CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Daguerreotype, Susan Sontag, Halftone
17 Sep 2013
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Document Summary
Photography on paper made it possible to reproduce images mechanically. 1839: first commercial photographic system (called the daguerreotype) Photographs were slow to be regularly features in newspapers. Daguere: artist who invented the photograph, created the diorama. In newspapers, drawings and sketches were features in ads, not photographs, and printers had sketchers . The idea that pictures are worth 1000 words was not totally true back then, because people did not trust the pictures. Constitutive elements: halftone pictures (technical, press photographers (social, photo agencies would send you a series of photos and you could buy some (business) People are moving into cities to become informed, they"re reading by electric light etc. By early 1870"s almost no newspapers used photographs (people were exposed to only about 100 pictures per week) 30 years later, out of the 14 newspapers in newyork, each features about 903 pictures per week. Eventually people said that pictures are bad because they distract people from the text.
