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 incertain 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 forcapturing 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.