History of Photography

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History of Photography.

Please click on the image for time-line.

1980	Also in History: President Carter fails in a daring plan to rescue 53 American hostages by a helicopter raid on Tehran.
	Also in History: Ronald Reagan becomes 40th president of the United States.
	Sony demonstrates first consumer camcorder.
1980-85	Scitex, Hell, and Crossfield introduce computer imaging systems.
1980s	The age of the media empires: in the wake of unprecedented profits, Hollywood studios are purchased by financial interests lying outside the United States.
1981	MTV begins broadcasting.
1982	Jean-Jacques Bienix's Diva, the first of a series of French thrillers combining punk/new wave guerilla aesthetics and New Hollywood publicity and video style.
	*Steven Spielberg's E.T.&SHY;The Extraterrestrial* is the first film to surpass $200 million in rentals.**
	Yellow Earth, directed by Chen Kaige and photographed by Zhang Yimou, offers critical insight into China's contemporary political culture through austere landscape cinematography and sparse dialogue.
1982-85	British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cuts government funding for film production, thrusting television producer Channel 4 into a central position for film production.
1984	Edgar Reitz's sixteen-hour Heimat, a programmatic response to the American miniseries Holocaust, is screened as a film in two parts at European festivals and released as an eleven-part television series in Germany.
	MPPA rating system is revised to include a "PG-13" category.
	Founding of Eurimages, a fund for European film co production.
	Canon demonstrates first electronic still camera.
	Japanese newspapers cover the opening of the Olympics in Los Angeles with Canon RC-701 Still Video Cameras and analog transmitter.
1985	Cable-TV mogul Ted Turner and publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch buy MGM and 20th Century-Fox, respectively.
	Rambo, a militarist fantasy typical of Reagan-era Hollywood cinema.
	Minolta Maxxum 7000 auto-focus, 35mm SLR.
	Pixar introduces digital imaging processor.
1986	Canadian films attract international attention: Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing.
	*John Woo's A Better Tomorrow* starring Chow Yun-Fat breaks box-office records in Hong Kong and initiates a cycle of "hero films".**
	Half of major American film companies' domestic revenues come from videocassette sales.
	World conference establishes standards for sound, video, and digital recordings.
	Minolta introduces first professional auto focus camera, the Maxxum 9000.
1987	*Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira* brings international attention to the feature-length science-fiction Japanese cartoon, or anime.**
	Eastman Kodak announces the 1.4 megapixel CCD for digital cameras.
	Canon produces RC-760 Still Video Camera with a 600,000 pixel CCD.
	USA Today begins to cover special events with the Canon RC-760 camera.
	Both Kodak and Fuji introduce novel disposable cameras, such as the Kodak Fling.
1988	*Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, is a triumph of animation technique combining cartoon characters with live-action.*
	*Vasily Pichul's Little Vera* contains the first sex scene in Soviet cinema and becomes a hallmark for glasnost filmmaking.**
	*Pédro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, an energetic melodrama/sex comedy from Spain.*
	Arnold Newman: Five Decades retrospective at the New York Historical Society. Black-and-white portraits of famous people photographed during his career.
	Garry Winogrand's massive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the book Winogrand: Figments From the Real World.
	Sony and Fuji announce new digital cameras.
	Eastman Kodak announces a 4 megapixel CCD.
	PhotoMac is the first image manipulation program available for the Macintosh computer.
1988-89	*Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski receives international recognition for The Decalogue, a ten-part work made for Polish television.*
1989	Sony Corporation buys Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola; Time Inc. purchases Warner Communications, Inc.
	Also in History: Berlin Wall pulled down.
	Sony announces MCV-5000 twin ship camera with two separate CCD elements for luminance and chrominance.
	Letraset releases Colour Studio 1.0 (TM), the first professional image manipulation program for Macintosh computers.
1989-90	Following the dismantling of the Soviet bloc, film companies are privatized and western films are welcomed in eastern Europe.

Last updated on Monday August 30, 2004