Explore how technological inventions & social changes affected the development of photography and the tricky issues—including censorship, propaganda and the staging of images—photography had to transcend.

I’m Dominic Righini-Brand, a professional photographer and photography teacher. I’ve always been fascinated by the photography’s history and all of the inventions and discoveries, which led to chemical photography and eventually digital photography’s development, and with this short class I invite your to explore the evolution of photographic techniques and photography as a medium.

This class is for anyone who is interested in photography and who wants to enhance their understanding of historic photographic techniques & processes by learning about photography’s origins and how it developed throughout the ages.

In this class I will cover some of the most important inventions and milestones in the technological history of photography:

starting with pinhole cameras and camera obscuras,
to the development of early chemical photographic processes, such as the Daguerreotype and Calotype,
to the development of cameras which were available to the general public and the rise of Kodak as one of photography’s great dynasties,
to experimental early colour photography and development of commercially-viable colour film stock;
to introduction of rangefinder and SLR cameras;
and finally to the development of digital photography.

And I will also touch upon how photography has been used and changed as a media from mid-19th century, through World War I and War War II, to the modern day with our smart phones and social media.

Originally I created this lecture when teaching photography students at the British High School of Art & Design (Moscow), and have now adapted it into a short Skillshare class specially for you!

I hope you'll enjoy learning about photography's journey though time and share my passion for old cameras and the photographs created using them!

Explore Our Other Photography Classes:

Explore Archives of Historic Photographs:

Library of Congress — Prokudin-Gorskii Collection
Cleveland Museum of Art — Photography Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Courtney Martin

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