Long story short:
The Craft's history of
visual storytelling

Warty Pigs

~ 51,200 BCE

Members of the same archaeological team who discovered the ‘warty pig’ painting in Sulawesi, Indonesia, recently found an even earlier example on the same island. It shows human figures around a wild pig. “There is something happening between these figures,” says Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm, “a story is being told.”^[1]

Warty pig — the previous record holder — is tipped to be around 40,000 to 45,000 years old. Though Maxime Aubert, a Griffith University professor involved in both archaeological finds, said, “The rock art in this region could very well be 60,000 to 65,000 years old.”^[2]

Paintings are, of course, only part of the puzzle. It’s hard to pick a moment to jump to next, but at the risk of skipping much, let us go to Sumerian cuneiform.

Cuneiform

~ 3200 BCE

Cuneiform is the earliest known form of writing. Used by the Sumerians in Uruq, today Iraq, it is a series of cone-shaped arrows pressed into clay. It was mostly used to tally things like grain transactions, though discoveries made in 2016 suggest cuneiform was also used by Babylonian astronomers.^[3]

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

~ 3100 BCE

This writing system uses images that each represent a single word. The Ancient Egyptians called them ‘Gods’ Words’, which translates to ‘sacred carvings’ by the Ancient Greeks, giving us ‘Hiero glyphs’.

The earliest examples found remain undeciphered; however, between 2650 and 2575 BCE, they are regularised, with around 700 signs that would be used for 2000 years, surviving the Persian and Greek conquests of Egypt, and only becoming extinct with the rise of Christianity, which outlawed their use between 400 and 500 CE.^[4]

Ancient Greece

~480-323 BCE

The Ancient Greeks are inspired by Plato’s idea that art imitates things and events from life, and Aristotle’s view that art seeks to represent the inner essence of its subject. Artists and sculptors take a methodical approach in their works — working with things like balance, symmetry and proportion — and achieve an unprecedented realism in their painting, sculpture, pottery and craft.^[4]

They depict their gods and deities but, unlike predecessors, give them human form, and also record human achievements such as victory at the Olympics or heroism in battle.^[6]

Camera Obscura

~400 BCE

Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu writes about light passing from an illuminated object through a pinhole into a dark room, creating an inverted image of the object. It’s the earliest record of a ‘camera obscura’, which later gives us the concept for the pinhole camera and all of photography.^[7]

The camera obscura has practical uses even before early photography. Eleventh century mathematician, physicist and astronomer Ibn al-Haytham uses the camera obscura to demonstrate how light travels in a straight line, and to safely observe eclipses.^[8]

Later, In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci describes camera obscura technology in his Codex Atlanticus, and may have used it as a drawing aid.

The Fall of Rome

476 CE

The Ancient Romans continue the Greek traditions of realism and humanism in their art, and invest heavily in it. During the fall of the Western Roman Empire, however, these funds dry up. This is the end of the age of classical antiquity, and artists move to more commercially viable and portable forms.

The Eastern Roman Empire survives the split, and keeps many of the traditions alive, though this Byzantine art eventually takes on its own style, “a continuation of cherished Roman artistic traditions that were infused with distinct Eastern influences”.^[9]

Kibyōshi

1775

Japanese books from the Edo period, kibyōshi are considered to be one of the original forms of graphic novels or comic books. Peaking as a genre between 1775 and 1806, the short booklets are written and printed by authors and woodblock artists. They feature black and white cartoons and text, often of a satirical nature.^[13]

The Times

~1806

An illustration of Horatio Nelson’s coffin is the first illustration in The Times, an early example of pictures appearing in a newspaper.^[14]

First photo

~1826

Niépce takes the first successful photo, View from the Window at Le Gras, by projecting onto pewter plates using a camera obscura. The exposure time is eight hours.^[16]

Daguerreotype

1835

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invents the first effective method of photography, in partnership with Niépce. The Daguerreotype generates a direct positive image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin layer of silver. The process reduces exposure time to 30 minutes.^[17]

Ben-Day process

1879

This process, invented by Benjamin Henry Day Jr, creates detailed images using a series of dots.^[18] It makes reproducing images in newsletters a much cheaper and quicker reality. It is later used in comic books and immortalised by US pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.

Celluloid

1882

Chemist John H Stevens dilutes celluloid with amyl acetate, allowing the material to be made into a clear, flexible film. Researchers take it a step further, processing it into film for still photos and, later, motion pictures.^[19]

Kinetoscope

1891

The Kinetoscope, invented by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson for the Edison company, makes its debut. Viewers watch a 20-second moving picture through a hole at the top of a wooden box. Viewing centres open up in New York and London in 1894.^[20]

Cinématographe

~1894

The Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, debut the Cinématographe, a camera, projector and film printer all in one. It shows films to paying audiences in Paris — the birth of cinema.^[21]

Stop motion

~1898?

The claimed release date of The Humpty Dumpty Circus of 1898 would make it the first stop motion animated film. Huge volumes of early animations and films will be later lost, including The Humpty Dumpty Circus, so the release date, and whether or not it actually uses stop motion, are impossible to verify.^[22]

Other filmmakers are toying with special effects at the time and, while there is no agreed ‘first’ animation, other contenders start appearing around 1906.

Shorthand

2014

Shorthand is the first to productise some of the existing visual storytelling techniques like those used in ‘Snow Fall’. Over the following years, the capabilities become accessible to brands, publications, news sites and NGOs.

Pokémon GO

2016

Pokémon GO is released. The app makes Augmented Reality a household name.

DALL-E

2016

OpenAI introduces DALL-E, its text-prompt image generator. Users type in image ideas of previously unseen and imaginative combinations or situations and wait for the results. Early results are erroneous, especially in the finer details, though the technology progresses quickly, through DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3 and competitors like Midjourney.

It introduces leaps forward in AI art, rapid content creation and deep fake issues, prompting ethical debate around privacy, intellectual property, image theft and straight up trickery.