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Thus began a long era of popular photography made possible by the cheap production of cameras and efficient processing and printing of film. Kodak’s line of Brownie box cameras, first released in 1900 and priced at one dollar, made photography truly available to the broad public. When the 100-exposure roll provided with the camera had been exposed, the whole apparatus was returned to Eastman’s factory, where the paper rollfilm was developed and printed, the camera reloaded and returned to the customer ‘You press the button, we do the rest’ was his slogan” (quite a bit easier than the painstaking process of creating a daguerreotype or a glass-plate negative). Pivotal in the development of amateur photography, George Eastman’s Kodak cameras, which hit the market in 1888, were “designed for the general public, who had only to point it in the right direction and release the shutter. It would be a few decades before new processes and equipment brought the making of photographs to the masses. These early practitioners were either professionals with studios or “ skilled amateurs” – often wealthy individuals who took up photography as a fashionable hobby. Portrait of Unidentified Daguerreotypist, 1845, Daguerreotype, hand-colored. Unknown maker, American, daguerreotypist. It seems that from photography’s earliest days, there has been a natural tendency for photographers to turn the camera toward themselves.
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Although the daguerreotype was eventually replaced by other techniques (notwithstanding a 21st-century revival by Chuck Close), self-portraiture has remained one of the most interesting genres in photo history. In a fine example of this type, Albert Sands Southworth, of the firm Southworth and Hawes, showed himself as a classical sculpted portrait bust, with a far-off, romantic expression. The other type of self-portrait seems to have been the photographer’s attempt to situate photography as a fine art, a novel idea during the era of early photography. As portrait photographers competed for customers, these images demonstrated the photographer’s ability to capture a flattering likeness with his technical skill and his eye for setting and pose.
#HISTORY OF PORTRAITURE TIMELINE PROFESSIONAL#
In the first type, which had a long tradition in painted portraits and self-portraits, the subject poses with a camera or a set of photographs, showing him as a professional of his trade.
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Many early self-portraits fall into two general categories. Self-Portrait with a Daguerreotype of Geneva, about 1847, Daguerreotype, hand-colored. Jean-Gabriel Eynard, daguerreotypist (Swiss, 1775 – 1863). Among these are some exquisite self-portraits, including what may have been the first daguerreotype made in America, the self-portrait of the Philadelphia metalworker-turned-photographer Robert Cornelius. Portraits were the most commonly produced type of photographs in the first decades of photography, comprising an estimated 95% of surviving daguerreotypes. The very first portraits, especially those produced by the daguerreian process were treasured for their ability to capture the aspects of facial appearance that constitute family resemblance.” Invented by the French painter Louis Daguerre in the late 1830s, daguerreotypes, with their “cold, mirror-like appearance” were well-suited to capturing exacting likenesses of sitters. Robert Cornelius, self-portrait Library of Congress Prints and Photographs DivisionĪccording to the Grove Art Online entry on photography, “Perhaps the most popular form of early photography was the portrait. But a tradition of self-portraiture in photography is as old as the medium, and the popularity of amateur photography only slightly less so. Selfie– the Oxford Word of the Year for 2013 – is a neologism defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” The emergence of this phenomenon a few years ago was therefore dependent on advances in digital photography and mobile phone technology, as well as the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, among other sites, which supply an outlet and audience for the photos.