July 31, 2007
Mary Johnson's photo
As mentioned previously, Betty Howell Traver provided us with an amazing photo of Mary Johnson (1786 - 1856). Mary was Betty's 2x Great Grandmother, and Henry Howell's Great Grandmother.
Mary Johnson "Polly"
When looking at this photo you realize that Mary's parents lived through the American Revolution, and that inevitably makes you ask "Is it really possible to have a photo of someone born in 1786?", and "When was photography actually invented?"
The stock answer is usually something like:
"In 1826 Nicéphore Niépce takes the first permanent photograph, a landscape that required an eight hour exposure."
But as far as the adoption of photos by the public it looks more like 1839. By 1839 daguerreotypes (an image formed on a silver-coated copper plate) were available to anyone with the means to afford them. In London, a daguerreotype portrait would cost about a guinea - approximately a weekly wage for an average worker. Each photo was a 'once only' affair, as there was no negative and therefore no way to make additional prints from the original image.
By the 1850s the concept of making a print from a positive or negative plate became the norm and things really took off. Calotypes were based on the concept of producing a positive print by means of a wet-plate negative. The Collodion process followed reducing exposure times to a few seconds. In 1850s there were 77 photographic galleries in New York alone, and prints in London sold for about one shilling (5p) according to Robert Leggat in A History of Photography.
By the 1880's the dry glass plate was in use and was easier to handle than the wet plate.
Kodak introduced the Brownie camera in 1900 and glass negatives were replaced by film.
As for our image of Mary Johnson...she appears to be in her 60's in the the image we have of her. In 1850, the year photography really started to take off, and was quite affordable, she was 64 years old. Still, she has to be one of the relatively few photographed that were born in the 1780's and we are very fortunate to have her image in 2007!
Sources: 1. Wikipedia.org. 2. "A History of Photography", Robert Leggat Ph.D.
Posted by jhowell at July 31, 2007 11:57 PM