Photography
A technological device of immense consequence for the modern ex-
perience was invented shortly before the mid-19th century: the cam-
era, with its attendant art of photography. Ever since Frenchman
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre(1789–1851) and Briton William
Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) announced the first practical photo-
graphic processes in 1839, people have celebrated photography as a
revelation of visible things. The relative ease of the process, even in its
earliest and most primitive form, seemed a dream come true for
19th-century scientists and artists, who for centuries had grappled
with less satisfying methods of capturing accurate images of their
subjects. Photography also perfectly suited an age that saw artistic pa-
tronage continue to shift away from the elite few toward a broader
base of support. The growing and increasingly powerful middle class
embraced both the comprehensible images of the new medium and
its lower cost.
For the traditional artist, photography suggested new answers
to the great debate about what was real and how to represent the real
in art. It also challenged the place of traditional modes of pictorial
representation originating in the Renaissance. Artists as diverse as
Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, and the Impressionist Edgar Degas (see
Chapter 31) welcomed photography as a helpful auxiliary to paint-
ing. In a memorable lithograph (FIG. 30-49), Daumier celebrated
the new medium as a genuine art form, and many artists marveled at
the ability of photography to translate three-dimensional objects
onto a two-dimensional surface. Other artists, however, saw photog-
raphy as a mechanism capable of displacing the painstaking work of
skilled painters dedicated to representing the optical truth of chosen
subjects. Photography’s challenge to painting, both historically and
technologically, seemed to some artists an expropriation of the real-
istic image, until then the exclusive property of painting. But just as
some painters looked to the new medium of photography for an-
swers on how best to render an image in paint, so too some photog-
raphers looked to painting for suggestions about ways to imbue the
photographic image with qualities beyond simple reproduction.
Artists themselves were instrumental in the development of this
new technology. The camera obscura was familiar to 18th-century
artists. In 1807 the invention of the camera lucida (lighted room) re-
placed the enclosed chamber of the camera obscura. Now the pho-
tographer aimed a small prism lens, hung on a stand, downward at an
object. The lens projected the image of the object onto a sheet of pa-
per. Artists using either of these devices found the process long and
arduous, no matter how accurate the resulting work. All yearned for a
more direct way to capture a subject’s image. Two very different sci-
entific inventions that accomplished this—the daguerreotype (FIG.
30-50) and the calotype(see “Daguerreotype, Calotype, and Wet-
Plate Photography,” page 814)—were announced almost simultane-
ously in France and England in 1839.DAGUERREOTYPESThe French government presented the
new daguerreotype process at the Academy of Science in Paris on
January 7, 1839, with the understanding that its details would be
made available to all interested parties without charge (although the
inventor received a large annuity in appreciation). Soon, people
worldwide began taking pictures with the daguerreotype “camera” (a
name shortened from camera obscura) in a process almost immedi-
ately christened “photography,” from the Greek photos (“light”) and
graphos (“writing”). From the start, the possibilities of the process as
a new art medium intrigued painters. Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), a
leading academic painter of the day, wrote in an official report to the
French government:Daguerre’s process completely satisfies all the demands of art,
carrying certain essential principles of art to such perfection that it
must become a subject of observation and study even to the mostPhotography 81530-50Louis-Jacques-
Mandé Daguerre,Still Life in
Studio,1837. Daguerreotype,
641 – 81 – 4 . Société Française
de Photographie, Paris.
One of the first plates
Daguerre produced after
perfecting his new photo-
graphic process was this still
life, in which he was able to
capture amazing detail and
finely graduated tones from
black to white.1 in.