12 Hugely Important Moments in the History of Photography

By Jason D. Little on Lightstalking we bring you this very interesting article which briefly sums up a history of photography. Fascinating.

As humans we seem to have an insatiable need to document life — our actions, the actions of other species of animals, anything and everything around us. While the ever present, universally accessible nature of the camera in the modern world makes this all too easy, the drive to produce a permanent record of life’s meaningful — and not so meaningful — events is not at all a concept borne of recent technological achievement. Consider, for example, cave paintings dating back to 40,000 years ago, commonly depicting scenes involving wild animals and outlines of human hands. And you only have to go back to about the 4th and 5th centuries BCE to realize that the great ancient Chinese and Greek minds had already grasped the basic principles of optics and were quite familiar with the pinhole camera, or camera obscura. Unbeknownst to the ancients, their simple device would eventually give rise to what is arguably the single most compelling means of documenting our lives — photography.

What follows is a list of 12 events (out of, perhaps, thousands) that mark the technological, social, and cultural path of photography’s evolution. READ MORE HERE

Louis Daguerre: Boulevard du Temple, with unicorn by topquark22, on Flickr

‘Ur-Leica (Original Leica)’

Read this article here