Garden City Foto Co. demonstrated its setup for high-angle shots in this ad from a Los Angeles city directory.
Long before topnotch stills photographers like Fred Hartsook and Albert Witzel began shooting high-end portraits, many early photographers captured Los Angeles residents’ likenesses for posterity. Most worked for only a few years as photographers before moving on to other professions. Then as now, rapidly changing technologies forced many out of business. By the 1890s, portrait photographers dominated the Los Angeles’ photography field.
Photography as a medium began with Joseph Nicephore Niepce’s use of heliography to capture the first image of a view from an upstairs window of his estate in 1826 or 1827, now part of the Harry Ransom Center’s photography collection. In 1829, Niepce partnered with Louis Daguerre to experiment with which materials were most sensitive to light and would most expose detailed, finished images on plates. Daguerre’s use of fuming his plates after exposure with heated mercury created a permanent image, revealed to the public in 1837. William Henry Fox Talbot in England developed his own printing techniques around the same time, which he displayed to Royal Institution in January 1839. Thus, photography as we know it, was born.
Mary Mallory’s “Hollywoodland: Tales Lost and Found” is available for the Kindle.
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