Photography arrived at an economically inauspicious moment: in the autumn of 1839, the USA, Britain, and Europe suffered a sharp recession that lasted until 1843. In Britain and France, economic instability encouraged protectionism, as did political and commercial rivalry, inhibiting the circulation of photographic formulae and methodologies. High unemployment encouraged many in the USA to take up the daguerreotype process; most were untrained, some were fraudsters, and the poor results obtained gave early photographers a bad name. By 1850, improved transportation increased output and lowered prices, producing a wave of prosperity lasting until the early 1860s. A growing consumer market demanded better-quality photographs, made more easily and cheaply, and technologies were adapted to enhance uniformity and affordability. New lenses improved image resolution and reduced exposure times, and glass-plate negatives and coated printing paper brought a new generation of inexpensive photographic artefacts. By 1861, cartes de visite, tintypes, and stereographs were being produced in their millions, and successful studios were structured like small factories, with standardized procedures and a clear division of labour. (Like other factories, they also employed large numbers of women.) Photographic art reproductions tapped into the growing middle-class interest in collecting, and this market boomed after 1865, when new pigment and photomechanical processes such as carbon and Woodburytype facilitated stable and relatively inexpensive photographic reproductions.
Mass-produced photographs were finally so cheap that only the largest firms could profit from them, and as the market became saturated with each new product type, prices dropped. In the 1860s, overproduction and economic stagnation reduced prices for manufactured goods and competition was fierce: studios turned to larger formats such as cabinet cards, tried unusual support materials like ivory, and promoted novelties, including photographs set into jewellery. The situation worsened in the 1870s, with a severe depression on both sides of the Atlantic, aggravated by war. In Paris, many studios went bankrupt during the Prussian siege, and the mayhem of the Paris Commune drove wealthy clients out to the provinces, although it provided a commercial opportunity for photographs—sometimes faked—of atrocities and destruction.
The last 30 years of the 19th century were marked by economic fluctuation, with a decline in output between 1875 and 1884, and recessions in 1873 and 1893. The photographic market had been held back by the perishability of materials, inhibiting standardization and mass production, and the relative complexity of products had restricted the amateur market. This changed with the commercial introduction of gelatin bromide dry-plate negatives and printing papers in the 1880s. These products were fast and effective, but their increased sensitivity required more control during manufacture. Few photographers had the necessary time or skill, so commercial manufacturers took on the production of ready-sensitized materials, whose adoption was slowed by high prices, technical inconsistencies, and the need to light-proof apparatus and darkrooms. Exposures had to be timed more precisely, but effective exposure calculators and meters would not appear for another ten years. Bromide printing paper was also finicky, and taken up only after the wider acceptance of an intermediate technology in the form of ready-sensitized gelatin and collodion printing-out papers. Bromide paper was adapted for small-format roll-film negatives, which led to the introduction of small, light, hand-held cameras, most notably the Eastman Company's Kodak series. Cameras became simpler and cheaper with the goal, for manufactures, of boosting sales of materials: Eastman's core business was film and paper, and the cameras were essentially vehicles to increase demand; the company's processing and printing services cost up to 50 per cent of the initial outlay for a camera.
The amateur market grew steadily from 1880, as social mobility and disposable income increased, and bank holidays and a (gradual) reduction in working hours produced a boom in leisure activities. Existing photographic associations were reinvigorated and new amateur clubs started; their numbers grew tenfold 1880-90. Women became a notable constituency: as early as 1886, women's magazines carried photographic advertisements, and from 1889 Eastman publicity depicted women using Kodak cameras. By 1900, women accounted for 30 per cent of British amateur photographers, and the US census listed more than 3, 500 female professionals. Many specialized in family portraiture, a relatively strong market at a time when birth rates were declining and parents were investing more time and money in their smaller families. Manufacturers targeted these increasingly privileged children; the inexpensive Kodak Brownie of 1900 was named after and promoted with popular cartoon characters.
Another key development was tourism, boosted since the mid-19th century by rail and steamer transport, and later by the bicycle and motor car. The camera became indispensable, first for the well-off leisure traveller but later also for lower-middle-class vacationers as paid holidays became widespread between the wars. Another by-product of tourism was the picture postcard, from c. 1900 to a considerable extent based on photography, and superseding the larger-format albumen ‘view scraps’ that had earlier dominated the souvenir market.
The later 1890s were generally prosperous, but there remained few patentable mass-market inventions, so profit margins were low and manufacturers fought price wars. The professional portrait trade was saturated with cartes and cabinet cards, and now also competed with postcards and home snapshot portraiture. High-street studios lured back customers with novelty photos on cloth, glass, metal, and ceramic ware: many of these were enlargements, achieved with new projection-speed emulsions and better artificial light sources. The popular press was one of the signal influences of this time, serving a more widely enfranchised and literate population. Inexpensive illustrated papers and periodicals were made possible by the new photomechanical processes, which afforded cheap, good-quality tonal reproductions. In turn, the growing corps of press and documentary photographers experimented with magnesium flash lighting, and inspired more advanced cameras like the Graflex single-lens reflex of 1898.
Photographic profits peaked in 1899, and the subsequent slump continued through the First World War. Censorship at the front restricted (but did not eliminate) photography, and production costs jumped due to cuts in the supply of imported raw materials. Yet lack of access to German sensitizing dyes induced British and American manufacturers to synthesize substitutes, producing better panchromatic emulsions and introducing new X-ray and infrared materials. On both sides, demand for improved rangefinders and gun sights promoted optical research. Aerial photography, used on an increasingly vast scale for reconnaissance, came of age in 1914-18.
Industrial and amateur photographic markets grew in the 1920s, as modernized production techniques supplied more sophisticated and standardized products at lower cost. The prices of snapshot cameras and film halved between 1900 and 1930. Cheap cameras were mass produced in metal or, from the 1930s, moulded plastic, and offered free for coupons on cigarettes and confectionery; in 1930 Kodak actually gave away 550, 000 Hawkeye cameras to 12-year-olds in North America. (The company was also busy marketing cameras as fashion accessories, modernistically decorated and bundled with cosmetic outfits.) In Germany, Britain, Japan, and the USA, workers' photography clubs compensated for scarce resources; members clubbed together to buy cameras and pay for processing. Their photographs were published by the labour press and workers' magazines such as the Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung. New high-circulation photo magazines such as Vu, Life, and Picture Post published reportage, sports, and travel photography, which encouraged the manufacture of higher-speed lenses and film, and ‘miniature’ 35 mm cameras like the 1925 Leica and 1932 Contax. The flashbulb technology developed by Paul Vierkötter (1925) and Johannes Ostermeier (1929) created a more reliable and user-friendly means of illumination. Meanwhile, the other mass medium of the time, cinema, stimulated research in colour materials, from assembly processes like Technicolor in 1933, to tripack colour transparency films such as Kodachrome in 1935.
Rationing curtailed civilian consumption of photographic goods during the Second World War. In Britain, sales dropped to less than 25 per cent of their 1938 levels, and manufacturers reduced their product range. Yet rationing encouraged innovation: Ilford introduced variable-contrast printing paper to save on paper stocks and miniaturized radiographic film to replace large-format plates. New fast films were developed for aerial and night photography, while higher image resolution improved microfilm; these materials later had atomic and astronomical applications.
After the war, companies like Kodak produced new colour negative and print processes at the expense of Agfa, whose research was documented in Allied government reports. Colour materials were complicated and expensive to manufacture, but in the 1960s more stable dyes and high-speed machinery reduced wastage and brought down costs. The post-war consumer boom and rise of mass tourism increased the demand for colour photography, and occasioned the one real innovation of the post-war years, the Polaroid instant photography system, introduced for black-and-white imaging in 1948 and adapted to colour in 1963. However, although the Polaroid system found important commercial and industrial applications, and went on being refined for half a century, the uniqueness and high cost of each image limited its market potential. In general, economies of scale favoured large companies that could afford to manufacture inexpensive versions of advanced technologies.
From the 1960s onwards, against a background of increasing affluence and leisure in Western societies and Japan, innovation proceeded apace. New systems like the cassette-loading Kodak Instamatics (1963) and Pocket Instamatics (1972), the disc camera (1982), and high-street minilabs (1980s) were designed to open up new segments of the mass market. Automation of camera functions proceeded apace, and innovations aimed first at professionals soon became available to amateurs. Meanwhile, photography's increasingly wide acceptance as an art form, and as a means of self-expression for non-artists, went hand in hand with the proliferation of museums and galleries wholly or partly dedicated to it, and of exhibitions, books, and television programmes about star photographers. A large market for art photographs and classic cameras emerged. Demographic change (and environmental concerns) presented both challenges and opportunities. Although falling marriage and birth rates in late 20th-century developed societies weakened one of photography's traditional mainstays, there were growing numbers of affluent retirees for whom photography offered a hobby and an adjunct to other pursuits, such as gardening or travel. (Manufacturers' response to ‘grey’ needs, with lightweight materials and ever more automation, generated products more attractive to consumers generally.) By contrast, the growth of ‘extreme’ leisure pursuits—scuba diving, caving, mountaineering—boosted demand for both ‘ruggedized’ high-end gear and ultra-basic single-use cameras, which reached the market at the end of the 1980s and generated useful profits for the industry.
The Advanced Photographic System (APS) launched in 1996 was the last large-scale innovation in silver-based photography. Offering many clever refinements, it was an ambitious attempt, after five years of economic recession, to attack both ends of the market. However, it was soon overshadowed by digital imaging.
The speed of the digital boom exceeded the most optimistic initial predictions. The first professional digital camera had a 1.3 megapixel sensor and a price of £15, 400 when launched by Kodak in 1992. Just over a decade later, 5-megapixel sensors were appearing in compact cameras costing less than £1, 000. Some 35 mm-equivalent professional models exceeded twice this capacity. There was a growing consensus to the effect that digital images could match the quality of silver-based ones. Digital cameras outsold film cameras in Japan in 2001 and the USA in 2003, and were predicted to do so worldwide by 2005. Much of this progress was due to convergence between digital cameras and other advanced consumer products, such as hand-held computers and mobile telephones, for which a huge global market had developed. It was a short step from exchanging technologies to combining them, and in 2002 already c. 19 million camera-phones were sold worldwide. Historically, major innovations have tended to create as well as satisfy needs, and it seems likely that digital photography, whether or not combined with mobile communications and data processing, will transform imaging culture: the role played by picture making in society and the ways in which images are distributed, stored, and displayed. One notable trend, with significant implications for the industry, is the low ratio—c. 1 : 10 according to some estimates—of pictures printed to pictures taken, compared with silver-based photography. As yet unanticipated new uses for the instantly transmissible digital image, whether in industry, medicine, policing, or everyday life, will inevitably appear.
— Hope Kingsley
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