Post #12- Lecture- Photography and Printed Media

In this week's lecture, we talked about the history of printed media. First, we went over the History of Media, where we learned that everything started forty thousand years ago when some human ancestors painted on the walls of a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. They would paint the stencils of their hands and other markings mostly related to animals. Something really interesting about this is that experts don’t know exactly what purpose the artwork had, but it is probable that their paintings might be the first examples of communicating through a medium, maybe to tell stories or just to record important events. Then, we talked about Monks copying manuscripts during the Middle Ages. In early manuscript culture, monks copied manuscripts by hand during the Middle Ages (about A.D. 500–1500), where they copied a variety of texts including some on astronomy, religion, herbals, and bestiaries. A really interesting fact about this is that it typically took a scribe fifteen months to copy a Bible, and such books were written on parchment or vellum made from treated hides of sheep, goats, or calves. Some years after this, Johannes Gutenberg built the first printing press in 1450, meaning that books could be mass-produced without the need to be handwritten. This brought the first newspapers during the early 17th century, and as more people learned to read and write, mass media continued growing. We also talked about photography, and how its arrival changed the media scene. In 1862, Matthew Brady held an exhibition of photographs he had taken of the U.S. Civil War, this caused a lot of shock and impact in the Americans due to the images of dead at the battle of Antietam. By late in the 19th century, new technology allowed newspapers to print photographs, and in 1895, the Lumière brothers gave the first public demonstration of moving pictures in Paris, and something really interesting about this is that some members of the audience were actually frightened of the moving pictures. This takes us to the history of the printing press and printed media, where we stopped to think... how would life be nowadays if the printing press had never been invented. We would not have books, magazines, or newspapers. Posters, flyers, pamphlets, and mailers would not exist. The printing press is really important, even cataloged as one of the most important inventions of our time, since it allows us to share large amounts of information quickly and in huge numbers, changing the way society evolved. Throughout the years, more and more inventions would appear, such as the Letterpress (which requires an operator to set movable type, ink it, and press paper against it), the Offset press (which revolutionized the printing industry, making it possible to print enormous quantities efficiently and cost-effectively), and the Digital press (which can print hundreds or thousands of the same item, but it can be costly when printing a few dozen or even a single copy). Lastly, we talked about the history of photography. Here, we went over some photography techniques, such as the Camera Obscura ( where from the 1500s to the 1800s, Draftsmen used these large wood boxes which had a lens on one end to let light through. But unlike modern cameras, which use light to create permanent photographs, these tools cast the light onto a frosted sheet of glass. Thanks to this, we had the first photograph ever, captured by Joseph Niepce in 1826), the Daguerreotype (which refined the chemistry in photography, shaving down the exposure time to only 15 minutes. Bringing with it, the first people captured in the photograph), and the Collodion or wet plate (which revolutionized photography by being 20 times faster than all previous methods). Thanks to all this progress, we were finally able to capture time and frames, with the introduction of the first KODAK camera in 1888, and with the arrival of the digital camera in 1975.