History Society Report

Audlem and District History Society

Last Thursday, 19th January, the members of the Audlem and District History Society were treated to an excellent and informative talk on 'The History of Photography' given by Matthew Jones.

Matthew is well qualified with a B.A.in photography, work in the industry and an interest in the history of Photography. With the help of slides we started at the beginning, in fact much earlier than you may have thought – camera obscura. This phenomenon was first observed by cave people with reflections on cave walls. Camera obscura is light coming through a small hole and reflected on something and is how cameras work today. The camera obscura was used as an aid to artists, and it is thought that Vermeer may have used this technique in some of his paintings.

In 1790 Thomas Wedgwood developed away of fixing images using bitumen and lavender oil, but they still had to be printed using ink. The next stage was to produce a negative/positive although the first attempts at this were quite dangerous and carcinogenic. Eventually the dry negative was developed into the film we use today and photography become an everyday art form. The Victorians loved photography and from poor to rich had family photographs on their mantel pieces. Matthew showed us a photograph taken by his great grandfather who was a amateur photographer.

Thank you Matthew for a very interesting and informative talk, it has made me want to go out and snap away and take more photos.

This talk was the great start to the history society year – if you are interested in history come along to our talks. There is always something of interest.

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