Jamie
Maitland is a Scottish photographer who graduated
from the Glasgow School of Art.
This
web site gives you the opportunity to view
and, if you like it, buy his work online -
prints or frames. You also have the ability
to download photographs and send free e-cards. Currently you can view
black and white photos of New York and The Meadowside Granary in
Glasgow.
Jamie's
CV (Resume) is also available to browse on
the site.
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First, the name. We owe the name "Photography" to
Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic
process became public. (*1) The word is derived from the Greek words for light
and writing.
Before mentioning the stages that led to the development of
photography, there is one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man
called de la Roche (1729- 1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary
tale, it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had
been coated with a sticky substance. This surface, so the tale goes, would
not only provide a mirror image on the sticky canvas, but would remain on
it. After it had been dried in the dark the image would remain permanent.
The author would not have known how prophetic this tale would be, only a few
decades after his death.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to
make photography possible. It is somewhat surprising that photography was
not invented earlier than the 1830s, because these processes had been known
for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes
had been put together that photography came into being.
The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura
(dark room) had been in existence for at least four hundred years. There is
a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this
same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated.
The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before
photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours
are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat,
air and light.
