Yes the past galleries have returned.
CLICK HERE
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre . No Pop ups! :-)

Joseph Nicephone Niepce

This months gallery ties up to Eugene's article about

Masters of Photography

Joseph Nicephone Niepce 1765 - 1833

Joseph Nicephone Niepce was a professional soldier, but resigned from his commission from the army when he fell ill and was diagnosed with typhoid fever. Niepce lived in a era, an age when aspects to his world were crying out for new discoverers and inventions. A virtually unknown, a pensioned officer, Niepce entered the encyclopedias along side Napoleon. A visionary, he was the first to build a bicycle, and fancied himself as a designer. As Europe marched under the step of Napoleon's troops, restrictions were placed on the passage of sugar and dyes by the English blockade. European substitutes had to be found for sugar cane and various forms of colour dyes. These possibilities excited his brother Claude, but Niepce had more ambitious dreams. He found himself fascinated by lithography. A process developed by Aloys Senefelder, had just become fashionable, and it opened up new avenues for reproduction techniques. In France Niepce tried to replace the Solenhofen limestone with a different material.

At first Niepce experimented with a stone found in his village. The smooth, polished surface of the stone coated with asphalt bitumen engraved and then etched. Niepce performed various experiments on the stone, to later discover that once asphalt is exposed to light it hardens and cannot be washed off by oil. He eventually decided to coat the prepared surface with another substance and attempted to copy a transparent drawing. This was later to became known as a negative, on to a sensitized plate surface.Niepce relied heavily on the process of the camera obscura. And as early as 1793 in Sardinia, Niepce and Claude had tried to use this popular draughts men and painters aid to produce permanent images with light.

Retired from the army at the age of thirty Niepce first settled in Nice, in 1801 he moved permanently to Chalon-sur-Saone where his father managed an estate. It is at this estate that Niepce devoted himself to reading Latin classics and writing verses and inventing practical and impractical things. It was also on this estate that Niepce was driven by his original idea of capturing permanently the fleeting images of reality produced by the camera obscura.

Niepce first piece of work was published in 1802, and ten years later he took up the experiment again. But it wasn't until 1822, a decade later. That Niepce managed to produce a permanent image, an engraving of Pope Pius VII using a glass plate sensitized with a coating of asphalt. Which he developed by washing with a mixture of lavender oil and kerosene to remove the unhardened unexposed places. This plate was broken and never found again in Niepce lifetime. If it had been preserved, it would have constituted the first existence of a photographic print in the world.

In 1826 Niepce began to refine his experiments and exact his technique. Niepce was able to produce an extant photograph from nature fixed on a pewter plate. Niepce also experimented with silver chloride, which darkens when exposed to light, but eventually looked to the bitumen (Bitumen is a mixture of organic liquids that are highly viscous, black, sticky, entirely soluble in carbon disulfide, and composed primarily of highly condensed polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), which he used in his first successful attempt at capturing nature photographically.

He dissolved the bitumen in lavender oil, a solvent often used in varnishes, and coated the sheet of pewter with this light capturing mixture. He placed the sheet inside a camera obscura to capture the picture, and eight hours later removed it and washed it with lavender oil to remove the unexposed bitumen. The image was 20 x 16 cm in size and showed a view from Niepce's window of a pigeon house and barn at Gras near Chalon-sur-Saone France. The bitumen of judea (aspahlt) film took 8 hours to expose as attested by shadows seen falling on both sides of the backyard. It was a success, and need to be fine tuned. In 1827 Nipece brought the picture to Kew England, where it was lost. And was later discovered and found in 1952 by the English historian Gernsheim, who added it to his collection.

Niepce called his process of producing images by sunlight:- Heliography. Whilst searching for a new lithographic reproduction (Lithography:- is a method for printing using a plate or stone with a completely smooth surface. By contrast, in intaglio printing plate is engraved etched or stippled to make cavities to contain the printing ink, and in woodblock printing and letterpress ink is applied to the raised surfaces of letters or images. Lithography uses oil or fat and gum arabic to divide the smooth surface into hydrophobic regions which accept the ink, and hydrophilic regions which reject it and thus become the background. Invented by Bavarian author Alois Senefelder in 1796,it can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or another suitable material) process, unbeknown to Niepce. He had in fact stumbled upon the basic fundamental, essential to photography. He progressively replaced lithographic stone with other materials such as copper, silver, zinc and glass. Afraid that his work would be stolen he refused to respond to Daguerres's first attempt to establish a partnership. In 1827, Niepce presented his findings of his invention to the Royal Society, but failed to submit finer details and the Royal Society refused to acknowledge his discovery and invention. Niepce made another picture representing a laid table, again using the glass plate sensitized with bitumen method. This is the image which is thought to be the oldest extant photograph in the world. Starting in 1829 he began collaborating on improved photographic processes with Louis Daguerre, and together they developed the physautotype, (The physautotype was a photographic process, invented by Joseph Nicephone Niepce and Louis Daguerre in 1832, in which images were produced with the use of lavender dissolved in alcohol as a photographic agent. This solution, once applied to a silver plate, was then exposed in a camera obscura for several hours to create a photographic image.a process that used lavender oil. Eventually Niepce made a deal with Daguerre, and in 1833 when he was dying. Niepce had no idea how revolutionary his invention and discovery had been. Niepce had managed using light to imprint a sensitized plate with a true image of reality and produce a negative as a positive print. Due to his own mistrust of people. Niepce failed to win the fame as the discoverer of photography although he had been the first to develop the process.

Click on an image to see the full screen version.

privacy