple prints. This sort of project combined traditional documentary conventions with postmodern concepts about typologies.

Into the 21st century: the digital age

The transformation of photography from an analog medium relying on chemically developed light-sensitive emulsions to one using digital technologies for image capture and storage began in the late 1980s with the introduction of the first consumer digital cameras and in 1990 the first version of Adobe Photoshop, a program for adjusting and manipulating digital image files. Conceived as an extension of the conventional darkroom, the program adopted many of the traditional tools of black-and-white film photography but let photographers go even further. By giving photographers the ability to easily change the structure of an image, and even its contents, it called into question long-held assumptions about photographic veracity or documentary “truth value.” To some minds, it changed the very nature of the medium.

Digital photography’s full impact was not felt until the first decade of the new century. Even as late as 2001, news events—most significantly, the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.—were photographed primarily with film cameras. But because digital images could be transmitted and edited much more quickly, by decade’s end nearly all newspapers and magazines had transitioned to a digital workflow process, and their photographers were using digital cameras designed for professionals.

The transgressive aspect of digital photography was apparent even before its widespread adoption, as in 1982 when the august National Geographic magazine published an altered image of the Egyptian pyramids. Because the magazine’s cover required a vertical image, editors used early computer software to push the pyramids closer together than they appeared in the original film photograph. The manipulation of visual fact for increased visual impact extends back before computers into the 19th century, notably during the Crimean War and American Civil War, but a spate of incidents of digital alteration of news photographs in the first decade of the 21st century created an uproar and led to the establishment of journalistic codes of ethics intended to regulate the alteration of digital images. Several photojournalists lost their jobs after their published pictures were found to have been digitally doctored.

Whereas photojournalists and documentarians reacted with caution to what came to be called digital imaging, other types of photographers were generally enthusiastic about its possibilities. Many artists using photography as their medium developed creative approaches that took advantage of the seamless mutability of digitally altered images, extending a long history of photographic collage, double printing, and other pre-digital forms of manipulation. Among the early adopters were Aziz + Cucher (Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher), Andreas Gursky, and Loretta Lux, all of whom stretched the limits of what is believable about a photographic image. Digital alteration also influenced the spheres of fashion and celebrity, as photographers such as Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (working together as Inez & Vinoodh) remade the looks of models and movie stars. Magazines began to regularly send their cover photographs to digital retouchers to eliminate blemishes and minimize their models’ waistlines.

Arguably the most profound impact of digital photography was the proliferation of picture taking and picture sharing. Beginning in 2007, the year Apple introduced its first iPhone, so-called smartphones became ubiquitous, as did picture-sharing applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that enable users to upload pictures from phone to Internet in a matter of seconds. One result was an almost unfathomable archive of images of mundane events and everyday places, a virtual map of the world that finds its commercial equivalent in Google Earth, which incorporates both satellite views and Google Street View, an assemblage of ground-level pictures of human habitation.