Description: "Explores the 180-year story of perhaps the most widely used device ever built. It covers cameras in all forms, revealing the origins and development of each model and tracing the stories of the photographers who used and popularized them"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description:
Dr. Michael Pritchard, FRPS, has over thirty years' experience as a researcher of photographic history and technology. He has written and lectured extensively and was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society for his work on the history of photography. He has contributed to numerous journals and publications, including The Oxford Companion to the Photograph and the Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Michael has been director-general of the Royal Photographic Society since 2011.
Review Quotes: [Review of hardcover edition: ] If you're new to photography or photo history--or if, like me, you just love cameras--you may want to pick up a copy of this new book. A History of Photography in 50 Cameras comes to you from a reliable source, Michael Pritchard, the director-general of the Royal Photographic Society in England. The book covers the full timeline of commercially available cameras, opening with the Giroux Daguerreotype in 1839, and closes appropriately with a camera-phone, 2013's Nokia Lumia 1020. Throughout its pages you'll find familiar names, from the Kodak Brownie to the Leica M3 and Nikon F, each described with a short history and illustrated with several images. Perhaps more interesting, however, are the unlooked-for and unusual. You'll no doubt want to spend some time getting to know the Enjalbert Revolver de Poche, a pistol-shaped device which produced images on tiny glass plates within its barrel. Pritchard also reveals the surprisingly long history of surreptitious photography in describing cameras shaped, variously, like books, packs of cigarettes, and even cravat pins. While this book is sure to please photo nerds, it's much more than a list of camera facts. A History uses each of the cameras Pritchard has selected as a jumping-off point to discuss a moment in the medium's history and the people who made use of the technology.--Adam Ryder "American Photo" (11/25/2015 12:00:00 AM)