1855 | North America • USA
| George Robinson Fardon takes photographs for the album San Francisco Album. Photographs of the Most Beautiful Views and Public Buildings of San Francisco (ca. 1855). This album of albumenized salt prints is published by Herre & Bauer and has the distinction of being the first album of photographs of any American city. Title | Lightbox | Checklist |
1856 | North America • USA
| Neff's Patent for Melainotype plates. (19 February 1856) |
1856 | Europe • Great Britain | John Benjamin Dancer applies for a patent for a stereoscopic camera (patent 2064, applied for: 1856-09-05, granted: 1857-02-27), allowing both images to be taken at the same time. Sets of stereographs quickly become popular. |
1856 | North America • Canada | William Notman commences his stereographic photographs of the city of Montreal. |
1857 | Europe • Great Britain | Photography by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake is published in the London Quarterly Review. |
1857 | Europe • Great Britain
| Queen Victoria purchases the allegorical photomontage The Two Ways of Life by Oscar Gustave Rejlander at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester. [Read about] |
1857 | North America • USA
| Alexander Beckers of New York City patents a stereo-viewer with a revolving mechanism which allows multiple views of different types to be inspected sequentially by turning a knob. (7 April 1857) |
1858 | Europe • France
| Nadar takes the first aerial photograph from a balloon over Paris. |
1858 | North America • USA | William & Frederick Langenheim publish their American Stereographic Views. |
1858 | Europe • Great Britain
| The first book illustrated with original stereographs is published in London. The book by the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth is Teneriffe, an Astronomer's experiment: or, specialities of a residence above the clouds. |
1859 | North America • USA | Blondin crosses the Niagara Falls on a tightrope and is photographed by William England for the London Stereoscopic Co. The stereocard becomes the most popular they ever published selling over 100,000 copies. |
1859 | Europe • UK | patents the first Panoramic Camera, appropriately called "The Sutton". The camera was at first produced by F. Cox and later by Thomas Ross (London). Thomas Sutton |
1859 | Europe • France | A group of artists and photographers, including Eugène Delacroix, Francis Wey and Gustave Le Gray succeed in getting photography included in the 1859 Paris Salon but the photography section has a separate entrance. |
1859 | North America • USA
| Oliver Wendell Holmes lauds “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” in The Atlantic Monthly. He is the first to use the term stereograph. |
1859 | Europe • France | On Photography, a section of Charles Baudelaire’s review of the annual Salon, fiercely condemns the medium. |
1859 | Europe • France | Emperor Napoleon III of France departing for the Austro-Sardinian War in Italy with his army stops at the studio of André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri to have his portrait taken. Although Disderi had the patent for carte-de-visite from 1854 this incident creates the publicity for a craze for photographic visiting cards that sweeps across the world. Whilst this makes for a good story that is often repeated subsequent research indicates that it is probably false. (May 1859) |
1860 | North America • Mexico | Désiré Charnay publishes Album fotografico Mexicano with twenty five photographs detailing his studies of Mayan ruins. |
1860 | Europe • Great Britain
| John Jabez Edwin Mayall takes portraits of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their children which encourages the collecting of photographic cards of celebrities. (May 1860) |
1860 | North America • USA
| James Wallace Black took an aerial photograph of Boston, MA, USA. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert O. Dougan Collection, Gift of Warner Communications Inc., 1981 (1981.1229.4) (13 October 1860) |
1861 | Europe • Great Britain
| James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates that by using three filters of the primary colors (red, green and blue) a full color image can be projected. This is the foundation of the additive process. |