Time - 100 Photographs - The Most Influential Images of All Time - USA (2019)

(Antfer) #1

Art and science—though sometimes sketched as opposites—are really


two volumes in the same marvelous book. Both express the human longing


to share what we see, in the world and in our imaginations.


Photography began as chemistry. Light will leave its mark indefinitely in

certain compounds. First using asphalt, then switching to silver in the pres-


ence of iodine and mercury, Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and


Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, working in the 1820s and ’30s, preserved


the visible character of photons as they reflected off physical objects.


But the chemists were also craftsmen. Even in Daguerre’s earliest pic-

tures, artistic principles of composition and form were on display. Early


portrait photographers, like Mathew Brady and Julia Margaret Cameron,


consciously shared the traditions of painters like Jan van Eyck and John


Singer Sargent.


No other art has drawn on such rapid scientific innovation. As media for

capturing images evolved and improved, from copper plates to sheets of


glass to celluloid rolls to silicon, photography became portable and inex-


pensive. Faster shutters and higher film speeds made it possible to freeze


motion—and to make motion pictures. First in the darkroom, and now


with digital tools, photographers learned to layer their pictures with artistic


interpretation. Cameras that record light beyond the visible spectrum have


shown us both the world inside our own bodies and the nebulae of incom-


prehensibly distant galaxies.


Now photography is rapidly becoming the first art that every human be-

ing will engage in. What started in 1900, when George Eastman introduced


the first Kodak Brownie camera, has accelerated exponentially with the


invention of the smartphone. Can the art keep up with the science? In the


days before photography, William Blake exhorted: “To see a World in a


Grain of Sand, and Heaven in a Wild Flower.” It is a task for the human eye


and spirit, and the camera is but a tool.


INNOVATION

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