Famous photographers

Nicephore Niepce

-He was one of the fathers of photography; he was also French. In 1825 he captured the first photograph. He is also famously known for making the first internal combustion engine. Niepce also served in the military under Napolean Bonaparte. Niepce was basically a brilliant French inventor that attempted to discover a lot of things.

Louis Daguerre

-He was a French artist that is well known for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. Daguerreotype photography is basically positive made on a silver copper plate. He is also proclaimed as one of the fathers of photography. He teamed up with Niepce but in 1833 Niepce died. Daguerra then continued experimenting with photography and that is how he came up with the daguerreotype process.

Henry Fox-Talbot

-British photographer that invented the calotype process. This process used paper that was coated with silver iodide. It was a long process, it usually took around 1 hour for the picture to be taken so there would be an acceptable negative. If these photographs were exposed to light then they would run the risk of changing. He attempted to find ink that would not fade as fast, but he didn’t complete that objective before he died.

Hippolyte Bayard

-This man claimed to be the first person to invent photography before the other French: Niepce and Daguerre. He invented his own process known as direct positive printing. His process involved exposing silver chloride paper to the light, this exposure would then turn the paper completely black. The next step was to soak it in potassium iodide before the exposure to the camera; afterwards, it was washed in a bath of hyposulfite of soda and dried. This process was pretty fast at the time, it took around 12 minutes as opposed to Henry’s process of 1 hour.

Julia Margaret Cameron

-Julia became famous when, Helmut Gernsheim wrote a book about her work. She was first interested in photography when her daughter gave her a camera for her birthday. In Julia’s photography she attempted to photograph beauty…in her book she wrote, “I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.”

Lady Clementina Hawarden

-Lady Clementina was a noted portrait photographer. She had ten children and turned to photography while she lived with her husband. They later moved to London and she set up a studio in her home, so she started taking it more serious. Today there is a collection of her portraits in a museum in London (Victorian and Albert Museum)

Nadar

-Nadar was born in Paris, France. He was the first person to take aerial pictures. Not only that but he pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, he did this by working at the Catacombs in Paris. Unlike many of these other photographers, Nadar lived a long live; he lived for 89 years.

Gustave Le Gray

-Has been named the most important photographer in the 19^th century. He was originally being trained to become a painter however he then crossed over to photography. He later became a famous portraitist. He also did work for Napoleon III

Diane Arbus

-Diane was Jewish and lived in New York. Her family was wealthy and they owned an apartment store on Fifth Avenue. Diane was initially hired as a photographer by her father to make advertisement for their store; this is the time when she became interested in photography. In NY she also taught photography. Furthermore, she decided to end her life by slashing her wrist she was only 48 years old.

Susan Sontag

-Susan was an American writer and filmmaker. She was often photographer and her image became popularized. One of her most famous writings was, “On Photography” where she explained her views on photography in a capitalist society. “Sontag says that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other.”