AlternativePhotography.com is now 23 years old. Help us make a list of birthdays for inventors of alternative photographic processes, women and men throughout history who contributed to making alt. photo. proc. to what they are today. Please note the information on this list is not verified with sources unless it states so (Wikipedia does not count as a source) and the name of the contributor is stated after each listing.
The website AlternativePhotography.com saw the light on the 8th of April 2000. That is 23 (!!!) years ago!
This got us thinking about birthdays.
Collab with us!
Is it possible to find a birthday of someone who has contributed to the invention of alternative photographic processes, or done significant work in these for each of the year’s 365 days? After some research, we came up with quite a few, but we’d love your help to fill the days!
Please comment below if you can think of anyone we missed!
The list so far:
–Birthdays in January–
20th:
Theodor von Grotthuss (1785 – 1822). A Baltic German scientist discovered that the absorbed light rays are active in the production of chemical changes in 1817.
20th:
Hippolyte Bayard (20 January 1801 – 14 May 1887) was a French photographer and pioneer in the history of photography. He invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world’s first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839. Bayard experimented with the new medium of taking photos of plant specimens, statuary (including posing with them for self-portraits), street scenes, urban landscapes, architectural photos, and portraits. He photographed prominent figures and ordinary workers. He also advocated combination printing and was one of the founders of a photo society. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
20th:
Janet Mann (Jessie) (20 January 1805 – 21 April 1867) was the ‘studio assistant’ of the pioneering Scottish photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. She is “a strong candidate as the first Scottish woman photographer” and one of the first women anywhere to be involved in photography. While she may have started as an assistant, she prepared, composed, exposed, and printed many of the prints with Hill and Adamson and is likely credited as an assistant rather than a third member of the team due to the nature of the history of photography and societal recognition (plus contemporary times want to keep the catchy “Hill & Adamson” than than ‘Hill, Adamson, and Mann.” (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
22nd:
Johan August Strindberg (1849-1912)
August Strindberg, he made what he thought were celestographs, but they turned out to be chemigrams. (Contribution by obscura__collective on Instagram)
Swedish author and scientist.
25th:
Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann (1815 – 1901). German’s first professional female photographer. She specialised in portraits and used Dagurerrotypes for her work.
28th:
Pierre Cordier (1933-) is a Belgian artist. He is considered to be a pioneer of the chemigram and of its development as a means of artistic expression. (Contribution by eddy in comment below)
30th:
Constance Fox Talbot (née Mundy, 1811 – 1880). An English artist and the wife of William Henry Fox Talbot is credited as the first woman ever to take a photograph.
–Birthdays in February–
11th:
Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) (contribution by @andiehsd on Instagram)
Henry Fox Talbot In 1834 William Henry Fox Talbot, works in a similar way to Wedgewood and produces paper coated with silver nitrate or silver chloride exposing it with a Camera Obscura. Like Niépce, he is able to produce a negative image, but he also realizes that he can contact print it and make a positive image.
26th:
Mairi Lambert Gooden Chisholm, (26th February 1896 – 22 August 1981), known as Mairi Chisholm, was a motorcyclist, ambulance driver, and first aider on the Western Front in Belgium during the First World War. Chisholm and her friend, Elsie Knocker, who was known as the ‘women of Pervyse’ (the French spelling of ‘Pervijze’), saved the lives of thousands of soldiers and won numerous medals for bravery. Her photography from the field during her front-line experience in WW1. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
29th:
Hercules Florence 29 February 1804. (Contribution by Simone Wicca in a comment below).
–Birthdays in March–
7th:
Sir John Herschel (1792-1871). An astronomer, scientist and chemist who invented the anthotype, cyanotype, “hypo” (enabling fixing) and did many more important discoveries. He also coined phrases such as ‘snap-shot’ and ‘negative’.
7th:
Joseph Nicephore Niepce (7 March 1765 – 5 July 1833). In the 1820s, Nicephore Niepce invented a photographic process that used Bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt, as the first photoresist. A thin coating of the bitumen on a sheet of metal, glass or stone became less soluble where it was exposed to light; the unexposed parts could then be rinsed away with a suitable solvent, baring the material beneath, which was then chemically etched in an acid bath to produce a printing plate. (Contribution by Bernd Hutchenreuter in a comment below).
In 1826, Joseph Niepce, a French scientist, produced the world’s first photograph.
Using ‘ heliography‘ Niépce produced the first photograph from nature. He photographed his courtyard at his estate in Le Gras. It was taken with a Camera Obscura ad the exposure time was eight hours. The sun had time to move across the courtyard in that time, which is why the shadows are visible on both sides.
16th:
Anna Atkins (née Children, 1799-1871). A botanist and scientist who published the first book illustrated with cyanotype photographs in 1843.
–Birthdays in April–
6th:
Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography. His equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
8th:
AlternativePhotography.com – the world’s most comprehensive free resource for alternative photographic processes is started in 2000. We never invented anything, but we love the research and spreading the knowledge. We did however start World Anthotype Day in 2022.
14th:
Prof. John Beaver (active). Writer of books including Photography: Physics and Art in Focus, and The Big Picture, the Universe in Five Steps. John is credited with the innovation of the Cyanoneggative (circa the late 90s using the Ware Cyanotype formula) – in articles on this website, experiments with chemilumen variants, which he named “Ephemeral Process,” utilizing the building blocks of developer (soda crystals and more) to accelerate lumen printing and most recently innovated the Resinotype (with roots in Gum and Dusting on Process)… of which there are a few practitioners. He does not yet have a how-to article (because he’s writing a book), but he premiered his process last summer at a European photo festival. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
14th:
Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1453-2 May 1519) In the 16th century gave a clear description of the Camera Obscura in his notebooks: “When the images of illuminated objects pass through a small round hole into a very dark room…you will see on paper all those objects in their natural shapes and colours.”
23rd:
Lee Miller (1907-1977). (Contribution by @washedupwool on Instagram)
Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, Lady Penrose, a model, photographer and photojournalist from USA. Photographed the war and Picasso.
26th:
Robert Adamson (26 April 1821 – 14 January 1848) was a Scottish chemist and pioneer photographer. He is best known for his pioneering photographic work with David Octavius Hill and Jesse Mann and for producing some 2500 calotypes, mostly portraits, within 5 years after being hired by Hill in 1843. It was his brother John who was a chemist in St Andrews who first reproduced Fox Talbot’s process in Scotland and provided him with the formula. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
–Birthdays in May–
7th:
Edwin Herbert Land, ForMemRS, FRPS, Hon.MRI (May 7, 1909 – March 1, 1991) was a Russian-American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. He invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went on sale in late 1948, making it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
14th:
Thomas Wedgewood (1771-1805). Experimented with Silhouettes. (Contribution by @anthonycarrphoto on Instagram)
Thomas Wedgwood (14 May 1771 – 10 July 1805) was an English photographer and inventor. He is most widely known as an early experimenter in the field of photography. Thomas Wedgwood, he made the first photographic pictures, but could not fix them.
Today this method of Wedgwood is used as Lumen Print. (Contribution by Bernd Hutchenreuter in a comment below).
Thomas Wedgwood experimented with light-sensitive materials and in a paper published in 1802, he (together with Humphrey Davy) described photograms made on white leather impregnated with silver nitrate, though he could not fix the image.
17th:
Claudine Sudre (17th May 1925 – 2013) A master printer in many alternative processes, often using the original negatives of the early artists. Her Nadar portfolio was sublime. (Contribution by Elizabeth Opalenik)
20th:
David Octavius Hill (20 May 1802 – 17 May 1870) was a Scottish painter, photographer, and arts activist. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
26th:
Charles Edward Kenneth Mees FRS (1882-1960) was a British scientist and photographic researcher. From 1906 until 1912, Mees worked for Wratten and Wainwright, Ltd., assisting Frederick Wratten in developing the first panchromatic photographic plates, as well as light filters and safelights for the darkroom. In 1912, Eastman Kodak Company acquired Wratten and Wainwright because they were interested in the skills Mees provided. George Eastman convinced Mees to move to Rochester, New York, United States, where Mees created the Kodak Research Laboratories, becoming its first director. (Contribution by eddy in a comment below)
28th:
Lieven Gevaert (1868-1935) was a Flemish industrialist. His father died when he was only three years old. He started his career in the company he founded together with his mother in 1889, which produced photographic paper according to traditional methods. In 1894, he founded the company Gevaert & Co, which in 1920, was transformed to N.V Gevaert Photo-producten, merged in 1964 with Agfa AG to become Gevaert-Agfa NV and later Agfa-Gevaert NV. (Contribution by eddy in comment below)
–Birthdays in June–
1st:
Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden (née Elphinstone Fleeming; 1822 – 1865). A British photographer working in albumens and collodions, using mirrors to create a reflection of her subject and natural sunlight to light her shots, which was ‘groundbreaking’.
11th:
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). A photographer who as well as portrayed the celebrities of the era such as the collodion portrait of Sir John Herschel in 1867 she also proved that portrait photography is a true art form.
12th:
Karel Van Gerven 12 June (1941-) Belgian saltprinter (Contribution by eddy in a comment below)
13th:
James Clerk Maxwell FRSE FRS (1831-1879). A Scottish mathematician and the scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism, and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism have been called the “second great unification in physics” and proposed the concept of RGB colour mixing. He commissioned Sutton to create the Tartan Ribbon. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
26th:
Walter Bentley Woodbury (1834-1885). An inventor and pioneering English photographer. He was an early photographer in Australia and the Dutch East Indies (now part of Indonesia). He also patented numerous inventions relating to various aspects of photography, his best-known innovation being the Woodburytype photomechanical process.
(Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
–Birthdays in July–
4th:
Elizabeth Opalenik. (4th July 1947 – still active today). Elizabeth lives in Oakland, CA, USA and pioneered with the use of Mordançage. Opalenik is credited with keeping the veils. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below and confirmed by Elizabeth Opalenik).
7th:
Robert Demachy (1859-?) was a prominent French Pictorial photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century. He is best known for his intensely manipulated prints that display a distinct painterly quality. (Contribution by Blackthorn in a comment below).
10th:
Dr. Mike Ware (10 July 1939-still an active contributor) FRSC is a chemist and photographer known for his work in alternative photographic processes and earlier printing methods such as the Ware Cyanotype. In the Present, Ware is a consultant, most recently on the history and development of the platinotype and palladium processes. He has also written about chemistry’s influence on the history of photography. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below and confirmed by Mike Ware).
Mike Ware can also put a claim the following distinct processes: Argyrotype, New Cyanotype, Simple Cyanotype, New Chrysotype, and (-with Prof. Pradip Malde-) Print-out Platinum-Palladium and have introduced the alternative process community to the use of: Tween20, sulphamic acid, disodium EDTA, and (for better or for worse!) glyoxal, and to have re-introduced glass rod coating and controlled R.H. boxes.
28th:
Anne Dixon, neé Austen (1799 – 1877). 29th was her day of baptizing, her birthday could be the 28th. The co-printer of British algae, helping Anna Atkins print the thousands of cyanotypes needed for the first book using photographs. Published in 1843.
29th:
Irving Pobboravsky (1933-2018). Contemporary daguerreotypists, to honour him on Daguerreotype day Daguerreotypists shoot a plate on this day and share it on Facebook.com/DaguerreotypeDay.org
–Birthdays in August–
2nd:
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (2 August 1802 – 28 April 1872) was a French inventor, photographer, and photo publisher. Being a cloth merchant by trade, in the 1840s, he developed an interest in photography and focused on technical and economical issues of mass production of photo prints. He studied the calotype and salt-print negative process, and in 1847 became the first person to publish on negative/positive paper photo process in France. He developed a method of bathing the paper in potassium iodide and silver nitrate solutions rather than brushing these chemical baths on the surface. In January 1847, he presented his research on stabilizing photo prints by floating them in the silver solution to the French Academy of Sciences. In 1850, he developed and introduced the albumen paper printing technique, which became the staple process of the soon-to-be popular carte de visite type of photo prints. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
31th:
Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786-1889).
A French professor of chemistry who carried out several experiments in the art of dyeing and how oxygen in the air and moisture affects the decomposition of colours.
–Birthdays in September–
3rd:
Mary Olive Edis, later Edis-Galsworthy (3 September 1876 – 28 December 1955), was a British photographer and successful businesswoman who, throughout her career, owned several studios in London and East Anglia. Known primarily for her studio portrait photography, Edis’s sitters ranged from royalty to politicians to influential women and local Norfolk fisherfolk. Edis was one of the first women to adopt the autochrome process professionally and became Britain’s first official female war photographer in 1919. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
6th:
Robert Hunt (1807-1887). A librarian and keeper of mining records who experimented with light-sensitive substances and publishes Research on Light, 1844.
6th:
Johann Peter Griess (1829-1888). An industrial chemist and an early pioneer of organic chemistry. Griess was influential in the formation of modern dyes, first formulating the diazotization reaction of arylamines. Diazo replaced the use of chromium salts in contemporary screenprinting and is often used in substitution in other processes in alternative photography. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
16th:
Denis Brihat (16th September 1928 – still active today). Denis’ toning techniques have produced color images unparalleled in color photography. He elevated simple subjects from the life in Provence that surrounded him. His attention to details with bleaching and toning brings out their beauty. Denis also works in grinotage, another version of mordançage shared with contemporary, Jean-Pierre Sudre. (Contribution by Elizabeth Opalenik)
22nd:
Thomas Sutton (22 September 1819 – ?). Kensington, England. Sutton was the photographer for James Clerk Maxwell’s pioneering 1861 demonstration of colour photography. In a practical trial of a thought-experiment Maxwell had published in 1855, Sutton took three separate black-and-white photographs of a multicoloured ribbon, one through a blue filter, one through a green filter, and one through a red filter. Using three projectors equipped with similar filters, the three photographs were projected superimposed on a screen. (Contribution by Bernd Hutchenreuter in a comment below).
24th:
Linda McCartney (1941-1998) Created a book of “Sun prints”. (Contribution by @frances.earnshaw on Instagram)
27th:
Jean-Pierre Sudre (September 27, 1921-September 6, 1997) ) Sudre’s subject-matter was mainly the still-life and figure. He is best known for his experimentation with chemicals, and is credited with the creation of Mordançage (tr. ‘etching’, ‘ scouring’), though he built the process on the film reversal technique first documented in 1897 by Paul Liesegang and known as etch-bleach, bleach-etch, gelatin relief, or reverse relief. (Contribution by eddy in comment below)
Jean Pierre Sudre (27th September 1921-1997). Sudre was a masterful printer in the darkroom and inventor of the mordançage technique, which he based on an old acid etch process. He explored spiritual and metaphysical concerns in his work, often employing the use of crystallized salts on glass as his negatives. Through toning and hand made developers, along with oxidation, he achieved beautiful color variations in his creations, which are breathtaking to view. (Contribution by Elizabeth Opalenik)
–Birthdays in October–
5th:
Louis Lumière (1864-?) Besançon, France. The Autochrome Lumière was an early color photography process patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. Autochrome was an additive color “mosaic screen plate” process. It was the principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s. (Contribution by Bernd Hutchenreuter in a comment below).
19th:
Auguste Lumière (1862-?) The Autochrome Lumière was an early color photography process patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. Autochrome was an additive color “mosaic screen plate” process. It was the principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s. (Contribution by Bernd Hutchenreuter in a comment below).
–Birthdays in November–
5th:
Martín Chambi Jiménez (November 5, 1891 – September 13, 1973) was a Peruvian photographer from Puno, in southern Peru. He was one of the first major Indigenous Latin American photographers. Recognized for the profound historic and ethnic documentary value of his photographs, he was a prolific portrait photographer in the towns and countryside of the Peruvian Andes. As well as being the leading portrait photographer in Cuzco, Chambi made many landscape photographs, which he sold mainly in the form of postcards, a format he pioneered in Peru. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
8th:
Henry Hunt Snelling (1817-1897). To educate Daguerrotypists in the “production of pictures through the agency of light”, he published History and Practice of the Art of Photography in 1849.
13th:
Henry Bosse (1844–1903). A German-American draughtsman and photographer has created cyanotype prints dating back to 1885 held in the National Museum of American Art.
18th:
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787 – 1851). A French artist, photographer and inventor of the Daguerreotype process.
20th:
Mungo Ponton FRS FRSE (20 November 1801 – 3 August 1880) was a Scottish inventor who, in 1839 created a method of permanent photography based on potassium dichromate. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
–Birthdays in December
6th:
Dominic Man-Kit Lam (1947-?). Born in Swatow, China. A Chinese doctor and artist. Lam is most notable for inventing the painting technique called Chromoskedasic Painting.
(Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
11th:
Sir David Brewster (1781-1868). A Scotsman, scientist, camera inventor and pinhole pioneer in the 1850s. (Contribution by @anthonycarrphoto on Instagram)
13th:
Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (1780-24 1849) was a German chemist known best for work that was suggestive of the periodic law for the chemical elements and for inventing the first lighter was known as the Döbereiner’s lamp. He became a professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Jena. The first person to have recorded observing the action of light rays on platinum was Ferdinand Gehlen of Germany in 1830. The following year, his countryman, Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner, determined that the action of light on platinum was quite weak, but that perhaps something could be combined with platinum to increase its sensitivity. Through experimentation, he eventually found that ferric oxalate was a highly-effective enhancer. The combination of these two metals remains the basis of the platinotype process in use today.(Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
26th:
Mrs Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872). A Scottish astronomer, scientist and writer, did extensive research on the action of rays on vegetable juices crucial to the discovery of anthotypes.
–No date attached to the contribution
- Dominique Stroobant – inventor of solargraphy. (Contribution by Justin_quinell on Instagram)
- Alphonse Louis Poitevin (1819-1882). A French chemist, photographer and civil engineer who discovered the light–sensitive properties of bichromated gelatin and invented both the photolithography and collotype processes. He has been described as “one of the great unheralded figures in photography”. In the 1850s he discovered that gelatin in combination with either potassium or ammonium bichromate hardens in proportion to the amount of light that falls on it. This discovery, significant for its capacity to facilitate the mass production of photographs, was later used by numerous figures such as Josef Albert, Joseph Wilson Swan, Paul Pretsch and Charles Nègre to develop subsequent photographic printing processes such as heliogravure, photogravure, collotype, autotype and carbon print. (Contribution by eddy in comment below)
- Hercule Florence. One of the pioneers of Photography, in the 1830s, in Campinas, in the interior of São Paulo. His discoveries in this field came about when he was trying to find simple and effective reproduction techniques, a concern that had already led him to the creation of Polygraphy. On January 15, 1833, he made his first report on the possibility of “printing by the action of light”. In his manuscripts, the Franco-Monegasque already reveals knowledge of the chemical qualities of silver nitrate, information transmitted by his friend and young apothecary Joaquim Corrêa de Mello, who worked in the pharmacy of Hercule’s father-in-law, Francisco Álvares Machado e Vasconcellos, a physician and prominent public figure. in the state of Sao Paulo. https://ihf19.org.br/pt-br/hercule-florence/inventos/fotografia(Contribution by Sheila Oliveira in a comment below).
- Elizabeth Fulhame (active 1794) was an early British chemist who invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She was described as ‘the first solo woman researcher of modern chemistry’. Although she only published one text, she describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. The book relates in painstaking detail her experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions and her conclusions regarding phlogiston theory, in which she disagrees with both the Phlogistians and Antiphlogistians. Her birthday is unknown, and as such proposes an honorary day in the celebration, education, and inclusion of Sept 21, selecting the Autumn equinox or thereabout as a metaphorical day. The day when the light begins to reduce as she discovered photoreduction and the equinox for the connection of equality and balance, something she never saw in her life as a Proto-Photo Pioneer. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
- Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866) was a 19th-century English artist and photographer who produced the earliest surviving photographic images taken by a woman. Images she had produced were not attributed to her until 2015, when her initials were discovered on a photogram that was previously consigned to an auction at Sotheby’s in New York. As her birthday is unknown, I propose an honorary day for the purpose of inclusion and education as March 21, the spring equinox, for a similar effect to the other equinox proposal. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
- J. Charles Burnett, Scottish chemist. Between 1855 and 1857, using this compound was a sensitive salt. Burnett authored an 1858 article comparing “Printing by the Salts of the Uranic and Ferric Oxides” The basis for the process lies in the ability of the uranyl ion to pick up two electrons and reduce to the lower oxidation state of uranium(IV) under ultraviolet light creating the Uranotype. Uranium salts were also used in the past in silver gelatin prints as a toning agent. Birthdate unknown; perhaps another nominated day for the sake of inclusion and education. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
- Frederick Scott Archer (1813 – 1 May 1857) was an English photographer and sculptor who is best known for having invented the photographic collodion process, which preceded the modern gelatin emulsion. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
- Karl P. Koenig. In 1990, Karl discovered a new alternative process, polychromatic Gumoil photographic printing. After publishing a book on the discovery and several articles, he gave lectures, demonstrations, workshops, and exhibited work based on the process.
- Scott Williams. Professor School of Chemistry and Materials Science at Rochester Institute of Technology teaching Inorganic Chemistry. Lead the technical photographic chemistry class which in October 1995 came up with Caffenol based on the knowledge of citric acid being a weak developer and sodium carbonate in combination with phenolic compounds. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below and confirmed by Scott Williams).
- Elizabeth Opalenick. Innovated the work of Jean Pierre Sudre, who had pioneering use with Mordançage. Opalenick is credited with keeping the veils. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher in a comment below).
- Mungo Ponton (?-?). A Scottish scientist observed the light sensitivity of paper treated with dichromates in 1839.
- Alois Senefelder (?-?). A playwright founding it too expensive to reproduct copies of his plays invented the printmaking process of lithography in 1798.
- Frederick Ives (?-?). One of the founding members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. Designed the first practical halftone screen that consisted of two exposed glass negatives with lines scribed on each of them and used for Lithography in 1885.
- C. Welbourne Piper (?-?). An Englishman who invented the bromoil processin 1907 from a suggestion from E.J. Wall.
- E.J. Wall (?-?) Works out the theory of the bromoil process, though C. Welbourne Piper applies it.
- Fred Judge FRPS (?-?). Invents the bromoil transfer technique, though first published in 1909 by C.H. Hewitt.
- C.H. Hewitt (?-?). Publishes the bromoil transfer technique in 1909.
- Giovanni Battista della Porta (?-?). A scientist from Naples, described the camera obscura in great detail in the first edition of his book “Natural Magic” in 1558.
- Sir David Brewster (?-?). An English scientist, was one of the first to make pinhole photographs. In the 1850’s in his book “The Stereoscope” the word “pin-hole” was first coined.
- Gemma Frisus’ De Radio (?-?). An astronomer, draws the earliest known picture of a pinhole camera obscura. He used it in his darkened room to study the solar eclipse of 1544.
- Johann Schultze (?-?). A German physicist discovered that silver salts reacted to light 1725.
- William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) A british scientiest pantented Camera Lucida – A lightweight drawing aid in 1806. It was a “light room” consisting of a rod to which a glass prism was affixed. The glass prism had two sides that reflected the scene at which it was aimed.
- Anonie Hercules Rovald Florence (1804-1879). A french artist and cartographer who experimented a lot with the photographic process. He called the process “Photographie” in 1832. Another theory is that Sir John Herschel coined the word.
- Sir David Brewster (?-?). An English scientist invented the word pinhole or pin-hole which he used in his book The Stereoscope, published in 1856.
- George Eastman (?-?). An ex-bank clerk experiments with roll film and ends up introducing the Kodak camera in 1889 to the market with the slogan “You press the button – we do the rest”. It was sold loaded with film, the photographer shot the film and sent it back to the factory for processing.
- W. W. J. Nicol (?-?). Patented the first iron-silver process and he is considered to be the inventor of the kallitype. The last revision using silver nitrate in the sensitizer rather than in the developer is the method used by many contemporary kallitype printers.
- William Willis (?-?). In 1873, William Willis, searching for a solution to the problems of impermanence of silver images, devised a means of printing in platinum. Willis devoted a further 20 years to improving his platinotype process, founding a company to manufacture the coated paper in 1879. By the late 1880s he began to enjoy a commercial success, which reached its zenith around 1900, when more platinotypes could be seen on gallery walls than any other process. The ‘platinum age’ enjoyed a lamentably short life; its end came with the First World War, when the use of platinum as a catalyst for manufacturing explosives debased the metal to a ‘strategic material’. Its use for jewellery and photography was consequently banned in 1916, and the commercial manufacture of paper ceased. Willis valiantly responded with an analogous process using the related metal palladium, which is hardly less permanent than platinum.
- Wlodek Witek. Innovator of different processes in particular some calotype formulas but others too. (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher)
- Dick Sullivan of Bostock and Sullivan and Carl Weese inventor of Ziatype (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher)
- Jonathan Tod Hilty inventor of New autochrome (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher)
- Annette Golaz mastered the Tricolour cyanotype (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher)
- Bing Dahn mastered the Chlorophyll prints (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher)
- Akroyd and Harvey mastered growing photographs on plants – similar to Danh’s chlorophyll but growing in a darkroom with an image projected (Contribution by Brittonie Fletcher)
Can you think of more? Please comment below.
Thank you Simone!
Hercules Florence 29 February 1804. ❤️
source: https://brasilianafotografica.bn.gov.br/?p=10341
Hi Eddy, Thank you for your contributions!
Thank you!
Alphonse Louis Poitevin (Conflans-sur-Anille, 1819 – Conflans-sur-Anille, 1882) was a French chemist, photographer and civil engineer who discovered the light–sensitive properties of bichromated gelatin and invented both the photolithography and collotype processes.
He has been described as “one of the great unheralded figures in photography”.[1] In the 1850s he discovered that gelatin in combination with either potassium or ammonium bichromate hardens in proportion to the amount of light that falls on it. This discovery, significant for its capacity to facilitate the mass production of photographs, was later used by numerous figures such as Josef Albert, Joseph Wilson Swan, Paul Pretsch and Charles Nègre to develop subsequent photographic printing processes such as heliogravure, photogravure, collotype, autotype and carbon print.[1]
Lieven Gevaert (28 May 1868 – 2 February 1935) was a Flemish industrialist. His father died when he was only three years old. He started his career in the company he founded together with his mother in 1889, which produced photographic paper according to traditional methods. In 1894, he founded the company Gevaert & Co, which in 1920, was transformed to N.V Gevaert Photo-producten, merged in 1964 with Agfa AG to become Gevaert-Agfa NV and later Agfa-Gevaert NV.
Pierre Cordier (born January 28, 1933 in Brussels) is a Belgian artist. He is considered to be a pioneer of the chemigram and of its development as a means of artistic expression.
Jean-Pierre Sudre (French: [sydʁ]; September 27, 1921 – September 6, 1997) Sudre’s subject-matter was mainly the still-life and figure. He is best known for his experimentation with chemicals, and is credited with the creation of Mordançage (tr. ‘etching’, ‘ scouring’), though he built the process on the film reversal technique first documented in 1897 by Paul Liesegang and known as etch-bleach, bleach-etch, gelatin relief, or reverse relief.
Charles Edward Kenneth Mees FRS[1] (26 May 1882 – 15 August 1960) was a British scientist and photographic researcher. From 1906 until 1912, Mees worked for Wratten and Wainwright, Ltd., assisting Frederick Wratten in developing the first panchromatic photographic plates, as well as light filters and safelights for the darkroom.
In 1912, Eastman Kodak Company acquired Wratten and Wainwright because they were interested in the skills Mees provided. George Eastman convinced Mees to move to Rochester, New York, United States, where Mees created the Kodak Research Laboratories,[2] becoming its first director.[3]
karel van gerven 12 june 1941 belgium saltprinter
Robert Demachy was a prominent French Pictorial photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century. He is best known for his intensely manipulated prints that display a distinct painterly quality. July 7, 1859.
thank you so much for this long list! Much appreciated!
Thank you that is very interesting!
Thank you Sheila! Interesting!
Thank you Tom!
Congratulations on your Anniversary! I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the website and the information therein. Thanks! Tom
Hercule Florence was one of the pioneers of Photography, in the 1830s, in Campinas, in the interior of São Paulo. His discoveries in this field came about when he was trying to find simple and effective reproduction techniques, a concern that had already led him to the creation of Polygraphy.
On January 15, 1833, he made his first report on the possibility of “printing by the action of light”. In his manuscripts, the Franco-Monegasque already reveals knowledge of the chemical qualities of silver nitrate, information transmitted by his friend and young apothecary Joaquim Corrêa de Mello, who worked in the pharmacy of Hercule’s father-in-law, Francisco Álvares Machado e Vasconcellos, a physician and prominent public figure. in the state of Sao Paulo.
https://ihf19.org.br/pt-br/hercule-florence/inventos/fotografia
Congratulations on your beautiful journey! 🙂
Elizabeth Fulhame (active 1794) was an early British chemist who invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She was described as ‘the first solo woman researcher of modern chemistry’. Although she only published one text, she describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. The book relates in painstaking detail her experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions and her conclusions regarding phlogiston theory, in which she disagrees with both the Phlogistians and Antiphlogistians. Her birthday is unknown, and as such proposes an honorary day in the celebration, education, and inclusion of Sept 21, selecting the Autumn equinox or thereabout as a metaphorical day. The day when the light begins to reduce as she discovered photoreduction and the equinox for the connection of equality and balance, something she never saw in her life as a Proto-Photo Pioneer.
Walter Bentley Woodbury (26 June 1834 – 5 September 1885) was an inventor and pioneering English photographer. He was an early photographer in Australia and the Dutch East Indies (now part of Indonesia). He also patented numerous inventions relating to various aspects of photography, his best-known innovation being the woodburytype photomechanical process.
Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (13 December 1780 – 24 March 1849) was a German chemist known best for work that was suggestive of the periodic law for the chemical elements and for inventing the first lighter was known as the Döbereiner’s lamp.[1] He became a professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Jena. The first person to have recorded observing the action of light rays on platinum was Ferdinand Gehlen of Germany in 1830. The following year, his countryman, Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner, determined that the action of light on platinum was quite weak, but that perhaps something could be combined with platinum to increase its sensitivity. Through experimentation, he eventually found that ferric oxalate was a highly-effective enhancer. The combination of these two metals remains the basis of the platinotype process in use today.
Dominic Man-Kit Lam (born 6 December 1947 in Swatow, China) is a Chinese doctor and artist. Lam is most notable for inventing the painting technique called Chromoskedasic Painting.
Johann Peter Griess (6 September 1829 – 30 August 1888) was an industrial chemist and an early pioneer of organic chemistry. Griess was influential in the formation of modern dyes, first formulating the diazotization reaction of arylamines. Diazo replaced the use of chromium salts in contemporary screenprinting and is often used in substitution in other processes in alternative photography.
James Clerk Maxwell FRSE FRS (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician[1][2] and the scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism, and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism have been called the “second great unification in physics” and proposed the concept of RGB colour mixing. He commissioned Sutton to create the Tartan Ribbon.
Elizabeth Fulhame (active 1794) was an early British chemist who invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She was described as ‘the first solo woman researcher of modern chemistry’. Although she only published one text, she describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. The book relates in painstaking detail her experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions and her conclusions regarding phlogiston theory, in which she disagrees with both the Phlogistians and Antiphlogistians. Her birthday is unknown, and as such proposes an honorary day in the celebration, education, and inclusion of Sept 21, selecting the Autumn equinox or thereabout as a metaphorical day. The day when the light begins to reduce as she discovered photoreduction and the equinox for the connection of equality and balance, something she never saw in her life as a Proto-Photo Pioneer.
Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866) was a 19th-century English artist and photographer who produced the earliest surviving photographic images taken by a woman. Images she had produced were not attributed to her until 2015, when her initials were discovered on a photogram that was previously consigned to an auction at Sotheby’s in New York. As her birthday is unknown, I propose an honorary day for the purpose of inclusion and education as March 21, the spring equinox, for a similar effect to the other equinox proposal.
Janet Mann (Jessie) (20 January 1805 – 21 April 1867) was the ‘studio assistant’ of the pioneering Scottish photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. She is “a strong candidate as the first Scottish woman photographer” and one of the first women anywhere to be involved in photography. While she may have started as an assistant, she prepared, composed, exposed, and printed many of the prints with Hill and Adamson and is likely credited as an assistant rather than a third member of the team due to the nature of the history of photography and societal recognition (plus contemporary times want to keep the catchy “Hill & Adamson” than than ‘Hill, Adamson, and Mann.”
Mairi Lambert Gooden Chisholm, (26th February 1896 – 22 August 1981), known as Mairi Chisholm, was a motorcyclist, ambulance driver, and first aider on the Western Front in Belgium during the First World War. Chisholm and her friend, Elsie Knocker, who was known as the ‘women of Pervyse’ (the French spelling of ‘Pervijze’), saved the lives of thousands of soldiers and won numerous medals for bravery. Her photography from the field during her front-line experience in WW1
Mungo Ponton FRS FRSE (20 November 1801 – 3 August 1880) was a Scottish inventor who, in 1839 created a method of permanent photography based on potassium dichromate.
J. Charles Burnett, Scottish chemist. Between 1855 and 1857, using this compound was a sensitive salt. Burnett authored an 1858 article comparing “Printing by the Salts of the Uranic and Ferric Oxides” The basis for the process lies in the ability of the uranyl ion to pick up two electrons and reduce to the lower oxidation state of uranium(IV) under ultraviolet light creating the Uranotype. Uranium salts were also used in the past in silver gelatin prints as a toning agent. Birthdate unknown; perhaps another nominated day for the sake of inclusion and education.
Martín Chambi Jiménez (November 5, 1891 – September 13, 1973) was a Peruvian photographer from Puno, in southern Peru. He was one of the first major Indigenous Latin American photographers. Recognized for the profound historic and ethnic documentary value of his photographs, he was a prolific portrait photographer in the towns and countryside of the Peruvian Andes. As well as being the leading portrait photographer in Cuzco, Chambi made many landscape photographs, which he sold mainly in the form of postcards, a format he pioneered in Peru.
Robert Adamson (26 April 1821 – 14 January 1848) was a Scottish chemist and pioneer photographer. He is best known for his pioneering photographic work with David Octavius Hill and Jesse Mann and for producing some 2500 calotypes, mostly portraits, within 5 years after being hired by Hill in 1843. It was his brother John who was a chemist in St Andrews who first reproduced Fox Talbot’s process in Scotland and provided him with the formula.
David Octavius Hill (20 May 1802 – 17 May 1870) was a Scottish painter, photographer, and arts activist.
Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography. His equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.
Edwin Herbert Land, ForMemRS, FRPS, Hon.MRI (May 7, 1909 – March 1, 1991) was a Russian-American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. He invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went on sale in late 1948, making it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less.
Mary Olive Edis, later Edis-Galsworthy (3 September 1876 – 28 December 1955), was a British photographer and successful businesswoman who, throughout her career, owned several studios in London and East Anglia. Known primarily for her studio portrait photography, Edis’s sitters ranged from royalty to politicians to influential women and local Norfolk fisherfolk. Edis was one of the first women to adopt the autochrome process professionally and became Britain’s first official female war photographer in 1919.
Scott Williams Professor School of Chemistry and Materials Science at Rochester Institue of Technology teaching photochemistry and optics. Lead the technical photographic chemistry class which in 1995 came up with Caffenol based on the knowledge of citric acid being a weak developer and sodium carbonate in combination with phenolic compounds. I don’t know his birthday, but he’s alive and someone could ask him. It would be great to give him a day.
Elisabeth Opalenick – birthday unknown, but someone can ask her- innovated the work of Jean Pierre Sudre, who had pioneering use with Mordançage. Opalenick is credited with keeping the veils. COincidentally she just announced that she is retiring within the past 24 hrs and really needs to be honored.
Jean-Pierre Sudre September 27, 1921 – September 6, 1997) was a commercial photographer. Sudre’s subject matter was mainly still-life and figures. He is best known for his chemical experimentation and is credited with creating Mordançage (tr. ‘etching,’ ‘ scouring’). However, he built the process on the film reversal technique first documented in 1897 by Paul Liesegang and known as etch-bleach, bleach-etch, gelatin relief, or reverse relief.
Prof. John Beaver April 14 (active) writer of books including Photography: Physics and Art in Focus, and The Big Picture, the Universe in Five Steps. John is credited with the innovation of the Cyanoneggative (circa the late 90s using the Ware Cyanotype formula) – in articles on this website, experiments with chemilumen variants, which he named “Ephemeral Process,” utilizing the building blocks of developer (soda crystals and more) to accelerate lumen printing and most recently innovated the Resinotype (with roots in Gum and Dusting on Process) … of which there are a few practitioners. He does not yet have a how-to article (because he’s writing a book), but he premiered his process last summer at a European photo festival. http://www.johnebphotography.com/
Michael J. Ware (someone knows his birthday 1939) FRSC FRSC is a chemist and photographer known for his work in alternative photographic processes and earlier printing methods such as a the Ware Cyanotype. In the Present, Ware is a consultant, most recently on the history and development of the platinotype and palladium processes. He has also written about chemistry’s influence on the history of photography.
Karl P. Koenig : ( Birthday – someone knows) In 1990, Karl discovered a new alternative process, polychromatic Gumoil photographic printing. After publishing a book on the discovery and several articles, he gave lectures, demonstrations, workshops, and exhibited work based on the process
Frederick Scott Archer (1813 – 1 May 1857) was an English photographer and sculptor who is best known for having invented the photographic collodion process, which preceded the modern gelatin emulsion. As their birthday was unknown, couldn’t he be assigned Wet Plate Collodion Day with both listed on a calendar for the sake of inclusion and education on the First Saturday of May?
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (2 August 1802 – 28 April 1872) was a French inventor, photographer, and photo publisher. Being a cloth merchant by trade, in the 1840s, he developed an interest in photography and focused on technical and economical issues of mass production of photo prints. He studied the calotype and salt-print negative process, and in 1847 became the first person to publish on negative/positive paper photo process in France. He developed a method of bathing the paper in potassium iodide and silver nitrate solutions rather than brushing these chemical baths on the surface. In January 1847, he presented his research on stabilizing photo prints by floating them in the silver solution to the French Academy of Sciences. In 1850, he developed and introduced the albumen paper printing technique, which became the staple process of the soon-to-be popular carte de visite type of photo prints.
Hippolyte Bayard (20 January 1801 – 14 May 1887) was a French photographer and pioneer in the history of photography. He invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world’s first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839. Bayard experimented with the new medium of taking photos of plant specimens, statuary (including posing with them for self-portraits), street scenes, urban landscapes, architectural photos, and portraits. He photographed prominent figures and ordinary workers. He also advocated combination printing and was one of the founders of a photo society.
Hi Bernd, Thank you so much for all these. I thought I had Niepce already, it’s a very obvious one, but no… so thank you!
Auguste Lumière
Born 19 October 1862
Louis Lumière
Born 5 October 1864
Besançon, France
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re
Color photos using potato starch
The Autochrome Lumière was an early color photography process patented in 1903[1] by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907.[2] Autochrome was an additive color[3] “mosaic screen plate” process. It was the principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumi%C3%A8re
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce
7 March 1765 – 5 July 1833
In the 1820s, Nicephore Niepce invented a photographic process that used Bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt, as the first photoresist. A thin coating of the bitumen on a sheet of metal, glass or stone became less soluble where it was exposed to light; the unexposed parts could then be rinsed away with a suitable solvent, baring the material beneath, which was then chemically etched in an acid bath to produce a printing plate.
Thomas Sutton
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sutton
22 September 1819 in Kensington, England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sutton_(photographer)
“Sutton was the photographer for James Clerk Maxwell’s pioneering 1861 demonstration of colour photography. In a practical trial of a thought-experiment Maxwell had published in 1855, Sutton took three separate black-and-white photographs of a multicoloured ribbon, one through a blue filter, one through a green filter, and one through a red filter. Using three projectors equipped with similar filters, the three photographs were projected superimposed on a screen.”
PS: Today this method of Wedgwood is used as Lumen Print.
Thomas Wedgwood, he made the first photographic pictures, but could not fix them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedgwood_(photographer)
Thomas Wedgwood (14 May 1771 – 10 July 1805) was an English photographer and inventor. He is most widely known as an early experimenter in the field of photography.