History of Photography Timeline
● Ancient times: Camera obscura used to form images on walls in darkened rooms;
image formation via a pinhole.
● 1826: Niépce creates a permanent image
● 1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in
silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution.
● 1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide
and "developed" with warmed mercury.
● 1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system
involving 3 black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter.
● 1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing
7000 negatives. .
● 1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's
four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by
time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse.
● 1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester,
New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper.
● 1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced. First model sold for $1 and
brought photography to the “masses.”
● 1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City
● 1906: J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the
North American Indian.
● 1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere
brothers in France
● 1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children
working mills.
● 1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the
first high quality 35mm camera.
● 1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were
made in the same camera under different filters; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham,
Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64.
● 1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit
● 1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition
to film.
● 1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker
would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural
hardships over the next six years
● 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development
of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
● 1941-1945: World War II:
o Development of multi-layer color negative films
o Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover
the war for LIFE magazine
● 1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the
photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
● 1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale;
Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and
white film
● 1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's MOMA.
● 1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City.
● 1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first
purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
● 1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters: "The
Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the first working CCD-based digital still
camera
● 1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William
Eggleston's Guide
● 1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox
spy camera)
● 1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the
US); In the American West by Richard Avedon
● 1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new all-electronic lens mount
● 1990: Adobe Photoshop released.
● 1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3
● 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a
leading manufacturer.
● 2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone
● 2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt
● 2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with the Olympus E-1;
Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000
● 2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras
● 2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR offered for $3000.
● 2006: Both Nikon and Canon stop producing film cameras.
