The theme: carrying the camera
One way to read camera history is as a long effort to make the camera easier to carry and easier to use. At each stage the equipment became smaller, cheaper or simpler, and each time a new group of people started taking photographs. The smartphone is the endpoint so far, because it is a camera that most people already have with them and that needs no special preparation.
Studio and tripod
The first practical process, the daguerreotype of 1839, tied photography to a studio. The cameras were wooden boxes with brass lenses on a stand, the plates were polished and sensitized just before use, and the subject often sat still with a head brace for the exposure. Wet-plate photography, from the 1850s, allowed work outdoors, but photographers had to bring a tent or wagon to coat and develop glass plates on the spot. A traveling photographer in the 1860s hauled a considerable load of chemicals and glass.
The hand camera
Gelatin dry plates in the 1870s and 1880s freed photographers from the darkroom tent and shortened exposures enough to hold a camera in the hand. In the 1880s, small “detective” cameras were disguised as parcels, books or even pocket watches, and the Kodak of 1888 offered simple box photography to anyone. Cameras became, for the first time, something a traveler could bring along casually.
The pocket camera
Folding cameras with bellows, popular in the early twentieth century, packed a large negative into a flat body. The 35mm format, popularized by the Leica from the mid-1920s, made a camera small enough for a coat pocket, and later compact cameras with built-in flash and automatic exposure reduced the skill required. By the 1980s and 1990s, almost every household with children owned a point-and-shoot camera, although it was usually kept in a drawer and brought out for occasions.
The digital compact
Consumer digital cameras of the late 1990s and the 2000s eliminated film and processing. People carried them on vacations and to parties, and they began to shoot casually. But a digital compact was still a separate object that had to be remembered, charged and then connected to a computer. Photographs had to be transferred by cable or card reader, and many sat unseen on hard drives.
The phone absorbs the camera
The early camera phones, discussed in their own article, had low resolution, but they solved the carrying problem. They were also connected through cellular networks, so a photograph could be sent immediately, and later phones with GPS receivers could tag each picture with a location. The first iPhone of 2007 and the Android phones that followed added large touchscreen interfaces and app stores, making the phone a general-purpose device with a camera among its functions. Over the next decade, the cameras improved quickly. Resolution rose, apertures widened, and image stabilization appeared. Phone makers added a front-facing camera, helping make the self-portrait, or selfie, a mass habit, although self-portraits themselves go back to the earliest days of photography.
Computational photography
Phone sensors and lenses are tiny, which limits how much light they can collect. Manufacturers responded with software. Modern smartphone cameras typically take several frames in quick succession and merge them to reduce noise and widen the range of light and dark that can be shown. Many offer a portrait mode that estimates depth to blur the background, which imitates the look of a large lens, and a night mode that combines multiple longer exposures. Artificial intelligence techniques are increasingly used to recognize scenes and faces and to adjust the result. Some phones add extra lenses with different focal lengths, so that wide-angle or telephoto views are available without a large zoom.
This is a different way of making a picture. Where film cameras recorded one exposure, a phone often records many and constructs a result. Photographers disagree about whether that makes the final image more or less true to what the scene looked like, and this debate is unresolved.
What changed for photographers
For professional photographers, the phone did not end the need for larger cameras, which still offer better low-light performance, more control and interchangeable lenses. But it did change the market. Sales of dedicated compact cameras declined sharply during the 2010s, and the cameras that remain tend to focus on enthusiasts and professionals. The phone also brought a change of place: the camera is now where the viewing, editing and sharing apps are, so that taking and posting a picture can happen in the same minute on the same device.
Reading the numbers with care
Popular summaries sometimes state exact counts of photographs taken per year or per day. Such estimates differ widely and are often based on uncertain assumptions, so they are best taken as rough indications. What is well supported is the general direction: by most accounts, far more photographs are now taken each year than in the film era, and a large majority are taken on phones.