THE INTERNET AND PHOTOGRAPHY
In the last years of the twentieth century, the prolif-
eration of digital photographic technologies con-
verged with rapidly expanding access to the global
networkingofcomputers. The result,for bothprofes-
sional and amateur photographers, is a transformed
medium whose online component has encompassed,
merged, expanded, and altered previous practices.
Sending photographs at electronic speed has become
commonplace. Photography’s past as well as its pre-
sent output has been scanned into the system, pro-
ducing an unprecedented number of images for
scholarly, personal, and commercial use. Museums,
galleries, and photography festivals now display their
collections to global audiences. Photojournalism in
online newspapers and magazines has the currency of
broadcast news while offering a range of display
options impossible toachieve inprint.Camera stores,
film-processing labs, and photo pornographers have
set up shop in the virtual world. Thousands of web-
sites provide both professional and amateur com-
mentary on the descriptive, historical, interpretive,
and technical aspects of the medium.
Online photography is the product of a second
stage in the development of computer connectivity.
The first stage, the founding of the internet, began
with a proposal made by the Rand Corporation in
1962 to find a means of linking military computers.
It was only in 1969 that four computers were able to
‘‘talk’’ to each other. What we now call the internet
is a product of the Transmission Control Protocol/
Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) established in 1983. The
Protocol allowed for the connection of an infinite
number of computers in a global network, each
identified by its Internet Protocol (IP) number.
While creators of the internet saw it as having lim-
ited academic, business, or military applications, its
origins coincided with the advent of desktop com-
puting. As a result, the 1,000 computers linked to
the internet by the end of 1984 grew to an estimated
1 million interconnected machines in 1992.
The second stage of computer connectivity was
marked by the invention of the World Wide Web
by Timothy Berners-Lee in 1991. The web operates
within the internet to link informational ‘‘sites’’
rather than physical computers. It was made far
more useful in 1993, when a University of Illinois
student, Marc Andreesen, released Mosaic, the first
web browser. Mosaic, which would later become
Netscape, allowed users to find websites on the
basis of the information within them, sparking a
second growth spurt in computer connectivity. The
number of sites grew from 600 in 1993 to 1 million
in 1997. At the end of 2004, it was estimated that
there were more than 20 million sites on the web
accessible to more than 900 million people.
While the internet in its first decade was used
largely for the transmission of text (e.g., email),
both the worldwide web and the browsers designed
for it could accommodate images. At first, these
images were provided by industrial scanning equip-
ment and could only be housed within relatively
large servers. Access to images, given the computer
and modem speeds of the day, was frustratingly
slow. But the exponential increases in computer
speed and memory and the introduction of broad-
band connections during the 1990s provided an
incentive for an increasing number of images on
the web. Conversely, the growing availability of
images inspired consumers to buy ever faster com-
puters with ever larger memories and to connect
them to ever faster online services.
The startling improvements in computer speed,
capacity, and connectivity were complemented by
the advent of the digital camera. Digital imaging
techniques had been developed by NASA and a
number of independent laboratories (e.g., the
Image Processing Institute at the University of
Southern California) as early as the 1960s. But it
wasn’t until 1990 that Kodak proposed the current
set of standards for digital photography. The follow-
ing year, Kodak sold the first digital camera to
be manufactured according to those standards, a
Nikon F-3 equipped with a 1.3 megapixel sensor.
From 1994–1996, consumer digital cameras, de-
signed for interface with a home computer, were
marketed by Apple, Kodak, Casio, and Sony. Like
computers, the capacity of digital cameras increased
rapidly, while their price fell, and by the end of the
1990s, peripherals such as scanners and photo prin-
ters also became available to home consumers.
Half a decade after the convergence of digital
photography and online technologies, photography
itself is the subject of websites dedicated to a wide
variety of activities pertaining to the medium. LocalINTERNET AND PHOTOGRAPHY, THE