The digital revolution

http://www.photography-now.com

Musée Suisse de L'Appareil Photographique

Schweizer Kameramuseum
Grande Place 99
1800 Vevey
Switzerland

Phone: +41(0)21 . 9253480
Fax: +41(0)21 . 9216458

Date: 23 Apr - 31 Dec 2010
Opening hours: Tue-Sun 11-17:30
cameramuseum@vevey.ch
www.cameramuseum.ch

Sam & Ken Kendes, Détail d'un portrait daté de Noël 1977



















Régis Colombo, photographe USPP, Sahara















Laurent Cochet, coucher de soleil.













Philippe Pache, Gilda et Sarah, workshop photographique en Toscane, juillet 2007.


THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

It was in the 1970s that electronic technology began to appear in photo cameras. Then came film-less cameras recording non-digital images on a kind of "still" video. Finally, in 1975, Steven J. Sasson invented the first digital camera using a Fairchild CCD sensor.
Nowadays we even use ordinary cellphones to take pictures, so is there anybody who can remember the first digital cameras with their heavy electronic devices lugged around in a rucksack? Who recalls the first digital transmission equipment, which so radically transformed the work of the press?
Although such a very recent invention, digital photography does have what one may call a history. However, it has moved ahead at such a tremendous pace and in such a spectacular way that most people have forgotten how it really started. Our exhibition shows the beginnings of this revolutionary technology as well as hybrid techniques, from silver film to digital, and the very first digital cameras. These seem amazingly archaic now and in fact most have already disappeared. The display recounts the story of digital imaging, from its birth to its multitude of current forms and, in collaboration with the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory of the Faculty of Informatics and Communications of the EPFL (Lausanne), speculates on what is likely to happen in the very close future.