Photography: the new way of making Art

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The word photography comes from the Greek and means “Writing with light”. Photography was the result of many discoveries from different inventors in diverse countries and years. The idea of trying to catch an image started more than six hundred years before photography per se was invented. It was called the Camera Obscura (dark room), and it consisted in a dark box or room with a hole in one end. Through this small hole it was possible to see an inverted image on the opposite wall.

Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre are identified as the primary inventors, even though they did just continue the work of others. Niépce and Daguerre made in the 1830s the first lasting photographic prints, and after that was photography the new and popular way of doing portraits.
Photography was rapidly adopted as a way to replace the canvas board to metal plates and the pen to the sunlight. With photography you can take a realistic picture in less than one second, which would take a good artist many days to paint. However this process was not always this fast, it took much more time to take a picture in the beginning.


Niépce produced in 1827 a successful picture using a material that became hard when exposed to light; it took up to eight hours of exposure to get the picture! Daguerre invented later a way to reduce the time to “just” 30 minutes, and discovered that the image would stay permanent by submerging it in salt.

The new technique became public on August 19th 1839. The fact that you could make a portrait with a machine became popular with the catchphrases “You do not need to know how to paint…” and “It takes less than one hour…” However it was not welcomed by everyone. For some people the birth of photography predicted the end of painting, drawing, lithography, engravings, and prints. Many artists were confident that a machine could never make a work of art. Even the church was against the fact that a machine tried to fix the image of God, and said it was evil. Despite its “enemies”, its popularity did not stop, and with the years photography became faster, cheaper, and therefore more accessible.

Nowadays, taking pictures is something everybody knows how to do; you do not need to be a professional photographer to take a good photo. It has become one of the best ways of maintaining personal memories, and it is appreciated in the world of Art. The technique is improving everyday, now it is faster, easier and better than it was in the beginning. You do not need to be carrying around a big and heavy camera, with today’s small digital cameras or the ones on cell phones you can be ready to take a good picture wherever you are. You can catch a moment in its perfection and save it forever.

In conclusions this everyday improving technique has changed Art. Artist use it to capture a model or a moment they want to get on canvas later and photography per se has become a way of expressing art.

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