When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I am something of a "photography genealogist" for the family. My father's half-aunt lived to be 103, never had children, and left behind a suitcase stuffed with photos — going back to a tintype of her mother from the 1880's. I was lucky the suitcase was eventually handed over to me.
That started my obsession with collecting all the family photos I could find. And starting with that suitcase, I scanned every photo and embarked on cleaning up and adjusting levels (etc.) for every interesting photo in the lot.
Sometimes a few lines of text on the back or border gave me the date or subject of the photo. Often there was nothing though. Nonetheless, I was slowly able to recognize people in the photos, associate a name to them (from also doing traditional genealogy with Ancestry.com). Stories emerged in some cases (my great grandmother's big road-trip vacation in 1925 after the divorce from her unfaithful husband, the mysterious young woman in the Denver photos that I was eventually able to trace to a teen daughter who died in Mexico, Missouri while away at music school, etc.)
And as I was able to figure out the photos, order them, I got to also see the progress of photography and cameras. The tintype and early collodion photos were all in a studio setting (perhaps a single photography studio in Kansas City in 1880? She was only a young girl, her father a farmer — he must have been putting on airs to have a studio photograph taken of his young daughter).
And then the Kodak Brownie (I assume) makes the scene by 1920 or so for the family and photos start to appear taken in the field, on the farm — no longer in studios. The quality though suffers immensely.
Better Kodaks (or similar) come into the family by the 30's and candid, amatuer photography now rivals the quality of the earlier studio photos. Somewhat.
Suddenly in the 1950's square color photos appear in the collection and the quality is actually some of the worst of all the family photos. So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital.
Instead I would rather it be accessible to other relatives that may not be aware of the photos (or are yet to be born).
They sell access to what others have contributed freely, sometimes they even sell you your own information back to you. For instance, if you want to use the birth and death dates, sources etc. that you've laboriously entered into a MyHeritage tree in Geni, you need a Geni Pro account. (Geni is owned by MyHeritage).
I think that of the three big American options, FamilySearch is best. Yes, it's the Mormons, and they do have an ulterior motive in their "baptism of the dead" thing, but they don't charge, they have an excellent transcribed source repository, free text search of machine-learning OCRd source documents, and actually smart matching. I'm glad their tithes pay for a state of the art genealogy research platform, I can think of a lot worse things it could have gone to!
They're also, interestingly enough, the least Anglo-biased: they don't give a child their father's last name by default, for instance.
The main downside is that they don't have any DNA features.
Can you explain why color film would be a tradeoff against fast lenses? Can't you use the exact same lens with color or B&W? Or what you mean by "traded film for color"? After all, color film existed decades before digital.
I don't know. I only observe the quality fall off when color arrives. Worse, I am not even sure. that my mom's 35mm camera (Canon AE-1) in the 70's shot as good and crisp photos as the B&W cameras in the family in the 40's (before she was born though).
The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image.
And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.
...of course many photographers have wept because a photograph wasn't sharp.
Maybe perceptually - due to stronger contrast and perhaps also the fact that B&W film often comes in higher speeds and probably incurs less motion blur of the subject overall.
But I don't think it's actually objectively sharper per se?
The most common frame size used in 120 is a 6x6cm square, especially in consumer cameras of the time. 6x6 cameras stayed popular for snapshots because they could be contact printed straight from the negative, without an enlarger. A whole roll of 120 can be contact printed onto a single sheet of paper and then cut. Much cheaper and faster than enlarging 35mm negatives.
With film there’s no such thing as a b&w specific camera. The difference you’re seeing is probably down to the glass in whatever cheap & cheerful 6x6 rangefinder they took those 1950s family snaps on, vs the photos from the AE-1 which is an all time great camera & lens system.
Slide film is great though if the scene was appropriately lit. Better colors than digital even today. All the catalog photography from the late 90s was medium format slide film and you could blow it up billboard size it had so much fidelity.
Color film typically benefits from optical coatings on the lenses and coated lenses are common from about 1950 onward and uncommon before WWII.
Could part of the problem be that color photos, especially early ones, did not age as well as B&W?
Detail though never appears.
https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...
In some cases pieces I've read on AI and art contain phrases or paragraphs that are almost word for word identical to photography and art discourse. There were moral panics around photography too, especially its obvious use in pornography. There was of course pornographic drawing and painting before (we've found it in ancient Egyptian structures!) but photography took it to a new level.
Countercounterpoint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#/media/File:Nik... (original image)
vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#/media/File:Sta... (edited image)
With photography, you could produce images that look authentic, and could convince people because they are photos, but are actually hoaxes
Text generated by LLMs has similar properties.
> “These innovations were sometimes misguided, occasionally obsessive, periodically dangerous, and perpetually fascinating,” [Burgess writes]
> Susan Sontag once called [them] “the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed.”
> “were exposed to toxic mercury and iodine vapors every time they made an image,” Burgess writes
> flash powder advertised as “the most powerful light under the sun” was the cause of multiple fatal explosions in Philadelphia
Expensive, wasteful, "tech bros".
Yet we wouldn't do without photos, would we?
The technology turned out to be more good than bad:
> As photographs became more accessible — and more commercialized — they introduced “notions about celebrity culture, self-imaging, authenticity, ownership, and representation that are deeply resonant today.”
> Charles Dickens that described the appeal of the fad in surprisingly recognizable terms, marveling at the excitement of “distributing yourself among your friends, and letting them see you in your favorite attitude, and with your favorite expression. And then you get into those wonderful books which everybody possesses, and strangers see you there in good society, and ask who that very striking-looking person is?”
I'd say the commercialization of it and the follow-on effects you mentioned are the bad, not the good.
An illustration of a fashionable Parisian though was probably adequate — a photograph not required. Photography perhaps made the latest fashion trends ubiquitous?
That aside, I treasure photography for giving me a glimpse into the ordinary lives of my ordinary family going back three and four generations. Having captured the arc of an entire life from childhood, to graduation from "Normal" school, marriage, motherhood… And finally the sadder photos where they are old, comforted now by their adult daughter until the last photo in the series: their headstone.
I am thankful for all of that. I have found having the full span of a life captured in photographs to be sublime … sobering, grounding.
I don't think that is a coincidence, it is precisely what the article wants you to think:
In “Flashes of Brilliance,” Anika Burgess takes us back to the 19th century to showcase the artists and innovators who developed the revolutionary technology.
By tying the invention to "artists", the whole piece is framed as having the endorsement of artists. The whole article is there to frame criticism of new technology as misguided, while cleverly not mentioning "AI".
Normally I wouldn't be that suspicious, but the book and the article came out in 2025.
Now, how about an article on the miracles of DDT technology, which was the best insecticide in the world?
Commission a painter