ART 150 - Introduction to Photography

It combines the world’s leading collections of photography and film with the stately pleasures of the landmark Colonial Revival mansion and gardens that George Eastman called home from 1905 to 1932. The Museum is a National Historic Landmark. Mr. Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Company, is heralded as the father of modern photography and motion picture film.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum offers unparalleled resources for the study of American art. Its extensive Photograph Archives contain nearly a half million negatives, photographs, and slides. The images document American art from the colonial period to the present.

Learn about the invention of photography.

Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin has an exhibit of Niepce's first photograph.

The Daguerreian Society brings together people from all over the world who are united by a common interest in the history of photography.

Niepce is known for taking the world's first permanent photograph in 1826.

Discovered a way of making permanent images by exposing to light paper treated with alternate washes of sodium chloride and silver nitrate.

A French painter and stage designer, invented the daguerreotype, the first practical and commercially successful photographic process.

Inventor of the carte de visite.

Best known for photographing the Civil War.

O'Sullivan began his photography career as an apprentice in Mathew Brady's Fulton Street gallery in New York City and then moved on to the Washington, D.C., branch managed by Alexander Gardner. In 1861, at the age of twenty-one, O'Sullivan joined Brady's team of Civil War photographers. When Gardner left Brady, O'Sullivan went with him, working for Gardner until the end of the war.

Landscape photographer best known for photographing Yosemite in California. Watkins used mammoth glass plates that measured 22"x18" to photograph the Yosemite valley. A contemporary of Jackson and O'Sullivan, Watkins also worked to photograph the expansion of the railroad in the west.

Best known as the inventor of the moving picture.