For a century, while-you-wait street portraitists worked plazas and pilgrimage sites with wooden cameras that were darkrooms inside — Spain's minuteros, Afghanistan's kamra-e-faoree operators, India's Yamuna-side wedding photographers. A paper negative was shot, developed inside the box in minutes, then re-photographed to make a positive. Cheap ID-photo booths, one-hour labs and finally the smartphone erased the trade; Kabul's last practitioners were documented as a dying breed in the 2010s.
Street box-camera photographer已不复存在。这里整理是什么消灭了它，以及哪个职业接手了那份工作。
1826–1880
The chemical pioneers
Photography's first professionals were part chemist, part showman: daguerreotypists coating, sensitizing and developing plates by hand for sitters who had never seen their own faces fixed in metal. Studios spread from Paris and New York to Bombay, Cairo and Yokohama within two decades, and by the 1850s American operators alone were making millions of portraits a year. The wet collodion process then destroyed that first trade in turn — cheaper tintypes and paper prints replaced the jewel-like daguerreotype almost completely within a decade of 1851.
当时还发生了什么
1851
Wet collodion makes photography cheap
London sculptor Frederick Scott Archer publishes the wet collodion process — sharper than a calotype, far cheaper than a daguerreotype — and refuses to patent it. Within a decade it destroys the daguerreotype trade worldwide. Archer himself dies almost penniless in 1857.
1855
Fenton photographs the Crimean War
Roger Fenton spends four months at the Crimean front with a horse-drawn darkroom van, bringing back some 360 glass plates including 'The Valley of the Shadow of Death' — the first sustained war photography, though exposures of several seconds meant he could show camps and aftermath, never battle itself.
1888
'You press the button, we do the rest'
George Eastman's $25 Kodak No. 1 ships pre-loaded with 100 exposures; owners mail the whole camera back to Rochester for developing. The 1900 Brownie follows at $1. Amateur photography is born at industrial scale, and professional studios lose their monopoly on the family portrait.
1925
The Leica shrinks the camera
Leitz unveils Oskar Barnack's Leica I at the Leipzig Spring Fair: a pocketable precision camera using 35mm cinema film. Fast, quiet and inconspicuous, it makes candid, mobile photography possible and becomes the defining instrument of twentieth-century photojournalism.
那份工作如今在哪里
The person paid to decide what a moment looks like — from Niépce's eight-hour exposure in 1826 to two trillion pictures a year, most taken by everyone else.
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