Chapter 1: Photography

In the early 1800s most printed materials, if they were illustrated at all, included engravings, drawings created in copper of wood that could be transferred to plated and then printed. In 1826 Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a French printer, was looking for a way to transfer drawings to plates automatically, without having to redraw them by hand. He used a small box with a lens on one side, called a camera obscura, and a light-sensitive plate to make the first photograph.

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Innovations in photography by Niepce, his associate Louis-Jacques Daguerre, and Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot made photographs a useful tool for engravers, who could refer to the photographs to draw detailed images. George Eastman brought photography to ordinary citizens with the release of his first Kodak camera in 1888. But it was not until nearly the end of the century that photographs could be reproduced accurately on printing presses. The use of photographs completely changed the look of graphic design.