699
plates. The Schmid portable view camera was to have
practically revolutionized the taking of instantaneous
photographs.
By 1884, vast numbers of new recruits had joined
the ranks of amateur photographers, attracted by the
simplicity of the new hand-held or easily transportable
cameras using dry plates. 1884 also marks the start of
the career of the famous American photographer, Al-
fred Stieglitz. Initially, Stieglitz’s father took his son to
Europe when Alfred was seventeen and entered him in
the Berlin Polytechnic Institute, believing that the future
belonged to engineers. But Stieglitz became attracted to
photography after seeing an inexpensive camera outfi t
in a Berlin shop window, and when he learned from a
co-student that Dr. Herrmann Wilhelm Vogel was lec-
turing on aesthetic theory as applied to photography in
another course at the Institute, he enrolled immediately
in Vogel’s class. One day in 1884, Dr. Vogel asked to
show some of Stieglitz’s photographs to a group of dis-
tinguished painters. While Europe’s awakening to the
potential of artistic expression in photography was still
several years away, it appears that this twenty-year-old
American in Berlin was among the fi rst to awaken this
interest among some of German’s leading artists. Of
the group who were shown Stieglitz’s prints, several
expressed the desire to have copies: one, according to
Stieglitz, remarked: ‘Isn’t it too bad your photographs
are not paintings. If they had been made by hand, they
would be art.’
Stieglitz at first worked the wet-plate, but soon
acquired dry-plate equipment. Speed in the taking,
developing and printing of his photographs became a
mania with him, and when he was asked why this was
so, he responded that newspapers would in future be re-
producing photographs more frequently, and that speed
would become of increasing importance in this type of
activity. If Alfred Stieglitz’s thoughts were running to
the mechanization of photography, one of Japan’s ear-
liest photographers—a man only four years older than
Stieglitz—was at this time also considering the possi-
bility of large-scale book illustration with photography.
This was K. Ogawa, the son of a deposed landowner of
the Japanese feudal system. A love of photography had
become a consuming passion with Ogawa to the same
extent it had with Stieglitz. Ogawa learned the rudi-
ments of the wet-plate collodion process and even took
up the manufacture of collodion. Just about the time
that Stieglitz signed up for Dr. Vogel’s course in Berlin,
Ogawa got himself hired as a sailor aboard the American
Asiatic frigate Swatara, and set sail to seek his fortune
in the United States. He disembarked in Washington
D.C. in January 1883 and remained until June 1884. He
studied portraiture, carbon printing, collotype printing
and dry-plate making.
The parallel between Stieglitz’s and Ogawa’s careers
did not end with their respective beginners in foreign
lands. Ogawa returned to Japan where, for a time, he op-
erated a large studio in Tokyo. Soon he was photograph-
ing the heir apparent to the Japanese throne—a vastly
greater honor in Japan than for a similar feat performed
in a any capital of the western world. He founded the
Shashin Shimpo, Japan’s only photographic periodical,
and established a photomechanical printing factory in
Tokyo. Alfred Stieglitz, meanwhile, remained in Europe
until 1890, after which he returned to the United States
to become the protagonist of the American fi ne-arts
photography movement, and founder of two of the
country’s most infl uential turn-of-the-century journals,
Camera Notes and Camera Work.
Amateur photographers were in 1885 counted by the
thousands and in the different cities were organized into
fl ourishing and growing societies. In 1885 the Society
of Amateur Photographers of New York held their fi rst
annual exhibition.
In 1881, Eadweard Muybridge visited the French
physiologist Etienne Marey, but the photographs he
brought with him of birds in fl ight were unsatisfactory
for the scientifi c studies, which the Frenchman was
then conducting along similar lines. After Muybridge
returned to the United States, he began in 1885 a new
series of photographic experiments at the Philadelphia
Zoo.
Technical elements also developed progressively
in the 1880s. The outset of photography’s second half
century coincided with the introduction of the Kodak
camera and nitrocellulose fi lm—both hallmarks of a new
era for the medium. The new negative fi lm process was
an American development, resulting from independent
research and development activities in Philadelphia,
Newark, New Jersey and Rochester. The Kodak camera
was actually patented in September 4, 1888 and was
on the market at the outset of 1889. It was a small and
lightweight and was strictly a fi lm camera. Although
it was still not possible to make color photographs in
the modern senses, photographers by this time had at
their disposal an assortment of special plates and color
screens, the use of which would enable them to render
better color values in their black and white prints. During
the 1880s numerous other dyes were introduced for or-
thochromatic plates as erythrosine and xanthophylls.
In 1880 the American industrialist George Eastman,
at the of age 24, set up Eastman Dry Plate Company in
Rochester, New York and created the fi rst half-tone pho-
tograph which was published in a daily newspaper, the
New York Graphic. In 1886, George Eastman perfected
a negative fi lm, which had a photographically sensitized
layer on it. It could be rolled up into a camera which one
could be rolled up into a camera which could actually
hold in one’s hand, and then the fi lm could be printed
by professionals. Eastman called it a Kodak: “All youHISTORY: 7. 1880s