Photography reaching new heights

When photography tool the shape of a portable picture snap shot with the help of colour, the digital age has come and the possibilities were virtually endless, one could take as many pictures as desired given they have enough plates, paper or glass, it was even on the screen and one could store them for a very long time. The photographic industry and development reach its peak with the invention of the camera phone and the new camera that marked a new age for the photographic industry to eventually become something that is an art.

In 1924, the first 35mm camera was invented and it allowed for the manual use without the tripod, but in the 1949, the first SLR camera was invented and it became the standard for professional photography for a while. The first digitally scanned image came in 1957 and in 1963; people got the Polaroid camera that changed the photography industry forever. With the added light feature, once no longer had to rely on light coming from a source, the light is there with the camera at all time. The autofocus camera also came to include the same feature of the flash light and it changed the game, photography was then very easy and it was picked up as a hobby, some theorized the art of photography at the time in the book in the 80s such as Wilderness to wasteland by David T. Hanson, doubles life, The Americans, Looking at photographs, Man Ray, why people photograph, and so many other crucial books that have helped make photography the huge industry that it is today.

In 2004, digital cameras have become more popular and everything changed, DSLR cameras took shape, and the new technologies have started to fuse with the camera. AI merged with camera just recently in 2016 making it a conscious camera that actively modifies the picture depending on the light and colour. Cameras have become more sophisticated as they started to produce more frames per the second, images were more real and lifelike, high quality and high definition images started to become the norm, and now one can even take videos and choose whatever frame as a picture.

This was also the height of the picture theory, one of the pioneers of picture theory, Mitchell has stated in his book “ what is an image”: “The expressive aspect of imagery may, of course, become such a predominant presence that the image becomes totally abstract and ornamental, representing neither figures nor space but simply presenting its own material and formal elements. The abstract image may seem at first glance to have escaped from the realm of representation and verbal eloquence, leaving behind both figural mimesis and literary features like narrative or allegory”.

The age of the internet has also come and it changed everything in the photographic landscape, photography became about fascination, experiencing different settings at once, calming and soothing. The age of the 21st century marked the age of professional Journalism where form and meaning were something that is critical, form and meaning were also intermingled with the formalism and realism debate in cinema during the 20th century with Russian formalism exploring new ways capturing moving image can be made. The colouring itself was not actually full scale, it was actually just dots that if seen by the naked eye, it looks normal, but once someone looks in with a loop, they could see dots of colour the same way that most digital screens operate such as TVs and iphones work.

The importance of the photographic medium in this process cannot be overstated: a combination of memory work and photography brings something entirely distinctive to the methods and findings of cultural memory research.

The power of this combination stems, I would argue, from the very everydayness of photography – from the ways photography and photographs figure in most people’s daily lives and in the apparently ordinary stories we tell about ourselves and those closest to us (Hirsch 1997).

This, combined with the capacity of the still photographic image to ‘freeze’ a moment in time, lends extraordinary impact to an apparently ordinary medium. (Bazin 1971; Barthes 1984)

As commonplace material artefacts, family photographs and albums contain meanings, and also seem infinitely capable of generating new ones at the point at which photography and memory work meet.” (Kuhn, A. 2007)

The development of photography one could see it as something that was developed mechanically an through invention, but what truly helped the history of photography develop is the growing passion for it to grow, photographers now to it for granted that people had to experiment with sliver salts and chemicals, while the industry would have never been as big today had it not been for that growing luring need to capture images one sees every day in their lives. Photography represents a wide range of interests, holding a camera makes you see the world in its purest and most true form, it makes you see the art in something that regular people regard as mundane or boring, but with the right skills and passion, a photographer can take the history and innovation that has been granted to them and capture the moment, a picture worth a thousand words, a still frames that speaks for days and decades.