Kodak Brownie - concept of the snapshot

Brownie is the name of a long-running popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm. 

With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, hence the slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest."

Brownies were extensively marketed to children, with Kodak using them to popularise photography. They were also taken to war by soldiers. Because they were so ubiquitous, many iconic shots were taken on brownies.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787 –1851)

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787 –1851) 

He was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter and a developer of the diorama theatre.

 "Boulevard du Temple", taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, includes the earliest known candid photograph of a person. The image shows a street, but because of the over ten-minute exposure time the moving traffic does not appear. At the lower left, however, a man apparently having his boots polished, and the bootblack polishing them, were motionless enough for their images to be captured.

 Shells and Fossils 1839, by LOUIS JACQUES MANDE DAGUERRE

The first daguerrotype , method which first gave the world the joy of photography

William Henry Talbot (1800 –1877)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 –1877)

He was a British scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure.

He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature, which was illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives, and made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.

WILLIAM  HENRY FOX TALBOT (1800-1877)

The first paper negative, the most popular photographic procedure up the appearance of digital photography in 1835

The Open Door, 1844

The origin of this photography was artistic incompetence. On his honeymoon in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to sketch the Italian countryside. He was assisted by a camera lucida, a device that projected the landscape onto a sheet of paper, but his untutored hand couldn’t follow the contours. So he conjured a means to record scenery chemically. He dubbed it “the art of photogenic drawing”, and in the 1840s popularised his invention with a book called The Pencil of Nature.

Lady Filmer (1838–1903)

Lady Mary Georgina Filmer (1838–1903) was an early proponent of the art of photographic collage.

A Victorian socialite, Lady Filmer produced several albums consisting of watercolour scenes decorated with photomontages.

The Pastime of Victorian Cutups, “Playing With Pictures” refreshes our appreciation of the essential fuzziness of art history and of the collective, even osmotic nature of invention.

Cutout photographs into the albums of watercolors, sketches and writing that had long been an approved female leisure activity. Their hybrid medium was stimulated by an advance in photography: the invention of the carte-de-visite process, which was patented by the French photographer André Disdéri in 1854. A precursor of the photo-booth technique, it essentially democratized photography with small, cheap, multiple portraits, creating a rage for collecting and exchanging these so-called cartes de visite that came to be known as cardomania.

At the same time the cutting up and collaging of photographs devised by these women was a way of rising above cardomania by reversing the mechanical impersonality of photography and re-establishing it within handmade, time-consuming, implicitly upper-class works.

Needless to say, the photocollage approach brought a new specificity and bite to the homemade album format, creating richly freighted social and personal artifacts. Women could celebrate their children, illustrate family trees, demonstrate social connections, flirt with gentlemen other than their husbands and also show flashes of wit and mischievousness that didn’t always have other outlets. Real people enter the picture and are, literally and figuratively, moved about rather like pawns on a chessboard. Stylistically too. More than once you may find yourself thinking of the abrupt Victorian-flavored credits of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

The drawing room, a remarkably common motif in photocollage albums, was the site of display for women's domestic accomplishments. Also used in many instances were borrowed backdrops which afforded collagists the opportunity to place sitters in fantastical and dramatic settings.

The theme of travel suffuses Berkeley's album; here, photographs comically decorate luggage waiting to be loaded on a train. Berkeley's treatment of the umbrella might have been inspired by caricatures in Punch magazine in which heads were often paired with unlikely bodies, or by an illustration in an 1855 pamphlet produced by an umbrella manufacturer.

Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer (English, 1838-1903), Untitled Page from the Filmer Album.

In this scene, staged in her fashionably appointed drawing room, Lady Filmer depicts herself as a collector of photographs, standing close to her albums, pot of glue and paper knife. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, (a coveted guest whose presence was an impressive coup for any society hostess), leans jauntily against the table in the center of the room. Filmer and the prince enjoyed a well-known flirtation, one that was conducted in part through the exchange of photographs, and his picture appears frequently in her album. His large figure contrasts with that of her seemingly diminutive husband, Sir Edmund Filmer, who is seated near the dog in the lower-right corner. By placing the prince next to her albums, Lady Filmer hinted that these volumes played a role in her social success and that the prince might have enjoyed her visual games.