History of Photography

On Monday, our Introduction to Digital Media Class received a lecture on the history of photography. This lecture was especially interesting because the most I know about developing pictures is loading them onto the computer and then sending them to CVS to have them print them out. I had no idea how many different kinds of processes existed t
o develop and take pictures. Apart from the images themselves, the processes take on their own kind of art-form that can be manipulated to the artists imagination.

One of the processes that we discussed during class was the Bromoil Process. The Bromoil Process is when a normally developed print on silver bromide paper is chemically bleached and hardened. The gelatin with the darkest tones are then hardened the most and the highlights are absorbed into the paper. This kind of process was popular among the pictorialists in the early twentieth century even though the technique usually left

the picture rather fuzzy or out of focus.

Although these techniques were most commonly used a long time ago, you can still find people using any of these old processes today to make their pictures one of a kind. Thom Harrel is a photographer that still uses the Bromoil process in his art and this is and example of his work. His webiste can be found here: http://home.earthlink.net/~trans40/photography/