Photography evolved due to numerous efforts — some failures and some successes, all with impermanent results — beginning during the 1790s. By 1826 or 1827, French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had developed a method to create a permanent photographic print. And by 1838, Frenchman Louis Daguerre, who had learned from and collaborated with Niépce (who died in 1833), introduced a simpler — though still cumbersome — photographic process.

Most who used this technology did so for portraits and landscapes. However, as photography spread, so too did the means to manipulate images. Traditional manipulation included using brushes or airbrushes to retouch or colorize prints with ink or paint, creating prints by double exposure, piecing negatives or prints together in the darkroom and scratching Polaroids.

With computers, scanners and digital cameras, the ease of photographic manipulation has quickened its pace and broadened its applications.

Speaker Prince Varughese Thomas, artist and associate professor of art at Lamar University, will address these topics at this Artful Lecture.