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earliest of these entreprneurs, as did Carl Friedrich
Mylius in Frankfurt on Main, Theodor Creifelds in
Cologne, Hermann Krone in Dresden and Joseph Albert
in Munich. Their fame spread far over the souvenir
kiosks in their home towns which helped them pursue
careers in photography. As Germany was still divided
into many small countries, the photographers usually
fi rst dedicated an album of their photographs to their
king, duke, or baron, and then hoped to sell even more
of these precious specimen.
A secondary effect of these developments was the rise
of the economic situation of photographers in general
which helped them to establish their own professional
groups and societies. Although primarily concerned with
scientifi c and technical developments within photogra-
phy like the ‘Berliner Photographische Gesellschaft’
founded in 1864 by Hermann Wilhem Vogel, these
groups gave themselves the image of a guild and thus
grounded the constitution of photography as a craft
which fi nally was installed by law in 1902 and estab-
lished as a profession until the 1980s. Although many
of these pre-guild congregations did not live for longer
than a few years and did not gain infl uence farther than
their local district area, they formed the average image
of photography in both the German language and the
public opinion. Still today there is the legal division
between a ‘simple depiction’ of reality and the ‘work of
art’ in photography causing courts to investigate cases
of copyright which stem from these formative years of
photography.
The most important concern of these guild-like
groups was a social notion: the institutionalisation
of photography as a business, and respected like any
other. Exhibitions were arranged, as were gatherings in
upper-class hotels, and symposiums of all kinds where
everybody could see that photographers were people
to be taken as seriously as civil servants or dealers of
antiquities. Carefully avoided in those circles was any
reference to photography as a fi ne art which was given
a pejorative notion—those who could not survive on
their craftsmenship, whether they lacked technical qual-
ity, which was mostly suspected by the colleagues, or
fortune in the profession, were nicknamed ‘followers
of art.’ It was the time of voluptuous studio decorations,
huge wooden frames around each portrait photograph,
and money being made on quantity, not quality. But it
was the time of science as well, and photography played
an important role in many fi elds of human knowledge.
Photography became the most important instrument
of description in positivistic approaches towards knowl-
edge. Hermann Krone and Hermann Wilhelm Vogel
within the 1860s established photography as a ‘scientifi c
aid’ and accompanied dozens of excursions throughout
the world for a large variety of reasons like solar eclipses
in New Zealand and Egypt, and research for botanic and
zoologic specimen in Asia and Africa. It may be seen
as typically German that travel photography arose here
not as business in the vicinity of literature and tourism
but as a part of science and diplomacy. Wilhelm von
Herford and Wilhelm Hammerschmidt travelled to the
near East as diplomats whereas Fedor Jagor and Franz
Stolze started their tours throughout the Middle East
and Central Asia with an interest in anthropology and
archaeology. From there it was only a small step for the
scientists of the 1870s and 1880s to take up photography
by themselves, as Heinrich Schliemann did when he
excavated Troja. The ony exception to this rule may be
described by the German expatriate Georg (later Gior-
gio) Sommer who fl ed his home town Frankfurt on Main
after the bourgeois revolution in 1849 and became one
of the most important travel photographers in Italy.
There is no science when it is not printed, and this
fact stimulated a European-wide research for printing
processes with results ready for use in the then rising
publishing industry. Germany had four major contribu-
tions to make in this fi eld throughout the 19th century,
and all of these contribution came from Munich. In 1855,
Edgar and his father Franz Hanfstaengl—then already
well-known as photographers and lithographers—an-
nounced their charcoal printing process which they
used in the business of art reproduction successfully
for more than two decades. In 1868, the photographer
Joseph Albert launched his ‘Alberyype’ process, a major
development of the phototype process for producing
large quantities of copies. His printing press sold images
of Bavarian landscapes, the castles of King Ludwig II,
and group portraits of all sorts of congregations with
great economic success. The third contribution cannot
be credited fully to a German inventor but to an Austrian
as well: In 1883—at the same time as Karel Klietsch
from Vienna, Georg Meisenbach published his autotype
method of setting half-tone photographs through grids
of glass, and in 1885, the fi rst photographs were printed
this way in a daily newspaper, the Illustrierte Zeitung
from Leipzig. And in 1892, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel’s
son Ernst released the news that he and his companion
William Kurtz had successfully installed a three-colour-
printing process after photographs.
As the knowledge of Roger Fenton’s participation in
the Crimean war spread over Central Europe, photogra-
phy became an integral part of early political propaganda
in due course. In 1864, the war between Denmark and
German troops under Prussian direction became an
early symbol of the coming unifi cation of all German
states, and it might be for this reason that this rather
unspectacular war with only one important battle re-
ceived an enormous coverage by press and photographs.
On the German side, the three photographers Christian
Friedrich Brandt from Kiel—he produced large albums
of medieval art afterwards, Heinrich Graf and Charles