1092
without transferring them into some printable form.
19th-century photographs had little or no public life in
their original photographic appearance (except on ste-
reocards), and instead they were reproduced in engraved
or lithographed versions that more often than not, and
even with semi-automated processes, transformed the
visual message and impregnated it with specifi c inten-
tions. Conversely, this technical incompleteness also
meant that photographs were like raw materials, usable
for any purpose, and transferable onto any base, from
chromolithographs to magazine engravings to postage
stamps. Finally, it is known that an artistic echo to these
technical procedures was found in the practice of many
painters, sculptors and even writers, who (whether or
not they welcomed photography amid the sphere of art)
used photographs as studies or preliminary sketches,
i.e., as documents that were at the same time defi cient
as works of art and useful (sometimes even essential)
to the creation of works of art.
In sum, the diversity, ingenuity and intensity of
19th-century photographic practices may refl ect, in
part, the primitive state of a technology that did not yet
lend itself quite so easily to the universal uses that it
seemed destined to fi ll. More fundamentally, however,
these practices registered the oscillation of 19th-century
culture between a fascination that led people to magnify
and sometimes to multiply the brilliant realism of photo-
graphic images, and a reticence, or perhaps a mere lack
of familiarity with the workings of photography, which
caused attitudes of restraint and an urge to control or
frame its power.
François Brunet
See also: Daguerreotype; Tintype (Ferrotype,
Melainotype); Brady, Mathew B.; Cartes-de-
Visite; Amateur Photographers, Camera Clubs, and
Societies; Books Illustrated with Photographs; Talbot,
William Henry Fox; Victoria, Queen and Albert,
Prince Consort; and Hugo, Charles and François-
Victor.
Further Reading
Frizot, Michel, (ed.), Nouvelle histoire de la photographie [A
New History of Photography], Paris: Bordas, 1994.
Gernsheim, Helmut, and Alison Gernsheim, The History of
Photography from the Camera Obscura to the Beginning of
the Modern Era, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.
Newhall, Beaumont, The Daguerreotype in America, New York:
Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1961.
Rinhart, Floyd, and Marion Rinhart, The American Daguerreo-
type, Athens (Ga.): University of Georgia Press, 1981.
Rosenblum Naomi, A World History of Photography, 3rd ed.,
London: Abbeville Press, 1997.
Scharf Aaron, Art and Photography, New York: Penguin Books,
1986.
Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene: A Social
History 1839–1889 (1938), repr. New York: Dover, 1964.
PHOTOGRAPHIC RETAILING
From the outset, the emerging profession of photography
had two distinct but associated requirements—a market
place for pictures and a source of equipment and mate-
rials. Thus a photographic retail marketplace emerged
catering for both requirements—outlets for the supply
of the latest in equipment and chemistry, and a shop
window for the photographs themselves.
Many early retailers of photographic equipment were
optical instrument makers—the Parisians Charles and
Vincent Chevalier made Daguerre’s fi rst experimental
cameras, while Alphonse Giroux et Cie manufactured
and marketed the first commercially produced da-
guerreotype outfi ts in 1839. The absence of any patent
control over the design of daguerreotype cameras, how-
ever, meant that within a very few years other French
manufacturers—including Chevalier and Nöel Marie
Paymal Lerebours—were producing and marketing
almost identical instruments at prices much lower than
Giroux’s original 600 franc outfi t. Giroux reportedly
sold all his original production run of outfi ts within the
fi rst few days after Daguerre’s announcement of the
process. That the inventor and a manufacturer/retailer
should work so closely together at the dawn of a new
medium may seem surprising, but Daguerre was always
convinced of the success of his invention, and Giroux
was related to Daguerre’s wife.
Giroux had pre-sold a number of camera outfi ts to
Berlin art-dealer Louis Sachse who had intended to
become Germany’s fi rst recorded photographic retailer.
He retained one of the outfi ts for his own use. Gernsheim
(1982) recounts that, in the event, there was a delay be-
fore Sachse could sell the cameras, and was beaten to the
market place by a few days by nearby optician Theodor
Dörffel who had manufactured his own apparatus, and
signifi cantly undercut the Giroux/Sachse price. Dörffel’s
outfi t—but without a lens as these were in very short
supply—went on sale on 15th September 1839.
The Giroux camera was the fi rst to be marketed and
used in many European countries—at least two thousand
are believed to have been sold—but was very quickly
copied locally, the replicas and later improvements driv-
ing prices down by the dawn of the 1840s. The names
of many of these early entrepreneurial retailers have
not been preserved.
In Great Britain, J.T. Cooper, a London chemist
with premises at the Royal Institution became the fi rst
person to retail papers for William Henry Fox Talbot’s
photogenic drawing process—with a month of Talbot’s
announcement of his discovery on January 31, 1839—
while Ackermann & Co, a print-seller with premises at
96 Strand, London, became the fi rst supplier in Britain
to retail a complete outfi t for making photogenic draw-
ings, at a cost of one guinea. Additional supplies of paper
could be purchased separately for two shillings.