Photography is derived from the Greek words photos, meaning light, and graphein, meaning to draw,” coined by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. However, photography has existed since ancient times.

In the 5th and 4th centuries Chinese and Greek philosophers described the basic principles of optics and the camera. In the 17th century camera obscuras, a dark room with a small hole to the outside world, were frequently used by artists to project an image. In 1880 the first half-tone photograph appeared in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic. The first roll film camera developed by Kodak became available in 1888. The first mass marketed camera, the brownie, came out in 1900.

Avant-garde designers in the 1910s and 1920s began using half-tone photography in critical and creative ways. Photographs were familiar to people from mass media newspapers, advertisements, and magazines, but the new wave of designers approached photography as a dynamic and flexible medium that reflected the modern age. In place of neatly framed and centered images, avant-garde designers cut, cropped, flipped, reversed, overlapped, and otherwise manipulated the optical-mechanical image.