From the daguerreotype to today’s film revival: classic photobooks and photographers’ own writings, exhibitions, photographs, film and camera releases, film technology, groups and institutions, and photographers’ lives. Every entry names its sources, and no date is more precise than they allow.
Births and deaths (158 entries) are hidden by default; choose “People” to see them. Year-only events appear here only; exact-date events also appear on On This Day.
1827 · International · Photograph
Niépce makes the oldest surviving photograph
View from the Window at Le Gras, exposed over days on a bitumen-coated pewter plate.
Wikipedia (en)
1839 · United States · Photograph
Cornelius makes the first American photographic portrait
Cornelius's daguerreotype self-portrait in Philadelphia is accepted as the first photographic portrait made in the United States and the second in the world.
Wikipedia (en)
25 January 1839 · International · Exhibition
Talbot shows his paper photographs at the Royal Institution
Weeks after the daguerreotype was announced, Talbot showed pictures he had made in 1835 to assert his priority.
Wikipedia (en)
19 August 1839 · International · Film technology
The daguerreotype is given to the world
At a joint meeting of the French academies in Paris the daguerreotype process was made public, presented by the French government as a gift free to the world.
Wikipedia (en)
18 October 1840 · International · Photograph
Bayard's Self Portrait as a Drowned Man
Hippolyte Bayard, aggrieved that his process had been passed over, made the first staged photograph.
Wikipedia (en)
1841 · International · Film technology
Talbot patents the calotype
Talbot's paper-negative process, the first to yield many positives from one negative.
Wikipedia (en)
1842 · International · Award
Talbot receives the Royal Society's Rumford Medal
For his photographic discoveries.
Wikipedia (en)
1844 · International · Photobook
Talbot's The Pencil of Nature begins publication
The first commercially published book illustrated with photographs: twenty-four calotype prints pasted into six fascicles.
Wikipedia (en)
1844 · International · Institution
Talbot's print works at Reading
A workshop for mass-producing salted paper prints; the plates of The Pencil of Nature came from here.
Wikipedia (en)
1850 · International · Photobook
Le Gray publishes his treatise on photography
The manual went through four editions in four years and spread his waxed-paper negative process.
Wikipedia (en)
1851 · International · Film technology
Archer publishes the wet collodion process
Archer's glass wet-plate process of 1851, far sharper than paper negatives and never patented; it dominated the next thirty years.
Wikipedia (en)
1853 · International · Institution
The Photographic Society of London is founded
The oldest photographic society still in existence; it received royal patronage from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in its first year.
Wikipedia (en)
14 January 1854 · International · Institution
The British Journal of Photography's first issue
Begun as the Liverpool Photographic Journal, one of the oldest photography titles still published.
Wikipedia (en)
1857 · International · Exhibition
Rejlander's The Two Ways of Life first shown in Manchester
The allegory combined from some thirty negatives was first shown at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition and set off the argument over photography as art.
Wikipedia (en)
1858 · International · Photograph
Henry Peach Robinson's Fading Away
A deathbed scene combined from five negatives, the most famous composite picture of the Victorian era.
Wikipedia (en)
1858 · International · Photograph
Nadar makes the first aerial photographs
From a balloon over the outskirts of Paris, Nadar became the first person to photograph from the air.
Wikipedia (en)
1859 · International · Camera
Sutton's panoramic camera with a wide-angle lens
A water-filled glass-sphere lens covering about 120 degrees, exposing onto curved glass plates.
Wikipedia (en)
1861 · International · Camera
Sutton patents the first single-lens reflex camera
A mirror put viewing and taking through one lens, seventy years before the idea became common.
Wikipedia (en)
1861 · International · Film technology
Sutton photographs Maxwell's three-colour demonstration
A tartan ribbon photographed through red, green and blue filters and projected together: the earliest colour photograph.
Wikipedia (en)
29 January 1864 · International · Photograph
Julia Margaret Cameron's first success
Cameron, who took up the camera at forty-eight, photographed nine-year-old Annie Philpot and called it her first success.
Wikipedia (en)
November 1865 · International · Exhibition
Cameron's first solo exhibition
She presented The Fruits of the Spirit to the British Museum and won awards in Berlin the same year.
Wikipedia (en)
1867 · International · Film stock
Agfa is founded
The old German photographic-materials maker; its consumer film business became AgfaPhoto in 2004, went bankrupt the next year, and the brand has since been licensed to other makers.
Wikipedia (en)Wikipedia (en)
1868 · United States · Exhibition
Muybridge exhibits his large Yosemite photographs
Working as Helios, the landscape photographer also began selling his popular stereographs.
Wikipedia (en)
1871 · International · Film technology
Maddox proposes the gelatin dry plate
Maddox's gelatin silver-bromide emulsion of 1871: plates could be made in advance and developed later, which made hand cameras and roll film possible.
Wikipedia (en)
1874 · International · Photograph
Cameron illustrates Tennyson's Idylls of the King
Her staged literary and classical tableaux reached their peak in two volumes of illustrations, evidently published at her own expense.
Wikipedia (en)
April 1874 · International · Exhibition
Nadar lends his studio for the first Impressionist exhibition
His photography studio on the boulevard des Capucines became the venue of the first Impressionist show.
Wikipedia (en)
June 1878 · United States · Photograph
Muybridge shoots The Horse in Motion
A row of electrically tripped cameras caught the phases of a galloping horse, proving all four hooves leave the ground, and foreshadowing cinema.
Wikipedia (en)
8 July 1878 · United States · Exhibition
Muybridge first projects his motion photographs
Magic-lantern slides of the horse sequences, shown at the San Francisco Art Association.
Wikipedia (en)
1879 · International · Film stock
Ilford is founded
The black-and-white film and paper maker founded at Ilford, England, in 1879; run by Harman Technology since 2005.
Wikipedia (en)
1886 · International · Photograph
Nadar and his son make the first photo-interview
The subject was the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, then a hundred years old.
Wikipedia (en)
1887 · United States · Photobook
Animal Locomotion is published
781 collotype plates holding 20,000 photographs, in eleven volumes.
Wikipedia (en)
1888 · United States · Film technology
The Kodak camera: a box camera pre-loaded with roll film
Eastman's paper roll film of 1885, the Kodak camera of 1888 and transparent celluloid film of 1889 took photography off glass.
Wikipedia (en)Wikipedia (en)
12 February 1888 · United States · Photograph
Riis's flash photographs of the tenements reach the press
The Sun printed the first report; magnesium flash had lit New York's tenements for the first time.
Wikipedia (en)
1889 · United States · Photograph
How the Other Half Lives appears in Scribner's Magazine
An eighteen-page illustrated article, expanded into the book of the same name the next year.
Wikipedia (en)
1889 · United States · Film technology
Transparent celluloid roll film goes on sale
Eastman's paper roll film of 1885, the Kodak camera of 1888 and transparent celluloid film of 1889 took photography off glass.
Wikipedia (en)Wikipedia (en)
1894 · International · Institution
The society becomes the Royal Photographic Society
Renamed the Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1874, and known as the Royal Photographic Society since 1894.
Wikipedia (en)
1898 · International · Institution
Paris institutions begin buying Atget's photographs
The Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris became his customers.
Wikipedia (en)
1899 · United States · Exhibition
Steichen's photographs in the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon
At twenty, Steichen showed for the first time in a major pictorialist salon.
Wikipedia (en)
1900 · United States · Camera
Kodak's Brownie is released
The inexpensive Brownie put cameras in ordinary households and grew into a long series.
Wikipedia (en)
1902 · United States · Movement
The Photo-Secession is formed
Stieglitz's pictorialist group in New York, arguing that photography is an art; its journal Camera Work began the next year.
Wikipedia (en)
1903 · United States · Essays and theory
The journal of the Photo-Secession, later turning to modernism; a periodical rather than a book, yet it set the standard for photographic printing.
WikidataWikipedia (en)
1903 · International · Film technology
The Lumières patent the Autochrome
The Lumière brothers' colour plate with a screen of dyed starch grains; patented 1903, marketed 1907, the first practical colour process.
Wikipedia (en)
January 1903 · United States · Institution
Camera Work begins
Alfred Stieglitz's quarterly Camera Work dated its first issue January 1903; fifty issues followed until 1917.
Wikipedia (en)
1904 · United States · Photograph
Steichen photographs The Pond—Moonlight
A hand-coloured gum-bichromate-over-platinum print, a landmark of pictorialism; it set a photograph auction record in 2006.
Wikipedia (en)
1905 · United States · Exhibition
Gallery 291 opens in New York
Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue; it ran until 1917.
Wikipedia (en)
1906 · International · Film technology
The first commercial panchromatic plates
Emulsions sensitive to red as well, commercialised by Wratten & Wainwright in 1906; black-and-white tones came close to what the eye sees.
Wikipedia (en)
1907 · United States · Photograph
Stieglitz photographs The Steerage
The lower deck of a liner bound for Europe, often called the first modernist photograph.
Wikipedia (en)
1907 · International · Film technology
The Autochrome is marketed
The Lumière brothers' colour process, patented in 1903, went on sale in 1907.
Wikipedia (en)
1908 · United States · Photograph
Hine becomes photographer to the National Child Labor Committee
He left teaching to photograph children in mills and mines.
Wikipedia (en)
1910 · United States · Exhibition
Stieglitz organises the Albright Art Gallery photography show
At the invitation of the Albright Art Gallery's director in Buffalo, Stieglitz put together a major show of the best contemporary photography.
Wikipedia (en)
April 1911 · International · Photograph
Steichen photographs Poiret's gowns for Art et Décoration
The gown pictures are regarded as the first modern fashion photographs.
Wikipedia (en)
1913 · United States · Exhibition
Imogen Cunningham exhibits in Brooklyn
At the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, by then a sought-after portraitist.
Wikipedia (en)
1921 · International · Film stock
Fotochema, the forerunner of Foma, is founded
The black-and-white materials maker of Hradec Králové, Czechia; Fomapan is among Europe's cheapest traditional films.
Wikipedia (en)
1922 · Japan · Photobook
Photographs from the Shiseido president's 1913 European journey; a landmark early Japanese photobook.
Shinzo FukuharaWikipedia (en)Wikipedia (ja)
December 1922 · International · Photobook
Man Ray publishes Champs délicieux
Twelve camera-less rayographs with an introduction by Tzara: the photogram as an art form.
Wikipedia (en)
1923 · International · Film stock
Ferrania begins making photographic film
The old Italian film maker, revived as FILM Ferrania in 2013; the black-and-white P30 followed in 2017.
Wikipedia (en)
June 1924 · International · Photograph
Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres is first published
Published in the Surrealist magazine Littérature; the model is Kiki de Montparnasse.
Wikipedia (en)
1925 · International · Essays and theory
The programme of the New Vision: photography as the shaping of light.
Wikipedia (en)
1925 · International · Camera
The Leica I appears at the Leipzig Spring Fair
The small camera using 35 mm cine film was an immediate success.
Wikipedia (en)
April 1926 · Japan · Institution
Asahi Camera begins publication
Japan's longest-lived photography monthly, published for nearly a century.
Wikipedia (en)
The page shows the first 60 entries; the remaining 585 load in the browser in batches.
Book entries record first editions only; reprints, translations and revised editions are on each book’s page. Camera and film entries distinguish announcement, retail release, production, discontinuation and relaunch.
