The Power of Photography
/Please enjoy the following transcript from a past episode of Exhibitsmith the Podcast. The Power of Photography debuted on December 2, 2024. Find Exhibitsmith on your favorite podcast platform and at Podbean.
Wow, what a year it's been. Am I right? I wonder what 2025 will bring. But before we jump along to the new Year, I want to go back in time. I want to take a moment and go back to the beginning.
And I don't mean January. Let's go back further, shall we? If you're familiar with my saving your family photos talks, you'll know that I don't simply start my program by sitting you down and explaining how to save your family photos. I bring a little history into the mix and I go a little deeper. I talk about the beginning of photography and what photography means to us today.
Hi, my name is Lindsey Smith with Exhibitsmith. I’m rethinking the way we save our stuff. I help people interpret, preserve, and better understand the objects that make up our world. If you have a lot of stuff, it might feel overwhelming. But believe it or not, I truly believe that artifact and heirloom preservation can be both easy and fun. In fact, I’ve developed a series of introductory-level workshops on this topic and others just to prove my point. Learn more about them at exhibitsmith.com.
Disclaimer Today, photography is everywhere. But as we go back in time, photography has meant very different things to us collectively throughout all the decades. For the vast majority of human history, photography wasn't a thing. It wasn’t until 1839, when the daguerreotype hit the world, that photography became the medium we have today.
Let’s picture ourselves in the past. It might be the 1830s, the 1730s, the 1630s, the 1530s, you pick a century. It's up to you. And when I say to picture yourself, well, if you were going to make a picture of yourself back then, you'd better be a good artist, right?
Because painting, drawing, sculpting, those were the only ways you could actually take a picture of yourself. And if you weren't a good artist or you didn't have the means to commission a portrait or sculpture, you know, and most people didn't, then you were out of luck. Those were the only pictures around. And the photo realism painting techniques of today were certainly not around, so. So even then, if you did commission a portrait, you never might not quite know what you might end up with, right?
If you moved away, if you lost a loved one, if you were just away from someone or something or somewhere, you had to look into your mind's eye to try to remember the likeness. And of course, there was no alternative. Out of sight, out of mind. That's just how it was.
Now the people in the past didn't know what they were missing because they didn't know to miss it. If your house burned down, there was no way to ever see it again. Your grandfather's face, the field where you played. You were a baby when you were a baby. No reminiscing there.
It was only in your mind's eye. And even now, as we look at photos from decades past, not too long ago, before we took photos every three and a half minutes, you may still be trying to picture a loved one at a certain point in time or a certain day when no photos were taken. And it's hard. You think you have it right, but you can never be sure. Well, that's how things always were until, bam, 1839 and the daguerreotype came along.
And yes, these early photos were expensive and yes, they were always very formal portraits. You would pay money and go to a studio and sit very still and hope your image came out. And then you would only get one image. No negatives, no duplicates. A single moment, frozen in time. It was an absolute, absolute work of art.
When I see one of these early images that has survived the centuries, I get excited because, wow, this delicate single piece of art has survived for us to be able to see so many years later, right? And daguerreotypes, of course, were just the start, the start of our insatiable desire for photographic images. Because all of a sudden, grandpa went to get his photo taken and he showed it to you on a little mirrored piece of metal in a fancy case behind glass. And you looked at him and you looked at the picture back and forth.
It was one and the same, a true likeness. Every birthmark, every hair out of place, a favorite bow tie. It was all there. It was precious and it was mind blowing and it seemed impossible. And then, of course, everyone was fascinated by this technology.
And new advancements kept coming out that made photography easier and cheaper and more durable and duplicatable and easier to travel with. And as the years passed, photography went from a mind blowing, life changing experience that your ancestor experienced, to something that was more expected and commonplace, though still a bit of a novelty.
In the 1860s, paper based prints started to take off. We no longer had to rely on the very fragile, expensive images on metal or glass, kept in delicate. Paper-based images had negatives that could be reproduced. Paper was inexpensive and more accessible. And all of a sudden people said, well, I want some of that in my life. And now, in addition to the pictures of our family and loved ones that we held so dear, we could have pictures of places we'd never been.
We could see the world beyond our backyard in a true likeness. We could have pictures of celebrities in our home. No longer just reading about them in the newspaper, now we can see them on our shelf.
The battlegrounds of the Civil War made war more real than anyone could have imagined. It truly changed people's perspectives. And as photography and photographs became more and more common in our daily lives, people thought of new ways to market and sell them. Why only take pictures of people in studios when you can take pictures of subjects that others might want to see, duplicate them and sell them en mass. The rolling hills of faraway countries now became entertainment as stereoscope viewers, which were like viewmasters, transformed simple photographs into 3 dimensional looking images.
The world changed again in 1900, when the Kodak company put cameras in the hands of everyday people. Kodak’s point and click technology let people document their everyday lives, letting us peer into homes and more silly and candid moments.
Photo studios still existed, of course, just as they do today, but with so many amateur photographers on the streets, they were able to document the good times, the bad times, and everything in between. Culture had changed. Photography wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime, expensive event, it wasn’t a formal occasion, and it wasn’t even something you had to seek out. Now we could take photos anywhere, at any time.
I love these early 20th century photos because people are still wearing the very formal oldie timey dress that we have come to expect with the past. However, the setting has changed and now people are at a park, under a tree, they're being silly, they're laughing, having fun. They're clearly showing their personalities on film and in photos for the first time. And it reminds us that people, our ancestors, have always just been people.
And just because the photograph from the early years wasn't documenting that part of their personalities, it was still there behind the scenes.
When we see people swinging from trees and frolicking through fields being silly, we have to imagine that people have always done those things, for thousands of years. But now we have photographs to document it. What a fantastic technology!
This evolution through imagery is fantastic for historians, of course, but to be living in that moment must have just been wonderful as well. Oh, that was a cool building. I'm going to take a picture of it. Oh, I went on vacation here and I want to remember it. I don’t want to forget this outing.
As the 20th century progressed photographs became more prolific, as did motion pictures and television and photographs in print media. Society simply expected it.
Photography and film settled into a nice spot for a number of decades, where photos weren’t rare but they weren’t constant, and when getting on the local news was still a big deal. Everything changed again, however, around the turn of the century.
This, of course, was the digital era – the era we’re still in now.
Today, we take photos of everything, constantly and we can simply delete the ones we don't like! Was the lighting not good? There’s an app for that. We started the digital photography era with digital cameras, but once smartphone cameras became the norm and cloud storage services made our lives easier (for better or worse), there was no stopping us.
We don't have to be concerned about what we look like in a photo. We don't have to be concerned that we're wasting film, we get instant results and delete what we don’t like. We’re not wasting money so why not?
Of course, this is an extremely simplified timeline of events – I cover this in depth during my photo talks. But an in depth look at our photography practices isn’t necessarily the point of this episode. Instead, it’s to help us all realize – or remember – how the role of photography has changed just in our lifetime, and, looking back, the massive, society-changing implications it’s had on our ancestors over the past (almost) two hundred years.)
Today, we can’t even get through a trip to the grocery store without being inundated with photographs and screens. And most of us don’t think anything of it. But not so long ago those photos would have been rare or unheard of. And just a little before that, seeing a photograph in your daily life would have been a big deal.
So, as we look ahead to the new year, which will, no doubt, be filled to the brim with tabloid images and talking heads, take a moment to go back in time, to life before photography, and think of your ancestors, whose world completely changed the first time they ever saw a photograph.
Wow, just wow.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. I invite you to subscribe to my podcast and once again, you can see everything Exhibitsmith is up to Exhibitsmith.com, including grabbing yourself some free, downloadable resources and learning about our online courses. Thanks for listening - I’m already looking forward to the next episode.