Photographers of the Old West :: Research History Photography Papers

Photographers of the Old WestIn a society that is focused on visual stimuli, it isnt uncommon to see a person taking a realize with a camera or making a movie with their camcorder. But, in the 1840s and 1850s, life just wasnt exchangeable that. If someone said they could make a picture of a digging town or of the route to the West without a pencil or paint people would devour laughed at them. Laughing would have been catch because photography didnt come into being until 1839. James Horan reveals in his book, Mathew Brady Historian with a Camera, that it wasnt even called photography then, it was called the new art (5). There were very a couple of(prenominal) people who knew what it was to take a picture, or make a picture with fainthearted. The only pictures that were around at that time were those that were drawn, painted, or printed from lithographs or etchings. Newspapers didnt have real live pictures that showed the actual things that were written about. The population of A merica as it was in 1800 didnt know what the West looked like. According to Eugene Ostroff, sketches and paintings were the only illustrations of the West forrader photography (9). Ostroff tells us that these werent usually accepted if the painter had taken tasty license (9). All Americans knew were the stories of the people who returned because it was too difficult to live at that place or the letters from friends and family telling the horrors they saw. So, with the invention of photography, especially the ability to lay the image onto the paper or metal plate had a study effect on the expansion to the West because the pictures that were taken showed how the West really was beautiful. Unfortunately, it was a while before the macrocosm was able to see the pictures that were taken by the photographers of the West because 1839 was only the very beginning of photography as a profession and a hobby. The first type of using light to make a picture was the daguerreotype. Both Loui s Jacques Mande Daguerre and Nicephore Niepce, who passed away before the public was introduced to the daguerreotype, founded this type of picture taking. However, before this Louis Daguerre made a theater without actors. Beaumont Newhall explains that this was an psychotic belief made by extraordinary lighting effects that made the 45 foot by 71 foot pictures appear to change as one looked at them (2).