A Painting-Self-Portrait in 1690's

Portrait of French painter Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 - January 20, 1875)

Photography has been around way before 1850’s. For memory or an image to be created, we have to see first. That is how first portraits of famous people were transferred from the artist’s mind onto the painting. From those paintings, the idea of photographs came and was born in mid 19^th century. In New York, the method of transferring the image onto the glass was very popular and studio Mathew Brady was one of the many in who was offering luxurious portrait service to politicians, doctors, lawyers and others (Jean-Claude Lemagny). The photographs also became very significant in Paris. They used a different method of photography which is transferring an image onto the paper. It was very popular and it cost 100 francs so a famous photographer Disderi was serving high class clientele of Europe. Another famous photographer Felix Nadar refused retouching any photographs so he hired specialists company Meyer Feyers for those kinds of photographs (Jean-Claude Lemagny). For that kind of special request today we use Photoshop.

Photographs are there to record a memory, an image or a moment in our lives. Women like to pose, put on makeup or dress up, meanwhile men like to fix their hair or tie before taking the picture. All of them have the same goal, they are determined to look their best on the photographs and nothing can stop them. The things have not changed much today. We still take the photographs because of the same reasons, but now we can take thousands of them and choose the best one. The difference is the way we take them, develop them and keep them and of course the technology has helped a lot in that department.

Technology allowed us to take these photographs and send them to our friends across the world in a matter of second after they have been taken. Photography was once considered profession but today everyone think they can be photographers. The view has certainly changed towards photography since the early days. As much as I like digital photography and having a camera on my phone, I have to admit that with technological improvement we have lost that joy of anxiously waiting in front of a studio for the photos to be developed. Whether it was last night’s party or vacation, you really didn’t know how we turned out. Therefore it was a nice surprise when we open the envelope. Even the smell and the touch of the freshly developed photographs had a big significance for me. I also have to mention that black and white photographs are excellent for the portrait. Since there is not colour, our eye focuses more on the persons face and features and allows us to analyze the photo more detailed.

We used to take photos to try and capture a moment or a frame of our life in a photograph but today with having many different options and taking many photos in few minutes it is more likely that we are trying to capture “the best possible moment”.