History of Photography
© Niepce
In this course, the History of Photography will be explored beginning with inventions that lead up to the fixing of a permanent image: the camera obscura and experiments with silver salts and light. Students will get a chance to use a small camera obscura. The early inventors of photographic processes were painters or entrepreneurs and often stumbled upon their discoveries. The lives of Niepce, Daguerre, Talbot and Bayard will be revealed as students look at daguerreotypes from the 1850s. Next, we’ll examine the styles of master portrait photographers Mathew Brady of New York and Nadar of Paris. The invention of the wet plate collodion process will include the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron, and landscapes by Gustave Le Gray and Carleton Watkins. Ambrotypes using wet plates from the 1860s will provide hands-on history lessons. We’ll also look at tintypes, carte-des-visites, cabinet cards, and stereoscopes.
The exploration of motion by Muybridge and Marey provides a fascinating introduction to the beginnings of motion pictures. We will continue our historical journey into Pictorialism and the works of Brigman, Coburn, Stieglitz, and Steichen. Advances lead to the Autochrome, the first commercially available color process. Next we’ll view works by the Modernists and New Vision photographers and the Group f. 64: Adams, Weston, and Cunningham. With the introduction of smaller handheld cameras, photojournalism takes off in the works of Eisenstandt, Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and Bourke-White. The evolution of social documentation by Hine, Lange, Parks, Iturbide, and Salgado comes next. We’ll end with the great portrait photographers of the fashion magazines, Penn, Avedon, and Leibovitz.
Blue Fier (www.bluefier.com) is a photographer specializing in the vigorous field of location photography. He has photographed numerous advertising campaigns for major corporations, specializing in panoramic images of people and products in exotic environments. He has two master’s degrees in Art (M.A. from Cal State University, Northridge and a M.F.A. from UCLA) that have given him the background to explore the history of photography. His unique perspective as a working photographer and years of creating order out of chaos has lead to his recently published book, Composition Photo Workshop, now available wherever books are sold. Blue teaches at Santa Monica College and currently resides in Los Angeles.
