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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

The "Oh, How Times Change!" Part I

It was an ordinary day.  Reading the 30th Anniversary "Life" Magazine that my brother, Steve, gave to me, since he just knew I would love it being that it featured all types of photographic stories.  It is a Special Double Issue titled PHOTOGRAPHY and hit the news stands December of 1966.  The issue I am holding belonged to Mrs. N. Prutzman who lived in Hamburg, Pennsylvania at the time it was published.  It had 154 pages and was printed in color as well as black and white.  


And...it cost a remarkable 60 CENTS!  You couldn't even buy enough paper to print a 154 page magazine for 60 cents today!  Advertisements featured the 1967 Lincoln Continental, the Minolta 35mm camera, Canadian Lord Calvert whiskey, Clairol Born Blond Lotion Toner, Schlitz Beer, Campbell's Quality Soup, Contact Cold Capsules, Colgate Dental Cream, Teacher's Scotch, Desitin Calmol 4 for hemorrhoids and many other advertisements.  Magazine was half in black and white and half in color.  And...I loved it!  My favorite article was titled "All at Once, a Moment Can Be Caught Forever" and featured the history of photography from it's discovery by Frenchman Claude Niépce to The Indispensable Camera.  My favorite line within the magazine was "All at Once, a Moment Can Be Caught Forever."  For anyone whom has ever taken a photograph, the title was perfect.  The article began with...One sunny morning in 1826, Nicéphore Niépce, an up to then unsuccessful French inventor, coated an 8 x 6 1/2 inch pewter plate with a kind of asphalt called bitumen of Judea and put it in his camera obscura, a wooden box that had an aperture fitted with a lens.  Leaving the box pointing from an attic window of his estate near ''Chalon" all day, at dark he took out the plate and washed it in lavender oil and petroleum. Incredibly, an image remained!  On the mottled surface could be discerned -- and still can be in oblique light -- the imprint of rooftops and walls.  Others had been struggling for years to do what Mr. Niépce had done which was make a picture using light alone.  Only a few people knew of his great feat, one being a Parisian scene painter named Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who eventually became Niépce's partner.  Finally, in 1837, on a treated copper plate, Daguerre produced his first daguerreotype.  The story went on to say that...News that man had landed on the moon could scarcely have equaled the excitement that greeted Daguerre's magical little pictures.  A German news editor denounced them as "blasphemy" while the great British astronomer Sir John Herschel said simply, "This is a miracle."  Within two years nearly every major city in Europe and the U.S. had at least one portraiture studio.  Borne upon a wave of wonder and delight, the age of photography had arrived!
 The magazine article had page after page of old dated photographs to illustrate the daguerreotypes of the day.  I realize to many of you, the discovery of photography might not have been a big deal, but to me it was the world, since I went on to teach photography in high school and to this day take photographs of just about every event imaginable, much to the chagrin of everyone I know!  A special note to my brother Steve:  Thanks for one of the best gifts ever!  I love it!!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. 

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