The world as we know it today is the most documented it has ever been. The ease with which human beings can communicate their experience individuals to a vast audience is unprecedented. The internet is the vehicle by which our communications travel. Our thoughts and ideas are expressed in a number of ways, including text, video, and audio recordings, such as in a podcast. And then there is the photograph. The photograph, the concept of capturing an image, exactly as it exists physically, is unique in that for a centuries, it has allowed the viewer a visual window into the life, experience, and world of another human being. It is a timeless form of communication that has not only created the path for modern video and film, but it has also revolutionized the way that people see the world, and ultimately each other in this day and age. The photograph is so much a part of the human experience and the human identity, but where did it come from? What made this technology possible?
The energy that made photography possible came from the Big Bang, around 13.8 billion years ago. There are four main types of energy: mechanical, thermal, electrical, and electromagnetic radiation (Elert, The Physics Hypertextbook, 1998). The energy that is used most prevalently in the art of photography is light energy. Light energy comes in the form of waves and is classified as electromagnetic radiation, given that light is a manifestation of electric and magnetic fields “bundled” together (Phil Plait, “Light: Crash Course Astronomy #24”, 2015). The light energy that important to photography is light from the sun.
This source of light and the brightest star in our sky has its origins about 4.5 billion years ago, forming from the collapse of a solar nebula, a giant cloud of the Big Bang elements: Hydrogen and Helium (“Sun – In Depth | Planets – NASA Solar System Exploration”). The sun produces light energy through the process of fusion, in which two atoms are exposed to heat and compression, which often results in the production of a photon, or a light particle (Fox, “Origin of Light”, 2012). In other words, “Right at its core it is transforming Hydrogen into Helium… in that transformation it’s converting some of its mass into energy. Every second, four million tons of the sun [are] being transformed into… light,” (Swimme, “The Fire of Creation”, 2002), thus making a lifelike reproduction of reality on photosensitive paper possible.
As the Big Bang brought forth the Hydrogen and Helium Atoms, these two elements formed stars through the process of fusion, also giving rise to Lithium through Iron (Christian, Brown Stokes, & Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, 2014). Some additional elements and compounds have been rather essential to the development and production of images using different methods of photography over the years. Some of these include Calcium Nitrate Ca(NO3)2, Silver, Phosphorus, Silver Carbonate Ag2CO3, Silver Chloride AgCl, to name a few (Newhall, The history of photography: from 1839 to the present, completely revised and enlarged edition, 1982).
The Earth, of course, also has an important role to play in producing images through photography. Like the sun, the Earth also formed around 4.5 billion years ago (Plait, “The Earth: Crash Course Astronomy #11”, 2015). The planet spent its first billion years in a hellish, burning, fiery state known as the Hadean Eon. During this period, the earth had no atmosphere, no gaseous protection from the sun’s radiation (Christian, Brown Stokes, & Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, 2014, 45). In the context of photography, the atmosphere is especially significant because, as previously mentioned, the art form depends on light. In the vacuum of space, there is no medium for light to travel through, causing the “frequency of light to be a straight line,” (David, “How Does Light Travel From the Sun to Earth?”, 2017). A medium, a substance through which, “the transfer of energy from one location to another,” is made possible (Ammer, “The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms”) is absolutely necessary for light energy to be processed and interpreted by the human eye. The atmosphere causes photons to collide and bump into the gas particles that are part of the atmosphere