200 Years of Photography: A Timeline (c. 1826/27–2026/27) | World Photography Day

Two centuries of images. Twenty years of the Sony World Photography Awards.

This World Photography Day, we glance again on the historical past of the medium that’s modified how we seize our actuality.

Although there’s no single agreed date for the invention of images, this yr we are able to start to have a good time 200 years for the reason that oldest surviving {photograph} made with a digicam was produced.

It’s Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras, a picture created utilizing heliography – a course of Niépce developed himself, from the Greek for ‘sun-writing.’ The {photograph} took days of publicity to mild to type. Eventually, it revealed a picture of buildings and rooftops exterior Niépce’s window in Chalon-sur-Saône within the Burgundy area of France. Today, it stands as one of many beginning factors for the medium of images.
 

The Harry Ransom Center in Texas, which at the moment holds this picture, explains the method:
 

‘Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in oil of lavender and applied a thin coating over a polished pewter plate. He inserted the plate into a camera obscura and positioned it near a window in his second-story workroom.’

Historians usually date the {photograph} to 1826–27, with 1827 typically cited because the extra doubtless date of its creation.

There’s one other vital date in images’s historical past that falls on 19 August: on this present day in 1839, the French authorities made the small print of Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype publicly obtainable. Developed from work he started with Niépce, the method created a single, extremely detailed picture straight onto a elegant, silver-coated copper plate, with out the necessity for a unfavorable. This historic date is now celebrated globally as World Photography Day.

So slightly than making an attempt to pin images’s two hundredth anniversary to a single day, we’re celebrating it throughout an entire yr – from the 2026 World Photography Day and nicely into 2027! And we are able to’t complain – it means extra time to understand the beginnings of this vital medium that has remodeled how we doc, perceive and see the world.

This yr additionally marks the launch of the twentieth version of the Sony World Photography Awards – twenty years of celebrating photographers from all over the world. As we glance again at 200 years of images, it appears like the right second to mirror on the photographers shaping its future.

1800s – The Birth of Photography

• Niépce produces View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest surviving {photograph} made with a digicam, earlier than coming into into partnership with Louis Daguerre.
   
• Daguerre publicly reveals the daguerreotype in 1839, whereas William Henry Fox Talbot individually introduces his negative-positive course of in England.
   
• Throughout the century, new processes together with the calotype, moist collodion and gelatin dry plate make images more and more sensible, whereas experiments in color start to emerge.
   
• By the late 1800s, images seems extensively in publications and mass-produced cameras convey it to a rising non-professional viewers.
   

1900s – Rapid Evolution and Popularisation of Photography

• Early 1900s: The Lumière brothers’ Autochrome course of brings color images to the market, whereas smaller cameras and roll movie make images more and more accessible.
• Mid-century: Photography turns into a dominant type of mass communication by way of newspapers, magazines, promoting and photojournalism, whereas additionally changing into firmly established as an artwork type.
• Late 1900s: Digital images emerges, remodeling how photographs are captured, saved, and shared
   

The 2000s – The digital revolution and images in on a regular basis life

• In the 2000s, digital images transforms the medium, making photographs sooner, simpler and cheaper to seize, edit and retailer, with smartphones ultimately placing a digicam in virtually everybody’s palms.
   
• Photography turns into a part of on a regular basis communication, as social media and digital platforms remodel how photographs are shared, found and consumed.
   
• World Photography Organisation is based in 2007 and the Sony World Photography Awards launched, creating a serious world platform for photographers all over the world.
   
• By the 2020s, images is an integral a part of every day life, whereas persevering with to evolve alongside new applied sciences and methods of seeing.
   

Make your mark on images’s historical past

Enter the Sony World Photography Awards 2027 to your probability to have your work seen on a world stage, join with images’s neighborhood and turn out to be a part of the story of images.