LESSON 81
History III: 1950 to 2000
Moments, museums, colour, and the first pixels.
IN THIS LESSON
- The decisive moment and the big show
- Colour becomes art
- The first digital steps
- Toward the web
- In practice: reading the period
The decisive moment and the big show
In 1952 Henri Cartier-Bresson published Images à la Sauvette, known in English as The Decisive Moment, which promoted catching the instant when form and content come together, and shaped street photography for generations. Edward Steichen, head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, built The Family of Man, 503 photographs from 68 countries. It opened there on 24 January 1955, ran until 8 May, and then toured the world for eight years to record audiences. Steichen had earlier included street work in MoMA shows such as Five French Photographers in 1951 to 1952, which helped spread the idea of street photography internationally.
Colour becomes art
For much of the century, serious photography meant black and white, and colour was seen as commercial or amateur. That changed in this period. The source credits William Eggleston with gaining wider recognition for colour photography as a legitimate art medium, and notes that colour has been the dominant form of photography since the 1970s, with black and white pushed toward niches such as fine art. In the same decades, wedding photographers moved toward a documentary approach from the 1970s, as lesson 46 describes.
The first digital steps
Digital photography began in laboratories. In 1957 a team led by Russell Kirsch scanned one of the first digital photographs, of his infant son, at 176 by 176 pixels with one bit per pixel. Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge-coupled device at Bell Labs in 1969, and Michael Tompsett found it could serve as an image sensor. Steven Sasson at Eastman Kodak built the first self-contained digital camera in 1975. It weighed 3.6 kg, recorded black and white images of 0.01 megapixels to cassette tape, and took 23 seconds to capture its first image, in December 1975. Kodak scientists made the first megapixel sensor in 1986.
Toward the web
In the mid-1970s Bryce Bayer of Kodak created the colour filter mosaic that most digital cameras still use to record colour; lesson 19 explains how it works. Digital cameras arrived commercially in the 1990s. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee published what the source calls the first photograph on the web, a picture of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes. By the end of the century the pieces of the next era were in place: sensors, compression, the web, and soon the phone.
In practice: reading the period
This section is working practice. Look at a page of The Family of Man next to a page of 1970s colour work and ask what changed: subject, scale, tone, the role of the photographer. Then ask what stayed the same. Many of the ideas photographers argue about now, such as truth, framing and the power of the edit, were sharpened in these years. Notice also how the place a picture lived changed its meaning: a magazine page, a museum wall, a touring exhibition, a slide show at home. The same frame can read as news, art or memory depending on where it is shown and who chose it.
Try it today
- 01Look up The Family of Man and choose three pictures from different countries.
- 02Find one Cartier-Bresson photograph and describe its decisive moment in one sentence.
- 03Find a William Eggleston colour photograph and list what colour adds.
- 04Look up Steven Sasson's 1975 camera and compare its numbers with your phone.
- 05Write a short timeline of five dates from this lesson from memory.