Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

WHILE Niepce and Daguerre were perfecting their process, another investigator was working on similar lines, and arrived at like results by a different method. This was Henry Fox-Talbot, who is entitled to rank with the two Frenchmen as an independent discoverer in photography. Fox-Talbot was born at Laycock Abbey, Wilts, in the first year of […]

IN the meanwhile another Frenchman had been engaged in a similar line of investigation to that which had so long riveted Niepce’s attention. This was Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, to whom for many years was given the chief honor in connection with the discovery of photography. Daguerre was born at Cormeilles, a village in the […]

THE next person to take up the subject of sun-pictures, and carry it forward from the point where Wedgwood and Davy had left it was a Frenchman named Niepce. Indeed, although his name was for years eclipsed by another, there is no doubt that to Niepce belongs the largest share of the honour due for […]

NOTHING further appears to have been done in regard to photography until Thomas Wedgwood, a son of the famous potter, took up the subject, and succeeded in producing a photograph by making use of Scheele’s observations on chloride of silver. He was, however, unable to fix his pictures, which blackened and disappeared as soon as […]

PHOTOGRAPHY is the joint child of optics and chemistry. All that has been discovered about the influence of light upon the salts of silver and analogous substances might have been known, and yet, without the “dark chamber,” the art of photography would have remained non-existent. It may even be said that the prior discovery of […]

THERE was a time when the art world used to sneer at photography. They said it was going to ruin art with its crude stiff facsimiles of objects, like enough to pass for the real thing, but in truth so bald and lifeless, and moreover, in general detail, so distorted and awry as to destroy […]

IT remains to say a few words on the all-important subject of art as connected with photography. There are those. who affirm that photography is not an art, and the photographer there-fore not an artist. Well, it is certainly true that every operator with the camera and the prepared plate is not an artist; but […]

EVEN while one writes, the tale of achievement in which photography plays its part takes a new if not a surprising departure; for in these days of rapid developments in science nothing greatly surprises. The new thing is quite in the line of research wherein many recent triumphs have been won, and to which much […]

THE discovery of a process by which objects may be photographed in their natural colours has been the aim of innumerable researches, but as yet no direct method has been found. Methods based on the trichromatic process of colour analysis, which have had a considerable measure of success, are not colour photography, properly so-called. Frederick […]

IT would be difficult to name a branch of science—hardly a department of industry—that has not benefited from photography. During the sixty years that have elapsed since the announcement of the joint discovery of Niepce, Daguerre, and Fox-Talbot, light as chemist has not only broadened and deepened our sight, but has revealed to us wonder […]