For reasons that have not always been explained, photography was soon associated with advancement and progress. Its commercial uses took firm root after the Great Exhibition of Arts and Industry of 1851 held in London’s Crystal Palace. Photography was clearly a product of the age of positivism, of scientific enquiry and years of experimentation. It represented a growing interest in what was thought of as ‘realistic’ visual representation, till then the domain of the artist, painter and later, the engraver. It is not as though photography could not have emerged earlier; there was sufficient technological progress happening in the ‘industrial’ century. Perhaps it would not be out of place to suggest that the growing middle classes were not quite ready and the aristocracy in any case was committed to the portrait painter. When the daguerreotype appeared on the scene in 1839, there was no looking back. It became extremely popular in the United States of America, where clearly the invention had appeared at a time when a young nation was keen on novelty and on symbols of progress.

However, owing to the fact that the daguerreotype was a single, very detailed image on a silver-coated copper plate — based on the chemical reaction of certain compounds when exposed to light — that had to be carefully protected from changes in the atmosphere, its popularity was relatively short-lived. By the late 19th century, the demand was for more than one print; photography was fast becoming a significant entrant to a domestic and wider economy based on sharing, exchange and status-seeking. The fragility of the exclusive daguerreotype could no longer satisfy a growing market. Soon, the expansionist vision of industrialized capitalistic societies helped encourage and legitimize proliferating photographic establishments in many parts of the world, large areas of which were colonized by the West.

Work on improved photographic mediums occupied a number of British and European innovators, each process being replaced by a more efficient one. Soon, it was the wet collodion process and the glass plate negative that popularized the photograph in the many studios mushrooming throughout the middle-class world. After the middle of the 19th century, most photographic prints were made by using albumenized paper (hence ‘albumen prints’) that had been sensitized with a solution of silver nitrate which was then put in contact with collodion, a sticky substance to which light-sensitive salts could adhere on glass negatives that were then exposed to daylight. This process was in vogue till the 1870s when a dry plate reduced dependence on the earlier more cumbersome method. These glass plate negatives could be prepared well in advance of their actual use and led to a growing business that was now not dependent only on the photographer. Commercially available after 1875, the negatives facilitated the emergence of the amateur photographer and his/her requirements provided for a flourishing photographic business.

The real breakthrough of the times came in 1888 with the invention of George Eastman’s three-inch ‘box’ camera that he named Kodak — a word that he felt “could be pronounced anywhere in the world”. By introducing the first hand-held camera, with a film that could now be sent to the manufacturer for developing, the American innovator brought photography into the public domain, within easy reach of the growing middle-class world. That Eastman sought to de-mystify and popularize photography is evident from his explanation of the choice of name for his camera. No longer regarded as a ‘witch machine’ where the photographer would disappear behind a shroud and then miraculously produce a glass plate negative with an image of the sitter, Eastman’s camera (popularly known as the ‘brownie’) further ‘tamed’ and domesticated the photographic process.

Even before the coming of Eastman’s invention that revolutionized photography, the practice had many enthusiasts, several of them eager to share and exchange views and information with other aficionados or even professional photographers willing to divulge trade secrets. By the last years of the 19th century, photographers started thinking in terms of bringing out journals and establishing groups and clubs. In 1847, the Photographic Club (also known as the Calotype Society) was set up in London followed by the Photographic Society. This became the Royal Photographic Society in 1853 and its journal, a pioneer in the field (The British Journal of Photography), carried a number of articles that hailed photography as the symbol of the civilizing era. It was here that amateurs and professionals shared information, asked for tips or discussed the merits of long exposures, new sources for albumen, substitutes for it, copying and enlarging photographs and strong versus weak baths for washing plates and so on.

Apart from technical information, anecdotes and useful tips, there were significant contributions on the likely misuse of photography or photographic piracy: years before the digital era and the ‘miracles’ of photo-shop, in the issue of August 15, 1863, a Major Gresley dealt with ways to improve landscape photographs. The author was at pains to point out that the production of various effects by manipulating the negative was being “dismissed as illegitimate practice” in some circles. Defending the practice, he then proceeded to explain at some length how such manipulation could help in enhancing a picture. This was particularly relevant in the field of landscape photography; for instance, if there was a dark foreground and distant hills, and the plate was exposed for a period of time necessary to bring out the details, the hills might become indistinguishable. How was this to be resolved? Quite easily, wrote Gresley, by splicing two negatives. Or if the foreground needed to be a bit more dramatic, the judicious addition of a little India ink to the collodion helped in what “you have not given the sun long enough to bring out”. Clouds could be problematic, but Gresley had an easy solution: “for my part, I prefer sketching the clouds with India ink in the negative”. Some artists, he continued, print — from one negative where there “was a natural sky”, to another with clouds. However, there could be disasters as well: Gresley recollected looking at a landscape by a well-known photographer where the sun appeared to be shining on the clouds from the right-hand corner and on the earth from the left.

Equally significant were so-called adjustments at the level of composition. Inconspicuous bridges could be made interesting by placing figures in the frame, an offensive branch could be chopped off or leaves be placed artistically along a village path. Samuel Bourne and Felice Beato, pre-eminent photographers of 1857 and after, are known to have placed people strategically within their compositions; Beato is rumoured to have re-arranged human and animal bones in his famous photographs of the Lucknow Residency while Bourne and others (see image) used humans to provide a sense of scale. Major Gresley thoroughly endorsed such techniques, adding, “it is surprising how much you may sometimes improve your picture by adapting as it were, your subject to your lens”.

If, in photographic discourse, debates around the manipulation of scenes, the limits to which one should or should not use photo-shop or other techniques are not uncommon today, they were not absent 150 years ago. In a note at the end of Gresley’s rather explicit article, the editors of The British Journal of Photography felt emboldened to justify their publication of the piece. Although the photographs had not been carried with the article, Major Gresley had apparently submitted two specimens in which clouds had been introduced “in a most artistic and satisfying manner”. Somewhat guardedly, the editors went on to say that objections to the manipulation of negatives were valid when they were first made. The argument then was that photography should stand on its own. However, things had apparently changed, and the editors concluded that “now that we are tolerably familiar with its power, we can afford to accept a new beauty, even if adventitiously introduced”. So impressed were they by the ‘power’ of external intervention, that the editors neatly evaded palpably evident ethical issues. Today, a modern-day Gresley would think twice before expressing views that reveal what would be regarded as dubious trade secrets and editorial judgment, too, would be more cautious. Morphing, plagiarism, legitimacy and ownership are very real issues in a world going viral; it is not that early photographic practitioners were immoral or even amoral — it is just that abuse and misuse have acquired a more dire meaning today.