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Sometimes close to the professional's work, more often miles away from it, he contributes to an art which rivals American painting in quality and interest. Photography does not have (and perhaps cannot have) the quality of slow revelation found in paintings. Its function is quick impact. Yet it sees many things the human eye does not see, in a wray the human brain alone cannot retain. It is compiling a vast and brilliant album of the odd, the beautiful and terrible human family. Above all, it is an art form which, for the first time since the art of the Middle Ages, is not reserved to an elite of experts but in which any man with a box camera and an eye for life can shine.
* Unless he happened to be one of some 1,000,000 "hypo hounds" who do their own developing.
* Arab scholars knew the basic optical principle underlying photography as early as 1038 A.D. Leonardo da Vinci noted that a small hole drilled in the wall of a dark room (camera obscura) facing a sunlit scene will project an upside-down image on the opposite wall. A Venetian nobleman, Danielle Barbaro, in 1568 fitted a light-concentrating lens into the hole. Later jt was found that a small box would do the trick as well. Frosted glass was used for the back of the box, and the image projected on the glass (art students traced the image on the glass as an aid to drawing). Next came the idea of capturing the image by making the back of the box chemically sensitive to light—the basic form of the daguerreotype camera. Others experimented with paper negatives followed by glass plates and film. * Credited with being the world's first war photographer to work under fire was the Englishman Roger Fenton, who covered the Crimean War (1854-56). He took with him a wagon outfitted as a darkroom, five cameras and 700 plates. * In 1909, at Railroad Tycoon Edward Henry Harriman's funeral, Arden, N.Y.
†Respectively, an electronic tube,used in flash equipment, and a color screen used in some printing processes.