Most cave art 10,000 to 35,000 years ago was made by spitting "paint" made of red ochre on to the wall, using their hand as a stencil to create an outline. Oddly, this is rather similar to the way many graffiti artists nowadays spray onto stencils to create a signature mark on a wall. The more things change, the more they don't change. How else are cave artists like their newer, more urban brethren? According to paleobiologists, the gender of the cave artists can be determined by studying subtle physical qualities of the hand stencils. By analyzing this data, it has been determined that, while ancient people of diverse age and gender left their marks, the majority of the artists were adolescent males.
Now, if we jump forward some 8,100 years, Chinese artists have discovered the wonders of stone rubbings, to reproduced stone-engraved scriptures on paper. This helped the spread of Buddhism through the ancient east. The earliest woodcut was a 5m scroll of the Diamond Sutra, copied from ancient drawings of the time.
Taking another leap in time, we reach Renaissance Europe , where Gutenberg has forever changed society and the transfer of information with his development of the printing press. More artistically minded Renaissance innovators would reproduce not set type, but intricately designed engravings and etchings, which were used to illustrate the printed books. Possibly the master of this technique was Albrecht Dürer. Working in etchings and woodcuts, he depicted the Dutch countryside with unprecedented beauty and detail. My parents have a copy of the Divine Comedy illustrated by Dürer, and it's been an influence on my own work since I saw it as a child.
But now, we come to the next great step in visual reproduction: the "light painting", or photograph. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first permanent photograph, of the exterior of his home, around 1826. The photograph was made using a camera obscura and a sheet of pewter coated with bitumen of Judea, an asphalt that when exposed to light, hardened permanently. It took 8 hours to make... or 10,000 years, depending on how you look at it. Niépce did not have a steady enough hand to trace the inverted images created by the camera obscura, as was popular in his day, so he looked for a way to capture an image permanently. He experimented with lithography, which led him in his attempt to take a photograph using a camera obscura. Niépce also experimented with silver chloride, which hardens when exposed to light, but eventually looked to the bitumen, which he used in his first successful attempt at capturing nature photographically.
Next, Louis-Jacqes Mandé Daguerre created the daguerreotype photo, in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. In later developments bromine and chlorine vapors were also used, resulting in shorter exposure times. The daguerreotype is a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the image and makes it appear positive in the proper light. Thus, daguerreotype is a direct photographic process without the capacity for duplication.
William Henry Fox Talbot was the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. The term calotype comes from the Greek κάλο for 'good', and τύπος for 'impression'.The sensitive element of a calotype is silver iodide. With exposure to light, silver iodide decomposes to silver leaving iodine as free element.
