The first photograph was taken by Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce in September
1824 in France. He used a large wooden box as a camera and a stone
plate coated in asphalt as film. The camera was pointed out his
second-story window, and he left the asphalt exposed for a full
day. When he rinsed the stone plate in lavender oil to remove any
unhardened asphalt, what remained was the first modern photograph
(See Robert Kunzig, Discover, August 2000:24-27.)
In the 1830's the Frenchman Daguerre
discovered that he could cut the exposure time down to half an hour
if he used silver halide crystals and a chemical developer. Unfortunately,
the resulting image, while sharp and detailed, could not be easily
reproduced.
In the 1840's several new techniques
and photographic processing systems were created or discovered.
One of the most useful involved Sir John Herschel's discovery that
ferric (iron) salts are photosensitive. Blue prints, or cyanotypes,
were inexpensive, easy to make, and relatively permanent, and many
amateurs and professionals liked the fact that coated paper was
easy to make or to purchase. The bright blue color was a draw-back
for some, but you will notice that Montgomery enjoyed creating cyanotypes
and probably printed off many of her early plates that way to decide
what to mount and to share. The scrapbook pages on display in this
exhibition have several examples of Montgomery's cyanotypes. The
cyanotypes disappear after her marriage when she bought a Kodak
to take on her honeymoon; as a rural minister's busy wife, new mother,
and author, she had no time for her old hobby of film processing
and printing.
Montgomery created cyanotypes from the glass plate negatives used
in her 4 X 5 camera of the 1890's. The dry glass plate she used
was a successor to the wet plates used from the 1850's to the 1870's.
The wet plate technique had required the application of a light-sensitive
chemical gel to a glass plate that then had to be exposed quickly
before the surface dried. In the field this rapid application and
exposure could be tricky and messy. In the 1870's, glass plates
were coated and sensitized and sold dry. They could be stored for
later use and after exposure they did not have to be developed right
away. Dozens of Montgomery's glass plate negatives are owned and
preserved by the University of Guelph. For a record of some of the
fun she had with the plates and images, see her Daily
Echo article on photography
in this exhibition.
The most famous name in photography, Kodak, was a word invented
by George Eastman, who had owned a dry plate and film company and
had revolutionized the photography industry by marketing his easy-to-operate
Kodak in 1888. So famous did the Kodak name become that Eastman
eventually changed the name of his company to incorporate it, becoming
the Eastman Kodak Company. The Kodak cameras were meant to make
photography accessible to everyone. The company's slogan has become
a by-word in advertizing: "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest"
(See Bill Belier, "1888-1988: The Centenary of the Kodak," Photographic
Canadiana, Jan.-Feb. 1988:2-4). Not only did Eastman produce
adaptors so that glass plate cameras could use film, but he made
the hand-held film camera one that could be pre-loaded by Kodak
and reloaded by the company when the photographs were processed,
or one that could be loaded and then developed by the photographer.
Even though she seems to have set aside her own film processing
and her creation of cyanotypes after she married in 1911, Montgomery
continued to take photographs for the rest of her life. The University
of Guelph owns some two thousand images taken of and by Montgomery.
See L.M. Montgomery
as a Photographer.
[Thanks to Andrea Kunard for background information on photography
prepared for the 1999 exhibition The Visual Imagination of Lucy
Maud Montgomery.]
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