History of Photography: The Magic of Light

*HOPstudy*

The word photography comes from the Greek phōs (light) and graphé (drawing) — meaning “drawing with light.”

Photography refers to images created with light. Different types of photographic practices have different names, but this general term “photography”, invented by John Herschel, is very accurate and explains the nature of the craft.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826–27, heliograph on pewter; Alan Jaras, The Beginnings of Green, 2007

To make a photograph, several components are required: light; a dark space; a surface that reacts to light (such as paper coated with a compound like silver nitrate); and a fixative that halts the chemical reaction. In essence, this is enough to create an imprint of light and shadow. But to make an image sharp, a lens is also needed. The advent of photography was made possible by the existence of the camera obscura, advances in lens-making, the search for photosensitive substances, and techniques for fixing the image.

The camera obscura — literally “dark room” — was described as early as the 4th century BC. It refers to a phenomenon in which light passes through a small hole into a darkened space, projecting an inverted image of the outside world onto the opposite wall.

Working principle of the camera obscura; Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: Image of the Grand Canal Looking West Toward the Accademia Bridge in Palazzo Room Under Construction, Venice, 2007

The camera lucida was first described by Johannes Kepler in 1611 and later built by William Hyde Wollaston in 1807. Using a prism to bend and redirect light, the device projected the scene in front of the artist onto a drawing surface. It served as a tool for more precise rendering of the physical world — an act closely aligned with photography’s relationship to reality.

The NeoLucida was launched in 2013 via Kickstarter, it is a modern reinterpretation of the camera lucida

Light is the basis of photography. It is no coincidence that one of the medium’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, had previously worked on dioramas — theatrical displays built around plays of light and shadow. These spectacular illusions captivated audiences with the incomprehensible nature of light.

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By the time photography was invented, light was not always understood as a purely physical phenomenon. It was often perceived as a metaphysical essence — a mysterious force intruding upon the material world.

The term “magic lantern,” invented in the 17th century, captures how light was often seen as a source of wonder. Early audiences were mesmerized as devils and angels mysteriously appeared on walls — seemingly conjured by magic itself.

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This sense of light as wonder endured well into the age of photography, sometimes in the shape of elaborate theories. Rosalind Krauss recalls Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist who, at 57, turned to theology and spiritualism. He proposed that everything we encounter in the natural world corresponds symbolically to a spiritual realm — including the light spectrum, which Swedenborg extensively explored and interpreted.

Swedenborg’s labors as scientist-turned-mystic compose an incredible cadenza on the theme of intelligibility. They turn, as I have said, on the issue of light. Beginning from Newton’s view of light as corpuscular — made of infinitely small particles — and adding this to the Cartesian notion that matter consists of particles that are indefinitely divisible, it was possible to think of light as a spectrum that begins in the world of the senses and shades off into the world of spirits. Insofar as the universe is permeated by light, some part of which is divine, it can be seen as a system of symbols, as a great hieroglyphics from which to read off the meaning of divinity. This legibility of the world is Swedenborg’s message; the Celestial Arcanum is a massive demonstration of how propositions from the natural sphere are transformed into their correspondence in the spiritual one”.

Rosalind Krauss

Photography, made possible by light-capturing techniques, was such an extraordinary invention that its scientific nature was not immediately clear to everyone. For example, Balzac proposed a theory — amusing from today’s perspective — that each body in nature is composed of a series of spectres arranged in infinitely superimposed strata, layered in countless delicate films extending in every direction perceived by the eye. When a photograph is taken, it supposedly captures, detaches, and retains one of these layers. In other words, Balzac believed all bodies consisted entirely of ghostlike layers, with each photograph peeling away one such spectral stratum.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey, print from the oldest photographic negative, c.1835; Edward Steichen, Douglass Lighters, 1928

Photography was born in the 1830s by, in Nadar’s words, “exploding suddenly into existence, surpass[ing] all possible expectations.” And into the initial responses to this event are folded the themes of Spiritualism. For photography was the first available demonstration that light could indeed “exert an action … sufficient to cause changes in material bodies.

Rosalind Krauss

Light was the means by which the seemingly magic transfer of the photograph was effected, the way in which one could, in Nadar’s words, create something from nothing’.

Rosalind Krauss

Nineteenth century seances

The fact that photography relies on light — a substance so elusive and difficult to comprehend — only deepened the medium’s association with mysticism. This, in turn, gave rise to spiritual photography, practiced during séances and beyond. Using long exposures to capture ghostly silhouettes and ambiguous forms, these images were often presented as scientific evidence of the spirit world.

In its earliest forms, photography stood at the intersection of science, art, and mysticism. Rooted in the act of capturing light — something inherently ephemeral — it appeared to conjure images out of nothing, making the invisible visible. In that sense, it was, undeniably, a kind of magic.

Henry Draper, photograph of the Great Nebula in Orion, as published in Washington Astronomical Observations, 1882; Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 26, 2003

Krauss, Rosalind. “Tracing Nadar.” October, vol. 5, 1978, pp. 29–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/778643

E. Cadava. “Nadar’s Photographopolis”, 2012, https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1fj29c51/1/Nadar%E2%80%99s_Photographopolis.pdf