In 1841 Talbot patented the calotype. It made a negative on paper, and that paper negative could print positive after positive. From then on, one picture could exist in many copies.
A salted paper print was made by pressing a negative onto sensitised paper and exposing it to sunlight. Popular in the mid-nineteenth century, it has a matte surface, with the image sitting in the paper fibres.
In 1842 John Herschel invented the cyanotype. Paper coated with iron salts is exposed to light and washed in water, leaving a blue image. No camera is needed.
Albumen paper used egg white to give the paper a smooth coating that could hold fine detail. In the second half of the nineteenth century it was one of the most common photographic papers. Most cartes de visite were printed on it.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer published the wet collodion process. A coated glass plate had to be exposed and developed while it was still wet. Once dry, the plate was useless, so the darkroom travelled with the camera.
A stereograph pairs two photographs of the same scene, taken from two slightly different positions. Seen through a stereoscope, they merge into one picture with depth.
In 1889 Kodak introduced commercial transparent roll film. Light-sensitive material went from rigid glass plates to a flexible strip that could be wound through a camera for many exposures.
In 1900 Kodak launched the Brownie box camera for one dollar, with film sold separately. It was simple to use, and many people owned a camera for the first time.
Julia Margaret Cameron often left her portraits deliberately out of focus and kept the scratches and marks of her process. The V&A describes these as her experiments. At the time these counted as mistakes.
In 1865 the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, showed Cameron's photographs: her first museum exhibition. In 1868 the museum gave her two rooms to use as a portrait studio.
MoMA holds a fern cyanotype by Anna Atkins dated 1853. She laid the plant directly on sensitised paper, so it printed its own outline. They are specimen records, and beautiful too.
In 1967 MoMA's New Documents showed photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. The curator, John Szarkowski, wrote that their aim was not to reform life but to know it.
In November 1905 Alfred Stieglitz opened a small gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, formally the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. People soon simply called it 291.
Camera Work, the quarterly Alfred Stieglitz edited, ran from 1903 to 1917 in 50 issues. It published carefully printed photographs alongside writing on art and exhibitions.
In 1907 the Lumière brothers launched the Autochrome colour plate. A layer of starch grains, dyed different colours, covered the glass and acted as a colour filter.
Talbot's The Pencil of Nature was issued in six parts between 1844 and 1846, with 24 photographs. It showed what photography could do: architecture, records of objects, copies of drawings.
On 19 August 1839 the daguerreotype process was made public at a joint meeting of the French academies of sciences and fine arts in Paris. The French government had acquired the invention and published the method for people to learn.
In 1975 George Eastman House mounted New Topographics, subtitled Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Its photographers turned away from grand nature to housing tracts, roads and parking lots.
Kodachrome's two inventors, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr., were professional musicians. They had experimented with colour photography together since their youth and kept going after they became musicians.
In 1943 Edwin Land's family was on holiday in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He photographed his young daughter, and she asked why she could not see the picture at once.
Garry Winogrand photographed constantly, but late in life he developed and looked at his film less and less. When he died in 1984 he left more than 2,500 rolls exposed but undeveloped, and about 4,100 developed but never seen.
In 1973 Takuma Nakahira published the essay "Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?", rejecting his own grainy, blurred, out-of-focus pictures. That year he burned many of his negatives and prints; one account says almost all of them.
In October 1952 Henri Cartier-Bresson's book came out in France and the United States together. The French edition was called Images à la sauvette, roughly images snatched on the run.
Looking for old photographs for a Chicago neighbourhood history book, John Maloof paid about four hundred dollars at an auction house for a box of negatives of 1960s Chicago.
In 1976 Masahisa Fukase travelled from Tokyo back to his home island of Hokkaido and photographed many ravens on the way. He had planned a title meaning an account of an escape to the north.
In 1972 Daido Moriyama published Shashin yo sayonara, Farewell Photography, with Shashin Hyoronsha. Most of its pictures are grainy, blurred and out of focus, and many barely show their subject.
In 2008 Polaroid announced the end of its instant film, and its plant in Enschede, the Netherlands, closed. Florian Kaps, a Polaroid film dealer, and André Bosman, the plant's former production manager, bought its remaining machinery.
In 1965 the photographer Eikoh Hosoe and the butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata spent two days in Tashiro, a mountain village in Ugo, Akita. Hijikata mixed with the villagers, sometimes startling them, while Hosoe photographed.
Story cards have their own shelf. Rating photographs still collects badges under the existing rules.
