Shrinking Cameras

These days we grumble if our digital camera doesn’t quite fit into our pocket. And that the camera bundled with our mobile phone produces blurry pictures. We take cameras so much for granted and expect so much of the technology.

So it was great to be reminded how far we’ve come since the first cameras were invented in the 1830s at the Points of View exhibition at the British Library (it’s free and on until Sunday 07 March 2010). The history of photography began with the camera obscura, a darkened room with a pinhole allowing light from a scene outside to be projected onto the wall through the hole and the exhibition starts with a box sized one through which you can see a ghostly image of a statue. You’re then led through to the two competing technologies that battled it out in the early days of photography (the VHS and Betamax struggle of its day, I suppose) - the daguerrotype and the calotype. The dageurrotype (named for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre) could produce only one perfect, crisp and clear printed image and you had to have a camera the size of the print you wanted to create. The calotype, created by Henry Fox Talbot, could reproduce a number of printed images from a negative but the quality was more smudgy. For awhile the daguerrotype was more popular, especially for portraits commissioned by the wealthy, but we all know which technology won out and dominated for most of the next 150 or so years…

The British Library exhibition has a number of those original Victorian cameras on display along with the boxes of chemicals needed to develop and print the images. They are huge wooden contraptions and the whole process of taking a photo and printing copies took an inordinate amount of time. But the challenge was on to make them more portable and to speed up exposure times as well as the whole process - at one time, the fact that they could snap a picture with a 30 second exposure time was a huge achievement!

I was also fascinated by the photos of the far flung corners of the world taken by energetic and driven Victorian photographers, showing places like Cambodia, India and Africa before the influence of the West took hold. They had to lug all that equipment around and often had to develop and print the pictures in the field so they also had to carry tents and tables etc along with them - via camels or other beasts of burden through the wild places of the world.

There are also photos of Victorian celebrities, ordinary people, street scenes and labourers in the English countryside - wonderful evocations of the past. I was particularly struck by the picture of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square under construction - again, we take that landmark so much for granted: it was strange to see it as it was being put up.

I’m not going to moan so much now that my little digital camera is a little bit too boxy for my jacket pocket. It fits easily into my briefcase and day bag and that’s handy enough for split second snapshots!

(You can also check out the Points of View blog which has some fun past and present views of London.)

Photo: from Points of View exhibition website, with thanks