The problem of time
Early photography was slow. A daguerreotype exposure was at first measured in minutes, and sitters were braced against head clamps to keep still. Moving things, such as horses, waves and street life, came out as blurs or did not appear at all. Capturing a moment required three things to change: sensitive materials, fast shutters, and cameras small enough to carry and aim. This article follows those changes. The longer story of film itself is covered elsewhere.
Faster materials and shutters
Gelatin dry plates in the 1870s were far more sensitive than collodion, and exposures fell to a fraction of a second. Cameras needed shutters that could open and close reliably at such speeds. Early photographers often removed the lens cap and replaced it by hand, which is hopeless at a hundredth of a second. Mechanical shutters using springs and rubber bands appeared, and the focal-plane shutter, which moves a slit across the plate just in front of it, allowed very short exposures. The German photographer Ottomar Anschutz was among the people who developed such shutters in the 1880s and took pictures of storks and military maneuvers that were sharp for the time.
Muybridge and Marey
The most famous early demonstration of freezing motion was by Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer working in California. In 1878, he set up a row of cameras along a racetrack at Palo Alto, with threads or electrical contacts triggering their shutters as a horse passed. The resulting sequence showed the animal’s legs in successive positions. It was commissioned by Leland Stanford, who was interested in how horses move. A popular story says the work settled a bet about whether a trotting horse ever has all four hooves off the ground; the full details of that story are doubtful, and accounts differ.
In France, the physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey developed a camera in the shape of a gun in 1882 that took a series of exposures on a single plate or a rotating disk. His work on motion study contributed to the development of motion pictures.
Hand cameras and the snapshot
By the 1880s, small cameras with dry plates or film could be held in the hand. Some were disguised as books, hats, parcels and watches, and were called detective cameras. The English scientist John Herschel had used the word snapshot in 1860 for a photograph taken in an instant, borrowing it from hunting, where it meant a quick shot at moving game. It became the standard term for casual photographs.
George Eastman’s Kodak camera of 1888 and the Brownie of 1900 turned the hand camera into a mass product. People photographed picnics, travel and children playing, scenes that were not posed in a studio. The motor cars and holiday travel of the early twentieth century brought new things to photograph. Snapshots often look crooked and awkward, but historians value them as records of everyday life that formal portraits omitted.
Candid photography
Better lenses and faster film made journalism more spontaneous. In the 1920s, Erich Salomon photographed politicians and diplomats in meetings with a small camera and a fast lens, avoiding bright flash. The Leica and similar 35mm cameras of the same period were fast to use and could be carried in a coat. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who used a Leica, popularized the idea of the decisive moment in photography, in which a picture catches the instant when elements in a scene align. He used the phrase for the English title of a 1952 book, based on a French expression that translates roughly as “images on the run.”
Cameras also gained motorized film advance, driven by small electric motors, so that a photographer could fire several frames per second without removing the camera from the eye. Sports and news photographers adopted it.
Instant photography
Capturing the moment can also mean getting the picture right away. Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, announced a one-step instant camera in 1947, and the Polaroid Land Model 95 went on sale in late 1948. By Land’s own later account, he was prompted by his young daughter asking why she could not see a photograph he had just taken. The print was developed inside the camera and peeled apart after about a minute, producing a sepia image. The chemistry involved a reagent spread between layers, a feat of industrial chemistry that was difficult to perfect. Color instant film followed in the 1960s, and the SX-70 of 1972 produced a print that developed in view without anything to peel away.
Instant film put the result in the hands of the subject immediately, which made it popular for family occasions, parties and artists’ studies. Fujifilm’s Instax line, introduced in the late 1990s, kept the format going into the digital age.
The digital conclusion
The idea of instant results reached its natural end with the digital camera, which shows the picture on a screen within seconds, and then with phones that can send it to others immediately. A modern sensor is one of many silicon chips that can capture tens of frames per second, far beyond Muybridge’s dozen cameras. Smartphones can also record a short burst around the shutter press so that the moment is not missed.
Cautions
The Muybridge anecdote, the exact dates for early shutters and some of the claims about candid photography are told in several versions. The general direction is well established: shutters got faster, cameras got smaller, and the gap between an event and its picture shrank from hours to seconds.