Richard Beard

Richard Beard was born December 22, 1801 in England. He was an entrepreneur and photographer. Beard started out working for his father at their family grocery store. When he took over, the business thrived. He then invested in coal merchants and again, the business turned profits under his control. He was a great business man. In 1839, Beard filed for a patent for color printing of fabrics. soon after, Beard took an interest in photography. Beard entered into a partnership to create a new camera. Although the camera was poorly made, Beard sought out a patent and began recruiting help to improve on the instrument. In 1841, he opened the very first professional photography studio in England. He lost interest in the business and focused more on coal in the 1860's. Beard died June 7, 1885.
 
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wikipedia
zonezero-images

Johann Baptist Isenring

Johann Baptist Isenring was born in 1796 in Switzerland. Isenring studied at the Munich Academy and originally was a carpenter. He was a painter, printmaker, and deguerreotypist. Im the early 1840's Isenring produced the first colored deguerreotypes using a mixture of gum arabic and pigments and applying heat. He died in 1860.




wikimedia
wikipedia
answers.com
art.findartinfo.com

Jean Baptiste Louis Gros

Jean Baptiste Louis Gros was born in 1793. He was a French ambassador. He was one of the first Daguerreotypists. He was also a painter. He died in 1870.

 

wikipedia

Francois Arago

Francois Arago was born February 26, 1786 in France. He had little to do with photography except that he was friends with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. He was the head of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts and Science. He helped Daguerre present his invention to the Academy before anyone else could steal the spot light. He tricked Hippolyte Bayard into "improving" on his invention before going public. He secretly did this so that Daguerre could take all the credit.



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Samuel F.B. Morse

Samuel F.B. Morse was born April 27, 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Morse attended Yale University. He made a living by painting. After his wife's death, Morse invented Morse Code and improved the telegraph. Slow communication caused him to miss his own wife's illness and death. Morse also brought the Daguerreotype to the United States, where it became very popular for a long period of time. He died on April 2, 1872 in New York City at the age of eighty.

 


wikipedia
http://home.clara.net/rod.beavon/samuel.htm

Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins was born on March 16, 1799 in England. Her mother died when she was young; she became close with her father who was a scientist. She learned a great deal from her father and became a very educated woman (not usual for that time period). She became a botanist and a photographer. She is credited with being the first person to put together a book with pictures and she is speculated to be the first woman to ever take a photograph. Atkins became interested in photography when she met her husbands friend William Fox Talbot, an English inventor and photographer. Atkins got her hands on a camera in 1841. Her book was called Photographs of British Algae. Anna died on June 9, 1871.

   

Wikipedia
http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/atkins.htm

Fredrick Scott Archer

Fredrick Scott Archer developed the Wet Collodian Process in 1848 and went public in 1851. This process had an exposure time of a few seconds and a person could quickly and easily produce multiple positives of the photo from the same glass negative. Archer was never publicly recognized until after his death and he lived most of his life in poverty because he never patent his new process. There is very little biographical information on Archer. It is thought he he was born around 1813 and died around 1857. He was born in the UK. He is thought to have jointly created the Ambrotype with the help of Peter Fry.

   

http://www.frederickscottarcher.com/
wikipedia.com

Hippolyte Bayard

Hippolyte Bayard was born on January 20, 1801. He was a civil servant from France, but took some time off to explore the world of photography. He is thought to have invented photography earlier than Daguerre and Talbot. He invented the method of direct positive printing. It is speculated that Francois Arago persueded Bayard to improve upon his invention before presenting it to the public. Arago supposedly did this so that Daguerre could present his invention first and be credited with the invention of photography. Bayard presented his findings in a thirty photo exhibition on June 24, 1849, but was too late. Daguerre beat him to the punch. Bayard felt cheated. He expressed this feeling through one of his most famous photographs ever taken- Self-portrait of a Drowned Man. Bayard died on May 14, 1887.





Getty Museum
Wikipedia.com
Hippolyte Bayard Photo

William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was born on February 11, 1800 into an aristocratic family. He was an inventor and was a pioneer of photography. He attended Trinity College and Cambridge. Talbot became interested in photography because he was not a very good drawer. He had his hands in many different studies, so his flitting from subject to subject cost him the glory of discovering a perfected version of photography. Although he had lost the race, he still went on to invent his own version of photography called the calotype process and became known as the father of photography in England. This process involves the use of negatives and positives, which is the basis for what was used up until the digital age. The technology he used for the calotypes already existed in pieces, he just put it all together. His first pictures faded due to lack of a fixing method, but after visiting Sir John FW Herschel, he learned of a solvent that would stop the fading. Calotypes were much less popular than Daguerreotypes because calotypes were "fuzzy" and Talbot discouraged public adoption when he aggressively sued anyone who tried to use his method. Talbot went on to start his own business with Nicholaas Hennenan creating photo albums for people. He also created several books with pictures. The most famous was Pencil of Nature. Talbot also did a lot of traveling. He died on August 17, 1877.







Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Sir John Herschel

Sir John Herschel was born on March 3, 1792 in Slough, Great Britain. He was a scientist and an astronomer like his father. Herschel attended the University of Cambridge in 1809. Herschel was an accomplished chemist and discovered a "fixer" for photographs in 1819 called sodium thiosulfate. He experimented with paper photographs and coined the terms photography, positive, and negative (referring to the photographic process). He named the moons of Saturn and Uranus, he had an influence on Charles Darwin, and in 1840 he invented the Cayanotype, a blue and white phtograph. He died May 11, 1871.
























The Getty Museum
http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/herschel.htm
wikipedia.com
house-cyanotype
tree-cyanotype

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787 or 1789 (discrepancy in sources) near Paris, France. Daguerre started out as an apprentice to a local painter outside Paris. Then, after moving to Paris, he became an apprentice to a local stage designer. He then became a professional scene painter for the Paris Opera. Daguerre had a particular interest in lighting effects. He eventually went on to make the Paris Diorama from 1821-1822. Then he formed a partnership with Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1829 to perfect the method of photography. After Niepce' death, Daguerre final invented the Daguerreotype, a type of photography (named after himself). This new type of photography had an approximate exposure time of thirty minutes. The earliest recorded Deguerreotype was taken in 1837 and the first picture of a human being was taken in 1828 called Boulevard de Temple, Paris. Deguerre publicly announced his discovery on August 19, 1839 at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. He was a good business man and wanted to make money off his discovery. He made a deal with the French government to have a government paid salary for life and to sell the Daguerreotype patent to foreigners and to give it free to all Frenchmen. Daguerre died on July 10, 1851.

    




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Boulevard de Temple, Paris

Joseph Necephore Niepce

Joseph Necephore Niepce was born on March 7, 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saone. He had one sister and two brothers. Niepce enjoyed physics and chemistry and he was an inventor. In 1788, he enlisted in the National Guard in Chalon-sur-Saone. In 1792 he enlisted in the Revolutionary Army. in 1816, Niepce began to experiment with photography. In 1827, he created the very first photography with approximately an 8 hour exposure time. The photo was the view from his window at Le Gras. The photo is called Point of View. In 1829 Niepce formed a partnership with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre to finish perfecting the technique of photography. Niepce died on Jully 5,1833, leaving Daguerre to finish the work by himself. What they were working on was eventually produced in 1837 and named the Daguerreotype.

http://www.niepce.com/pagus/pagus-bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce

Picture of Niepce

Point of View

Thomas Wedgwood

Thomas Wedgwood was born in 1771 and died in 1805. He grew up around artists and inventors. Experimentation was common in his family. He experimented with silver nitrate, but could never stop it from getting too dark. He created the first photograms. His father was a famous potter and his brother experimented with photography as well.




http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Thomas_Wedgwood_(1771-1805).jpg
http://www.search.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/engine/resource/exhibition/standard/default.asp?resource=5231

Photo of Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche

http://external.ak.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=7f19766f6d5e59e582ef12bf2774dade&w=100&h=300&url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F9%2F95%2FCharles_francois_daubigny.jpg

Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche

Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche ws born February 19, 1722 and died August 11, 1774. He was from France. He studied to be a physician at the University of Caen in 1744. He later became a science-fiction novelist. He predicted the invention of photography in one of his novels published in 1760.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-Fran%C3%A7ois_Tiphaigne_de_la_Roche