Snapshots over time: BYU exhibit traces 170 years of photography

Sometime in 1853, Brigham Young sat down to have his picture taken. Not much is known about the exact sitting, but picture-taking in those days, using the method invented by Frenchman Louis Daguerre some 14 years earlier, was rather a clunky process.

It involved coating a copper plate with silver oxide, exposing it at length to the image being captured, developing it in a mercury bath and then removing the remaining silver oxide with a warm solution of cooking salt.

The developing process took about 30 minutes and resulted in a single, direct-positive picture.

But for its day, it was a remarkable achievement.

"The daguerreotype was the latest result of a never-ending quest to find better ways to capture images," says Tom Wells, curator of an exhibition in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections area of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

Titled "From Daguerreotype to Digital: 170 Years of Photography," the exhibit not only traces the development of photography from the 1840s to the present, it also showcases some "treasures in our special collections and demonstrates the vastness of our holdings of notable photographs," says Wells. The exhibition runs through May.

In addition to the daguerreotype of Brigham Young, there are photos that represent subsequent photo processes, as well as works by notable photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, William Henry Jackson, C.R. Savage, George Edward Anderson, Ansel Adams and John Telford.

It is one of the interesting ironies of history that the camera was invented long before photography. As early as the fifth century B.C., people noticed that a scene from the outside world could be created on walls by letting sunshine flow through a small hole into a darkened room. This was called the "Camera Obscura."

In the 1500s, the camera obscura was improved with the addition of a lens, and it became a tool of artists. But it would be another 300 years before the idea of combining the camera obscura with photo-sensitive paper led to the first notion of photographs.

Several processes were developed before Daguerre came up with his, but the daguerreotype became one of the first to be taken on the road, as it were, and be widely used by other photographers.

From that point, the race was on for ways to improve sharpness of image, ease of development and new and better ways of taking pictures, said John Telford in a lecture held in connection with the exhibition's opening.