1. What are the main differences and similarities between portraits in the early days of photography and portraits today?
The early day’s portraits were made basically for the higher status people. Due to the high cost not everyone can have their portraits. The early days pictures were taken in black and white they were not made of the colourful portraits nowadays. The early portraits were mostly made for the rich and powerful. Over the time it becomes more powerful between the middle class patrons to commission portraits of their families and colleagues. Today the portrait can be discovered by anyone in the family with the help of many new photographers and picture maker. Photography was probably an inevitable invention – the surprise was that it took so long for it to develop, especially given that the scientific principles that are responsible for it – physical principles such as our understanding of lens and optics and chemical processes that are required to affix permanent images, have actually been known for long before the invention of the first photograph.
2. Who was the photographer and who was the subject of photographs in the past and today?
In the early days there were not much photographers. In 1839, Robert Cornelius, a Dutch chemist who immigrated to Philadelphia, took a daguerreotype portrait of himself outside of his family’s store and made history he made the world’s first human photograph! This self-portrait of Robert Cornelius is one of the first photographs of a human to be produced.
Robert Cornelius he began working for his father specializing in silver plating and metal polishing. He became so well renowned for his work, that shortly after, Cornelius was approached by Joseph Saxton to create a silver plate for his daguerreotype of Central High School in Philadelphia. It was this meeting that sparked Cornelius' interest in photography.
3. What was the impact of technology on the portraits in the past and today?
As we all know the impact of photography in this century. Photography is truly the most pervasive. Here the effect that photography has had on 20th century society will be discussed in four distinct areas: amateur photography (making everyone a photographer), advertising photography (creating desire in the public), journalistic/editorial photography (informing and entertaining the public), and documentary photography (recording the lives of real groups of people).
To imagine a social world before photography, we would have to think of a world without picture IDs; without portraits of ordinary people, one without pictures as souvenirs of travel; one without celebrity pictures; one without advertising photographs and one in which the great masses of people had no way to visually document the important events of their lives.
The technology of photography is part chemical, part optical, and dates from 1839. Soon after its simultaneous invention by William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in France, photography was used to document foreign places of interest such as India, the Holy Land, and the American West. It was also used for portraits with photographs taken of kings, statesman, and theatre or literary personalities.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/images/talbot_william_henry_fox.jpg
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