Cameron Photography Digital Exhibit

We live in a world of photos... but what exactly is photography? It's the process of creating a visual representation of an image using various physical and chemical processes and a camera. Light enters a camera lens, which then focuses the rays onto a material that records them visually. Today this material is usually a digital sensor, but since photography's beginning images have been recorded on sensitized glass, metal, or paper. 

In the early 1800s, inventors like Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot created different methods of using silver compounds to permanently capture images. Throughout the 1800s, different photographic methods included the daguerrotype, ambrotype, tintype, and calotype. For most of the 19th century, albumen prints (with paper coated in egg whites and sensitized with silver compounds) created from glass negatives were the most popular photographic method. Talbot's use of photographic paper negatives was particularly influential, with his technique eventually developing into the gelatin-silver process using plastic negatives that is still used today for analog photography. 

Our archive contains photographic images from Earlham's founding in 1847 to the present day. Many of these are gelatin-silver prints, particularly from around 1910-1990, often created by amateur student photographers for college publications and newspapers. Negatives were typically developed at darkrooms nearby in Richmond or in our own darkroom, once in the Runyan Student Center and now in CVPA, where analog photography is being taught to a new generation of photographers. 

View from the Window at Le Gras, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1826 (currently held at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin TX)

This 'heliographic' image is probably the earliest surviving photograph.