HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

The first permanent was an image produced in 1826 by the  inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce. His photographs were produced on a polished  plate , which he then dissolved in white petroleum. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a positive image with light regions of hardened bitumen and dark regions of bare pewter.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce

The daguerreo type proved popular in response to the demand that emerged from the middle classes. This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the development of photography. In 1847,designed a bellows camera which significantly improved the process of focusing. This adaptation influenced the design of cameras for decades and is still found in use today in some professional cameras. While in Paris, Levitsky would become the first to introduce interchangeable decorative backgrounds in his photos, as well as the retouching of negatives to reduce or eliminate technical deficiencies. Levitsky was also the first photographer to portray a photo of a person in different poses and even in different clothes (for example, the subject plays the piano and listens to himself.

By 1849, images captured by Levitsky on a mission to the Caucasus, were exhibited by the famous Parisian optician Chevalier at the Paris Exposition of the Second Republic as an advertisement of their lenses. These photos would receive the Exposition's gold medal; the first time a prize of its kind had ever been awarded to a photograph. In 1851, at an exhibition in Paris, Levitsky would win the first ever gold medal awarded for a portrait photograph.

Oldest photographic portraits

In 1884 Eastmen Geogre, developed dry gel on paper and film to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's codak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the codak brownie.

 Brownie is the name of a long-running popular series of simple and camera inexpensive made by Eastman's codak . The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the low price, point and shot and hand held camera. The brownie camera was a simple, black, rectangular box covered in imitation leather with nickeled fittings. 

Brownie bullet camera