The Changing Role Of Photography In The Nineteenth-Century

The revolution from printed word and drawings, to photography completely changed the way a story could be told. Our visual system evolved to process images quickly, whereas text, which only appeared a few thousand years ago, translates concrete information into abstract markings, which removed context , and requires our visual system to scan each individual characters, one at a time, recognize them, and piece them together into words, then sentences, and so on . Although, written word and pictorials were used to convey clear information, the information could be true or false and no one would be the wiser . Photography has the ability to instantly depict real moments in time, ‘virtual witnessing’ of anything, and is could be considered a more …show more content…
The printing press generated a need for publishers and bookshops, as the market for books in personal, public and university libraries were created and expanded at a rapid pace due to the want for written text . This created much larger virtual communities than the previous group of purely intellectuals and clerics . 
Photographers started a social revolution by beginning to document the poverty of the lower classes, which were rarely the subject of artistic representations. Photojournalism employed images in order to tell new stories of far-away places, including the horrors of war far from the home front. This allowed for ‘virtual witnessing’ of views people had previously never seen before . Soon after, in the late nineteenth-century, the mass-market box camera was available to everyone , which helped to break barriers in class. Both print and photography gave people from all walks of life the capability to communicate ideas, transforming the economic structure of society and changing people’s way of being and their …show more content…
The more that was printed the more people learned to read and write. This began the regularization of writing in the vernacular to reach a larger audience particularly with the printed bible , and inevitably led to the loss of techniques related to the older manuscript culture . The first practical photography method, daguerreotype, quickly spread across Europe and North America creating portrait photography as a profession, however no copies could be produced . The more people who wanted photos the more the way of photography changed creating a loop of give and take. Through the nineteenth century exposure time dramatically decreased and the realism and the nature of the photograph increased reducing the formality of photographs . The method of calotype photography, of transferring images from a negative to positive image on paper allowed for multiple copies to be made from a single negative , again reducing the stiffness and formality of images. These photographs captured what the human memory could not recall , or the honest depiction of past events; therefore increasing the peoples want to capture the moment. Photography changed the way information was shared with the general public because it was quick, just like the printing press. It could be mass-produced and increased the