Photography went from a single silvered plate that needed minutes of sunlight, made public in 1839, to a phone that merges a burst of frames before you lower your hand. In between came the paper negative, wet and dry glass plates, roll film, color, the 35mm camera, the single-lens reflex, instant prints, autofocus and the digital sensor. Each step made pictures faster, cheaper, smaller or easier to copy, and each changed who could make them.
This page follows the tools in order and asks of each one: what did it change for the person making the picture? It goes further than the short timeline in the history of photography by tying each date to working conditions, and it leaves the artistic arguments to photography movements and the ideas behind them. Where historians dispute a date or a first, the text says so. A table near the end helps you identify old pictures by process.
Before 1839: the camera obscura and the first fixed image
The optical half of photography is ancient. A camera obscura is a dark room or box with a small hole in one side; light passing through the hole forms an upside-down image on the opposite surface. By the 1500s a lens in place of the hole made the image brighter, and artists used portable versions as drawing aids. The hard part was chemical: making that image record itself and then stay.
The oldest surviving photograph made in a camera is by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. In 1826 or 1827 (the date is not settled) he coated a pewter plate with bitumen, an asphalt that hardens where light strikes it, exposed it in a camera at an upstairs window of his house at Le Gras, and washed away the unhardened parts. The exposure took at least several hours and, by some estimates, days.
What it changed: nothing practical yet. A day of sun can record a rooftop and nothing that moves. But it proved a camera image could be kept, and it set the two problems everyone afterward worked on: speed and permanence.
The daguerreotype: one sharp picture on a silver plate
Niépce became partners in 1829 with Louis Daguerre, a Paris painter and showman, and died in 1833. Daguerre carried on with different chemistry. A copper plate faced with silver was polished to a mirror, made sensitive with iodine fumes and exposed in the camera. The plate then showed nothing at all. Held over heated mercury, the invisible (latent) image appeared within minutes, and a chemical bath fixed it. The method was announced to the French Academy of Sciences in January 1839 and published in full that August, which is why 1839 is the usual date for photography’s public arrival.
A daguerreotype is extremely sharp, and it is a one-off. There is no negative: the plate that sat in the camera is the picture, normally reversed left to right, and so delicate that it was sealed under glass in a small case. The first exposures ran to many minutes. Daguerre’s 1838 view of the Boulevard du Temple shows a busy Paris street as empty because the traffic moved too fast to register; a man who stood still to have his boots polished is usually cited as the first person to appear in a photograph.
What it changed: within about two years, faster lenses and more sensitive plates brought exposures under a minute, and portrait studios opened in cities across Europe and the United States. An ordinary family could own an exact likeness, provided the sitter held still.
The calotype and the negative that could be printed again
In England, William Henry Fox Talbot had worked separately since 1834, coating writing paper with salt and silver nitrate. He made images by laying lace and leaves on the paper in sunlight, then with small box cameras; his 1835 picture of a latticed window at Lacock Abbey is the oldest surviving camera negative. Hearing of Daguerre in January 1839, he showed his own results in London that same month.
In 1841 he patented an improved process, the calotype, in which a short exposure left a latent image to be developed chemically. Exposures fell to about a minute or less in good light. More important was the principle. The camera produced a paper negative with the tones reversed, and pressing it against a second sensitized sheet in sunlight gave a positive, as many times as wanted. Film photography ran on that negative-positive idea for the next century and a half. Calotype prints are softer than daguerreotypes because the paper fibers of the negative print along with the image.
The astronomer John Herschel supplied missing pieces. He showed that sodium thiosulfate (“hypo”) dissolves unused silver salts and so fixes the image, and in 1842 he devised the cyanotype, the blue print made with iron salts. The botanist Anna Atkins used it from 1843 to record seaweeds by contact, in what is generally counted as the first book illustrated with photographic images.
Can you still make a picture the way Talbot and Atkins did, with no camera? Photograms and camera-less photography covers sun prints on cyanotype paper, the darkroom version, choosing objects and testing exposure with a strip.
What it changed: a photograph became something that could be published, posted to relatives and pasted into a book, and the work split into two stages, exposing and printing.
Wet collodion and albumen: glass negatives and the studio boom
In 1851 the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer published, and did not patent, a process with the sharpness of the silver plate and the reproducibility of paper. A sheet of glass was coated with collodion, a syrupy liquid carrying iodide salts, dipped in silver nitrate, exposed for a few seconds while still wet and developed at once. A plate that dried lost most of its sensitivity, so the whole cycle had to be finished in minutes. The negatives were printed on albumen paper, coated with egg white to hold the image on a slightly glossy surface, and that pairing was the standard photograph from the 1850s to the 1890s.
The price was logistics. Away from the studio, a photographer needed a darkroom beside the camera. Roger Fenton took a converted wine merchant’s van to the Crimean War in 1855. Prints were made by contact, so a big print needed an equally big negative and a camera to match.
Collodion had cheap one-off forms too. An ambrotype is a thin negative on glass that looks positive against a dark backing; a tintype is the same idea on a sheet of blackened iron. The carte de visite, patented in Paris in 1854, put several small portraits on one plate, each mounted on a card about 2.5 by 4 inches. Around 1860 exchanging them became a craze, and albums were sold to hold them.
What it changed: photography became an industry with standard sizes and low prices. The plates responded mainly to blue light, so skies burned out to white; the blank skies in many 19th-century landscapes are a property of the plate, not the weather.
Dry plates, roll film and the snapshot
In 1871 the English physician Richard Leach Maddox proposed replacing collodion with silver bromide suspended in gelatin. Others improved the idea, and by about 1880 factories were selling boxed dry plates that kept for months and were far more sensitive than wet collodion. The dark tent disappeared, because plates could be developed weeks later. Exposures dropped to fractions of a second, so cameras gained shutters and could be held in the hand.
George Eastman, a plate maker in Rochester, took this to its conclusion. His Kodak camera of 1888 was a small box sold already loaded for 100 exposures. When the roll was finished the whole camera went back to the factory, which returned the prints and the camera reloaded. The first Kodaks used a paper-backed film; transparent film on a celluloid base followed in 1889. In 1900 the Brownie box camera went on sale for one dollar.
What it changed: the photographer no longer had to be a chemist. Pictures turned casual (children, picnics, pets, holidays), and the snapshot dates from here. Gelatin papers were also sensitive enough for enlarging, so a small negative could give a large print, which made small cameras worth building.
Color: from the autochrome to color film
For decades a color photograph meant a monochrome print tinted by hand. The first color process to sell widely was the autochrome, patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903 and marketed from 1907. A glass plate carried microscopic grains of potato starch dyed orange-red, green and blue-violet over a black-and-white emulsion. Each grain filtered the light reaching the emulsion and, after processing to a positive, colored the light coming back out. The result is a unique transparency with a soft, grainy look. The grains absorbed so much light that exposures ran to a second or more in sunshine, so it was a tripod process.
Color film as later generations knew it stacked several emulsion layers, each forming its own dye. Kodachrome went on sale in 1935 as home movie film and in 1936 as 35mm slide film; color negative film for paper prints followed in the early 1940s. Family pictures did not become mostly color until the 1960s and 1970s.
What it changed: color became a property of the film you chose, each with its own palette, and processing moved almost entirely to laboratories.
Wondering what shooting film involves today? Film photography covers film formats, choosing a film stock, camera types, loading, metering, developing and scanning.
35mm, the rangefinder and the single-lens reflex
Oskar Barnack, an engineer at the Leitz optical works in Germany, built a prototype still camera before the First World War that ran 35mm cinema film sideways, giving a frame of 24 by 36 millimeters, twice the movie frame. Leitz sold it from 1925 as the Leica. A roll held up to 36 exposures and the camera fitted a coat pocket.
Compact and portable compared with the plate cameras of the era, it let photographers follow events as they unfolded and work unnoticed. Photojournalism and the street work of Henri Cartier-Bresson grew out of it, and the 24 by 36 frame is still the reference that full-frame digital sensors are named after.
A Leica was framed through a separate window, so the photographer never saw exactly what the lens saw. The single-lens reflex (SLR) uses a mirror behind the lens to send the image up to a focusing screen, then swings it out of the way for the exposure. Making that quick to use in 35mm took a pentaprism for an upright view at eye level (late 1940s) and a mirror that returned by itself after each shot (1954). The Nikon F of 1959 combined them in a rugged system of interchangeable lenses and became a favorite among professionals. During the 1960s SLRs began measuring light through the lens itself, so metering allowed for whatever lens or filter was fitted, and automatic exposure followed.
What it changed: one body could take any lens and show the exact framing before the shutter fired, and the camera began making some of the technical decisions.
Instant film and autofocus: shorter waits, fewer misses
Edwin Land demonstrated one-step photography in 1947, and the first Polaroid camera went on sale late in 1948. After the exposure, rollers spread a pod of chemicals between the negative and a receiving sheet, and about a minute later the user peeled off a finished print. Instant color followed in 1963, and in 1972 the SX-70 introduced a print that ejects from the camera and develops in daylight with nothing to peel. For the first time the result existed while the subject was still there. Instant film photography explains how the film works.
Focusing was the last manual skill to be automated. The first mass-produced autofocus compact appeared in 1977, and in 1985 the Minolta 7000 became the first widely successful autofocus SLR. By the 1990s a pocket camera could set exposure, focus, fire a flash and wind the film unaided. Current systems are covered under autofocus.
What it changed: sharp pictures of moving subjects stopped depending on years of practice with a focusing ring.
The digital sensor, then the phone
From a laboratory chip to the camera bag
The charge-coupled device (CCD), a chip that turns light into electrical charge, was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1969. In 1975 Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, built what is generally accepted as the first self-contained digital camera: a toaster-sized prototype that took 23 seconds to record a black-and-white image of 100 by 100 pixels onto cassette tape.
Products took longer. The first digital SLR sold commercially, in 1991, paired a 1.3 megapixel sensor with a professional film camera body and a separate storage unit carried on a shoulder strap. Consumer cameras with a screen on the back arrived in the mid 1990s, and in the early 2000s digital cameras began to outsell film cameras. In 2008 the first mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera removed the reflex mirror and showed the sensor’s live image instead.
What it changed: one more frame cost nothing, so people experimented more. The picture could be checked on the spot. Sensitivity and color balance became settings changed from shot to shot, not properties of the roll loaded that morning.
What happens between light reaching the chip and a file being saved? How image sensors work covers the path from light to electrons, CMOS versus CCD, the Bayer filter, pixel size against pixel count and sensor size.
The camera in the phone
Phones with built-in cameras went on sale in Japan and South Korea around 2000; which model counts as the first depends on the definition used. The touchscreen smartphones that followed from 2007 added a large display, editing apps and a permanent connection for sharing.
A phone’s lens and sensor collect far less light than a dedicated camera’s, and makers answered with processing. In computational photography the phone captures a burst of frames and merges them: several exposures blended to hold bright skies and dark shadows (the idea behind HDR), many frames averaged at night, and a depth estimate used to blur backgrounds in portrait modes.
What it changed: nearly everyone carries a camera all the time, and the photograph is assembled by software from many exposures. Where to stand, what to include and when to press remain the photographer’s decisions.
Telling the main processes apart
Each process left objects that look and feel different, which is what makes old pictures datable.
| What you are holding | In common use | How to recognize it |
|---|---|---|
| Daguerreotype | 1839 to about 1860 | Silvered metal plate under glass in a case; mirror-like, and the image flips between positive and negative as you tilt it |
| Ambrotype | Mid 1850s to mid 1860s | Glass, in a similar case; looks positive from every angle, with no mirror effect |
| Tintype | 1856 to the early 1900s | Thin sheet of iron (a magnet sticks); dark, with gray highlights instead of white |
| Carte de visite | About 1860 to the 1880s | Brownish albumen print pasted on a card about 2.5 by 4 inches, often with the studio’s name |
| Cabinet card | Late 1860s to about 1900 | The same on a larger card, about 4.25 by 6.5 inches |
| Black-and-white snapshot | 1890s to the 1960s | Thin paper print with neutral gray to black tones, often with a white border |
| Color print | 1940s onward, the family norm from the 1960s | Dye image, often faded with a color shift |
| Integral instant print | 1972 onward | Thick sealed print with a white frame that is deeper along the bottom edge |
The process gives an earliest possible date and a likely range, not a year. Clothing, a studio address printed on the mount and the ages of known relatives narrow it further.
Common mistakes
- “One man invented photography in 1839.” Fix: 1839 is the year two processes were made public. Niépce had fixed a camera image more than a decade earlier, Talbot had negatives in 1835, and others, Hippolyte Bayard in France among them, had working methods of their own that year.
- “Nobody smiled because exposures took minutes.” Fix: that applies only to the first year or two. Studio portraits took seconds from the early 1840s. Serious faces owe more to the conventions of formal portraiture and the occasion of a rare, paid sitting.
- “Old photographs were black and white.” Fix: few are neutral gray. Daguerreotypes are silvery, albumen prints brown to purple, cyanotypes blue, and many portraits were tinted by hand.
- “Eastman invented film in 1888.” Fix: 1888 is the Kodak camera and its processing service. Transparent flexible film came the following year, and who invented it was disputed in court.
- “Digital photography began in the 1990s.” Fix: the sensor dates from 1969 and the first digital camera prototype from 1975, built inside a film company. The 1990s are when digital cameras reached shops.
- “Photographs could not be altered before computers.” Fix: from the 1850s photographers printed skies from a second negative, combined several negatives into one staged scene and retouched portrait negatives by hand.
Try this
Date one family photograph in fifteen minutes. Pick the oldest picture you can find and leave it in its case, mount or album page. First, decide what the image sits on: metal, glass, thick card or thin paper. If it looks like dark metal, hold a small magnet near the back; a pull means a tintype. Second, measure the card or print and compare it with the table above. Third, note the color of the image (silvery, brown, neutral gray or dye color). Fourth, read the back and the bottom edge of the mount for a studio name, a town or a pencil note. Write the date range you arrive at on the envelope or sleeve, never on the picture.
Nobody wrote a date on the back? How to organize and preserve a family photo archive covers dating photos when nobody wrote the date down, naming people and recording stories in the files.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented photography?
No single person. Niépce made the earliest surviving camera photograph in 1826 or 1827, Daguerre’s process was the first to be published and widely used, in 1839, and Talbot independently invented the negative-positive method that later photography was built on.
What is the oldest photograph?
The oldest surviving photograph from a camera is Niépce’s view from a window at Le Gras, on a pewter plate, dated 1826 or 1827. The oldest surviving camera negative is Talbot’s latticed window at Lacock Abbey, from 1835.
When was the first color photograph taken?
It depends what counts. A three-filter projection demonstrated by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861 is often called the first color photograph. The first color process sold widely was the autochrome in 1907, and multi-layer color film arrived in 1935.
When did digital cameras replace film?
Gradually. The first prototype dates from 1975 and the first commercial digital SLR from 1991, and digital cameras began to outsell film cameras in the early 2000s. Film is still manufactured and used.
Related guides
- The history of photography: a shorter timeline with the key figures.
- Photography movements: Pictorialism, straight photography and the ideas that followed the tools.
- Louis Daguerre: the Diorama, the partnership with Niépce and the plates of the late 1830s.
- William Henry Fox Talbot: the inventor of the negative and his book The Pencil of Nature.
- How image sensors work: the chip that replaced film, explained.
- Computational photography: multi-frame capture, night mode and portrait mode.