1115
even as recently as 2004, been rekindled by various
publications of such documents.
More generally, the keen interest that scientists ini-
tially took in the invention and its scientifi c applications
explains the leading role that chemists and physicists
played among early photo-historians. Beyond Arago,
who authored, in addition to his famous 1839 speech
to the French Parliament, several memoirs on the
subsequent development of photography, a number of
the leading academic scientists of the time contributed
historical remarks and some essays on photography, its
origins, and its signifi cance, especially for the theory
of light. These include the Englishmen John F. W. Her-
schel, David Brewster, and, more specifi cally for pho-
tographic methodology, Robert Hunt (whose Treatise
on Photography (1841) and Researches on Light (1844)
are, arguably, the most signifi cant early publications on
the subject), the Frenchmen Joseph-Louis Gay-Lus-
sac, Jean-Baptiste Biot, the Germans Johann Madler,
Alexander von Humboldt (and, later, Hermann Vogel,
perhaps the single most infl uential scientifi c writer on
photography in the nineteenth century), and the Ameri-
can expert on photochemistry John W. Draper.
These early accounts, more scientifi c than techni-
cal, paved the way for at least two subsequent kinds of
“scientifi c” histories of photography. One was embed-
ded in the larger genre of popular science, represented
by encyclopaedias, magazines such as The Scientifi c
American (founded in 1845), and illustrated surveys
of the “wonders of modern science” of the kind that
the French polymath Louis Figuier became famous
for; these perpetuated a number of legends about the
beginnings of photography but maintained its link to
popular and general culture. The other was the later,
far more specialized, and ever-widening investigation
of what would come to be known as the “prehistory”
of photography, which would often be associated with
more strictly technical, or methodological, surveys
of its development. In the last years of the nineteenth
century, this trend, which may perhaps more properly
be called technical, was represented by the British ex-
pert John Werge (The Evolution of Photography, 1891)
and, above all, by the Viennese chemist Josef-Maria
Eder, arguably the fi rst major historian of photographic
and imaging technologies, with his monumental Aus-
führliches Handbuch der Fotografi e in four volumes
(1891–96), followed by his groundbreaking Geschichte
der Fotografi e (four editions were published between
1895 and 1932). In the twentieth century, this brand
of technological history was primarily pursued by
German-language historians, from Erich Stenger to
Helmut Gernsheim, though it had echoes in France
(with Georges Potonniée) or in the United States (with
Edward Epstean, originally a photo-engraver, who was
also Eder’s English translator); but its infl uence can be
felt, until the end of the twentieth century, over much
photo-history.
Although practitioners or advanced amateurs often
had a hand in this scientifi c-technical brand of photohis-
tory, as shown by the examples of Vogel, Werge, or Eder,
another, more specifi cally professional, brand of photo-
historians emerged very early on with the appearance of
the fi rst specialized treatises, or handbooks. Daguerre
himself had entitled his 1839 manual Historique et de-
scription des procédés du daguerréotype et du Diorama.
While most of the handbooks published in the 1840s
contained few historical remarks, the formation after
1850 of more self-conscious professional organizations
and the appearance of the fi rst specialized magazines (in
France, the U.K., and the U.S.) was accompanied by the
publication of more ambitious treatises that more and
more often included several historical chapters. One of
the very fi rst such compendia was the American Henry
Hunt Snelling’s The History and Practice of the Art of
Photography, published in 1849, but it was soon fol-
lowed by a host of competitors (such as, in the U.S., John
F. Towler’s The Silver Sunbeam and Marcus A. Root’s
The Camera and the Pencil, both published in 1864).
The Société héliographique (founded in 1851, replaced
in 1854 by the Société française de photographie), the
Royal Photographic Society, formed in 1853, or the
American “daguerrean” associations, each of which
started publishing a magazine between 1850 and 1855,
all busied themselves, and increasingly with time, with
historical investigations. Writers such as Ernest Lacan
in France or H.H. Snelling in the United States came to
be regarded as authorities on the subject by their peers.
Indeed, this burgeoning historical, technical and critical
curiosity cannot be separated from the campaigns waged
by leading professionals (and some devoted amateurs) to
establish their art, or their commerce, on a fi rmer cultural
basis—in short, to legitimize photography, and to rally,
towards this goal, the support of unifi ed and coherent
professional constituencies. Lacan, Snelling, and their
likes were neither great scientists nor careful historians;
their writings were eclectic, often second-hand, some-
times full of errors; they were prone to nationalist claims
and parochial arguments on the universal usefulness of
their activity; but in the second half of the nineteenth
century, they probably best embodied the emerging
self-consciousness of a “photographic fi eld” that sought
both recognition by the academies and a certain measure
of autonomy and self-reliance. Moreover, this trend is
important in that it set a model for later campaigns for
the recognition and institutionalization of photography,
photographic art, or photographic education, which, as
in the example of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-secession,
most often included a strong interest in the history of
photography and an equally strong doctrine about how it
should be written. Even the typical eclecticism of much