> This meant toting hundreds of pounds of equipment — including volatile chemicals, a darkroom tent and fragile glass plates — to wherever they hoped to snap a scene.
I am something of a "photography genealogist" for the family. My father's half-aunt lived to be 103, never had children, and left behind a suitcase stuffed with photos — going back to a tintype of her mother from the 1880's. I was lucky the suitcase was eventually handed over to me.
That started my obsession with collecting all the family photos I could find. And starting with that suitcase, I scanned every photo and embarked on cleaning up and adjusting levels (etc.) for every interesting photo in the lot.
Sometimes a few lines of text on the back or border gave me the date or subject of the photo. Often there was nothing though. Nonetheless, I was slowly able to recognize people in the photos, associate a name to them (from also doing traditional genealogy with Ancestry.com). Stories emerged in some cases (my great grandmother's big road-trip vacation in 1925 after the divorce from her unfaithful husband, the mysterious young woman in the Denver photos that I was eventually able to trace to a teen daughter who died in Mexico, Missouri while away at music school, etc.)
And as I was able to figure out the photos, order them, I got to also see the progress of photography and cameras. The tintype and early collodion photos were all in a studio setting (perhaps a single photography studio in Kansas City in 1880? She was only a young girl, her father a farmer — he must have been putting on airs to have a studio photograph taken of his young daughter).
And then the Kodak Brownie (I assume) makes the scene by 1920 or so for the family and photos start to appear taken in the field, on the farm — no longer in studios. The quality though suffers immensely.
Better Kodaks (or similar) come into the family by the 30's and candid, amatuer photography now rivals the quality of the earlier studio photos. Somewhat.
Suddenly in the 1950's square color photos appear in the collection and the quality is actually some of the worst of all the family photos. So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital.
johnmaguire · 9h ago
> So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital.
Can you explain why color film would be a tradeoff against fast lenses? Can't you use the exact same lens with color or B&W? Or what you mean by "traded film for color"? After all, color film existed decades before digital.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
Maybe someone else knows why black and white film looks sharper and has more detail then. Was there a race to the bottom in terms of optics when color film showed up in the consumer camera? Is it because they moved to a smaller film stock than the medium format 120 film that was common in B&W cameras before color? Or is color film, with three layers of gelatin, an inherently "noisier" film stock?
I don't know. I only observe the quality fall off when color arrives. Worse, I am not even sure. that my mom's 35mm camera (Canon AE-1) in the 70's shot as good and crisp photos as the B&W cameras in the family in the 40's (before she was born though).
_aavaa_ · 2h ago
There’s multiple things going on.
The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image.
And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.
bugsMarathon88 · 10h ago
Please upload these photos to Commons, especially if you own the rights to them; photos taken in the US before 1930 can be shared even if they are not yours, too. These stories and associated artifacts are interesting and deserve to be shared, if you're comfortable with it.
JKCalhoun · 10h ago
I've posted already to ancestry.com, findagrave.com, etc. (But I am inclined to do up a blog post about it so I can talk about it and embed the photos.)
bgwalter · 10h ago
More training material? Why not upload them under the most restrictive copyright possible?
JKCalhoun · 10h ago
I haven't yet switched over to the view that training material is bad. I'm neutral at this point.
Instead I would rather it be accessible to other relatives that may not be aware of the photos (or are yet to be born).
bugsMarathon88 · 10h ago
Because Commons won't allow you to. Hilarious anyone thinks a license wards away scrapers, too.
bgwalter · 9h ago
You can obviously upload them to some other place. You mentioned Commons, I did not.
bell-cot · 9h ago
> Suddenly in the 1950's square color photos appear in the collection and the quality is actually some of the worst of all the family photos.
Could part of the problem be that color photos, especially early ones, did not age as well as B&W?
chazeon · 9h ago
Recently, I visited the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum and was fascinated to learn that when steel railcars were first introduced—despite being far safer than their wooden predecessors, which could easily be crushed—many people feared they might attract lightning. It's such a good analogue to our movement into AI reality.
k__ · 8h ago
Photorealism gives the impression of capturing the truth, but any reasonably skilled photographer knows this isn't the case.
Text generated by LLMs has similar properties.
75345d4c · 7h ago
Photo-receptive chemical immitations will never be real art
Commission a painter
api · 10h ago
The discourse around photography and art reminds me exactly of the discourse around AI and art too:
In some cases pieces I've read on AI and art contain phrases or paragraphs that are almost word for word identical to photography and art discourse. There were moral panics around photography too, especially its obvious use in pornography. There was of course pornographic drawing and painting before (we've found it in ancient Egyptian structures!) but photography took it to a new level.
lblume · 8h ago
A counterpoint: photography enabled integrity and authenticity of images, which fueled journalistic credibility, in general becoming one part in fostering a high-trust society. AI image generation leads to these advances being slowly eradicated as generated images increasingly cannot be differentiated from unfabricated evidence. In this light, photography was socially progressive, while AI generation of photorealistic images could be seen as regressive.
echelon · 12h ago
This reminds me so much of present-day generative AI criticisms.
> “These innovations were sometimes misguided, occasionally obsessive, periodically dangerous, and perpetually fascinating,” [Burgess writes]
> Susan Sontag once called [them] “the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed.”
> “were exposed to toxic mercury and iodine vapors every time they made an image,” Burgess writes
> flash powder advertised as “the most powerful light under the sun” was the cause of multiple fatal explosions in Philadelphia
Expensive, wasteful, "tech bros".
Yet we wouldn't do without photos, would we?
The technology turned out to be more good than bad:
> As photographs became more accessible — and more commercialized — they introduced “notions about celebrity culture, self-imaging, authenticity, ownership, and representation that are deeply resonant today.”
> Charles Dickens that described the appeal of the fad in surprisingly recognizable terms, marveling at the excitement of “distributing yourself among your friends, and letting them see you in your favorite attitude, and with your favorite expression. And then you get into those wonderful books which everybody possesses, and strangers see you there in good society, and ask who that very striking-looking person is?”
codingdave · 12h ago
I'd say the good from photography, aside from more options for creativity, is documentation. Journalism without photography would be of lower value. Photos are highly impactful in education, both formal and informal, to get visuals of the world beyond your immediate reach. Documentation of history, in particular local and family history, is far more powerful since photography came along.
I'd say the commercialization of it and the follow-on effects you mentioned are the bad, not the good.
JKCalhoun · 10h ago
I'm thinking of women's fashions in the U.S. — perhaps spurred on by depictions of the latest Parisian-wear from Godey's Lady's Book up to the 1890's. Then the starlets of a young Hollywood I suppose kicked off the flapper craze of the 1920's in the U.S.?
An illustration of a fashionable Parisian though was probably adequate — a photograph not required. Photography perhaps made the latest fashion trends ubiquitous?
That aside, I treasure photography for giving me a glimpse into the ordinary lives of my ordinary family going back three and four generations. Having captured the arc of an entire life from childhood, to graduation from "Normal" school, marriage, motherhood… And finally the sadder photos where they are old, comforted now by their adult daughter until the last photo in the series: their headstone.
I am thankful for all of that. I have found having the full span of a life captured in photographs to be sublime … sobering, grounding.
bgwalter · 10h ago
> This reminds me so much of present-day generative AI criticisms.
I don't think that is a coincidence, it is precisely what the article wants you to think:
In “Flashes of Brilliance,” Anika Burgess takes us back to the 19th century to showcase the artists and innovators who developed the revolutionary technology.
By tying the invention to "artists", the whole piece is framed as having the endorsement of artists. The whole article is there to frame criticism of new technology as misguided, while cleverly not mentioning "AI".
Normally I wouldn't be that suspicious, but the book and the article came out in 2025.
Now, how about an article on the miracles of DDT technology, which was the best insecticide in the world?
contagiousflow · 11h ago
I don't follow the analogy? Are you just comparing two technologies that have had criticisms at their infancy?
I am something of a "photography genealogist" for the family. My father's half-aunt lived to be 103, never had children, and left behind a suitcase stuffed with photos — going back to a tintype of her mother from the 1880's. I was lucky the suitcase was eventually handed over to me.
That started my obsession with collecting all the family photos I could find. And starting with that suitcase, I scanned every photo and embarked on cleaning up and adjusting levels (etc.) for every interesting photo in the lot.
Sometimes a few lines of text on the back or border gave me the date or subject of the photo. Often there was nothing though. Nonetheless, I was slowly able to recognize people in the photos, associate a name to them (from also doing traditional genealogy with Ancestry.com). Stories emerged in some cases (my great grandmother's big road-trip vacation in 1925 after the divorce from her unfaithful husband, the mysterious young woman in the Denver photos that I was eventually able to trace to a teen daughter who died in Mexico, Missouri while away at music school, etc.)
And as I was able to figure out the photos, order them, I got to also see the progress of photography and cameras. The tintype and early collodion photos were all in a studio setting (perhaps a single photography studio in Kansas City in 1880? She was only a young girl, her father a farmer — he must have been putting on airs to have a studio photograph taken of his young daughter).
And then the Kodak Brownie (I assume) makes the scene by 1920 or so for the family and photos start to appear taken in the field, on the farm — no longer in studios. The quality though suffers immensely.
Better Kodaks (or similar) come into the family by the 30's and candid, amatuer photography now rivals the quality of the earlier studio photos. Somewhat.
Suddenly in the 1950's square color photos appear in the collection and the quality is actually some of the worst of all the family photos. So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital.
Can you explain why color film would be a tradeoff against fast lenses? Can't you use the exact same lens with color or B&W? Or what you mean by "traded film for color"? After all, color film existed decades before digital.
I don't know. I only observe the quality fall off when color arrives. Worse, I am not even sure. that my mom's 35mm camera (Canon AE-1) in the 70's shot as good and crisp photos as the B&W cameras in the family in the 40's (before she was born though).
The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image.
And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.
Instead I would rather it be accessible to other relatives that may not be aware of the photos (or are yet to be born).
Could part of the problem be that color photos, especially early ones, did not age as well as B&W?
Text generated by LLMs has similar properties.
Commission a painter
https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...
In some cases pieces I've read on AI and art contain phrases or paragraphs that are almost word for word identical to photography and art discourse. There were moral panics around photography too, especially its obvious use in pornography. There was of course pornographic drawing and painting before (we've found it in ancient Egyptian structures!) but photography took it to a new level.
> “These innovations were sometimes misguided, occasionally obsessive, periodically dangerous, and perpetually fascinating,” [Burgess writes]
> Susan Sontag once called [them] “the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed.”
> “were exposed to toxic mercury and iodine vapors every time they made an image,” Burgess writes
> flash powder advertised as “the most powerful light under the sun” was the cause of multiple fatal explosions in Philadelphia
Expensive, wasteful, "tech bros".
Yet we wouldn't do without photos, would we?
The technology turned out to be more good than bad:
> As photographs became more accessible — and more commercialized — they introduced “notions about celebrity culture, self-imaging, authenticity, ownership, and representation that are deeply resonant today.”
> Charles Dickens that described the appeal of the fad in surprisingly recognizable terms, marveling at the excitement of “distributing yourself among your friends, and letting them see you in your favorite attitude, and with your favorite expression. And then you get into those wonderful books which everybody possesses, and strangers see you there in good society, and ask who that very striking-looking person is?”
I'd say the commercialization of it and the follow-on effects you mentioned are the bad, not the good.
An illustration of a fashionable Parisian though was probably adequate — a photograph not required. Photography perhaps made the latest fashion trends ubiquitous?
That aside, I treasure photography for giving me a glimpse into the ordinary lives of my ordinary family going back three and four generations. Having captured the arc of an entire life from childhood, to graduation from "Normal" school, marriage, motherhood… And finally the sadder photos where they are old, comforted now by their adult daughter until the last photo in the series: their headstone.
I am thankful for all of that. I have found having the full span of a life captured in photographs to be sublime … sobering, grounding.
I don't think that is a coincidence, it is precisely what the article wants you to think:
In “Flashes of Brilliance,” Anika Burgess takes us back to the 19th century to showcase the artists and innovators who developed the revolutionary technology.
By tying the invention to "artists", the whole piece is framed as having the endorsement of artists. The whole article is there to frame criticism of new technology as misguided, while cleverly not mentioning "AI".
Normally I wouldn't be that suspicious, but the book and the article came out in 2025.
Now, how about an article on the miracles of DDT technology, which was the best insecticide in the world?