TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY: History of Travel Photography

Joseph Niepce

The oldest image produced by a camera was taken in 1825 by Joseph Niepce who captured a street scene in the East of France (Saint Loup de la Varennes).

taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

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This picture is the oldest surviving travel photo captured with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of

20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. As a result of the 8-hour exposure, sunlight illuminates the buildings on both sides.

· 1839 in Paris, Louis Jacques Daguerre introduced a photographic process called the “Daguerrotype”. It is a complicated process that required a lot of equipments and chemicals (amalgam or alloy, of mercury and silver), but however was still accepted quickly.

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Each Daguerrotype are unique and record scenes with very good detail. It allowed people to travel with camera.

taken by Louis Daguerre

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The first owners photographed their local area like Notre Dame Cathedral, the river Seine and le Pont Neuf.

The appeal of photography was obvious to travellers in the 19th as it is today.

Daguerre suggested himself that his camera could be taken on a trip.
But that wasn't that simple!

The travelling photographer had to carry with him a portable darkroom including enough chemical to have a mini laboratory.

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A portable darkroom in 19th century Ireland

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process which became a standard photographic process until 1880.

Here is a video explaining about the collodion process :

This new process reduced the exposure time to only 2 second , compared to the daguerrotype and colotype.
(Calotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide)

However this did not help many travel photographers in their task.
In the 1850s the standard photographer outfit was the large sized camera, tripod, glass plates, plate holders, a tent like portable darkroom,chemicals, tanks, water containers ...
Photographers carted their equipment around the world.

19 century pictures:

Collodion print from a negative taken by Francis Frith. The Great Wall of China 1860

Grand Canyon, America

Benasares India

In the mid 1800s, pictures taken for scientific purposes were of great interest to people in general and with the help of the collodion process reproduction of photographs became convenient.

With the invention of the printing press, photography became commercialized as the demand due to tourism increased. However, this new era of photography was not accepted well by the purists who debated that commercialization had spoiled the craft.

According to sources, the first postcard was introduced by the Austrian postal service in 1869.

The world first postcard

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In 1910, France printed 123 million postcards and the world's mail systems processed around 7 billion in the same year.

By the end of the 19th century tourists could take their own pictures. In 1888, George Eastman, the founder of Kodak invented a camera using a roll of film.

He launched the first point in shoot with the now famous slogan.. "You press the button, we do the rest". The camera came loaded with a 100 exposure film and a memorandum book that had to be filled in to keep count of the photos. When the film was finished the camera was posted back to the factory. The camera was written with the films and loaded with a fresh film. In the first year Eastman sold 13000 cameras.

Further refinements saw the introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera in 1900, which made the photography process accessible to millions of people around the world.

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Photography had become a mass medium and tourists were traveling with small and easy to use camera. According to some, by the start of the 20th century the world has been photographed to death.

Reference : Lonely planet, travel photography, 3rd edition, august 2009

Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron,(8 December 1837–31 August 1920),was the French pionner of color photography,he developed a process for color photography on the three-color principle.