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refl ected a deeper hesitation between the notions of
invention and discovery, i.e. between the photograph as
mechanical product and as natural image. As is known,
however, a patent was taken out for the daguerreotype in
England, and for most of the 19th century the practice
of photography remained esoteric, and mostly limited to
professionals. In 1839, moreover, Daguerre and Niépce’s
son were honored as inventors, and the whole rationale
of the French bill was that their process was indeed an
invention—original, practical, historic, and so useful to
science and society that it behove the government to buy
it and make it public. Thus, the law on the daguerreotype
programmed and legitimized the formidable spread of
photography into every corner of the globe and into
every branch of activity, which was often rationalized
in terms of “applications” to particular goals when in
fact it betrayed a self-justifying ideology of modernity.
By the same token, it emphasized a connection between
the defi nition of photographs as exact images obtained
by a natural or mechanical process (without the artist’s
hand) and the perspective of everybody making such
exact images (since they required no special skills)—in
other words, between the idea of an artless image and
that of a democratic art. This idea of photography as an
invention that made a technique of both viewing and
making unquestionably realistic pictures of the world
accessible to everybody was just as revolutionary as the
magical, eerie realism of photographic pictures.
Although this idea was contested in the parallel, ep-
och-making invention of the negative/positive process
and the practice of the calotype as expressive art by Wil-
liam Henry Fox Talbot, many other signs confi rm that
19th-century culture generally treated photography as
an invention. The inaugural Franco-English quarrel over
the real father(s) of photography, the obsessive quest of
later historians for the true inventor, the many lawsuits
of photography’s fi rst decades, and the prominent place
of photography in popular science compendia on the
“wonders” of the century—these were only some of the
facets of a framework that defi ned, valued, and limited
photography in terms of invention and technology, as
opposed to other forms of culture. Although after 1855
photographs were sometimes exhibited in art exposi-
tions, they were usually separated from the fi ne arts,
and more commonly, as in world fairs, they belonged
with the products of industry. And yet, because this
invention set a new standard of pictorial truth, it very
forcibly projected technology into the realm of art and
into philosophical and aesthetic discussions of images,
truth, and reality. Because it heralded universal access to
pictures and to picture-making, and therefore questioned
traditional privileges, it raised broader issues about the
place of art and pictures in society. Finally, it must be
noted that in the strongly emotional response that eve-
rywhere greeted the advent of photography, the striking
faithfulness of photographic images was inseparably
linked to the dramatic—in some cases almost fantas-
tic—novelty of the experience of seeing them. This
response was not always favourable, but it was clearly
and durably hyperbolic, and thereby expressive of a
deep perturbation of the cultural order, as shown espe-
cially by the famous essays of Lady Elizabeth Eastlake
(1857), Charles Baudelaire (1859), and Oliver Wendell
Holmes (1859–1863), which twenty years after the fi rst
announcement of photography recorded that upheaval
with the same emphatic tone, albeit with different judge-
ments. In writing on photography, artists, writers, critics,
and philosophers (such as Baudelaire, Schopenhauer,
Emerson, or Ruskin) addressed not only the supposedly
uncontrovertible character of photographic evidence,
which was almost immediately put into question on a
variety of grounds, but the compelling and fascinating
novelty of the photographic image, towards which they
displayed deep ambivalence. In sum, the 19th century
as a whole kept echoing the novelty of photographic
images and, inseparably, the power of inventions and
inventors to transform society and culture.
In keeping with this global defi nition of photogra-
phy as invention, its development was predominantly
categorized under the label of technology. This was
most obvious with commentators within the profes-
sion of photography, which was perhaps especially
prone to pride itself on its technical achievement since
it was generally refused a more academic recognition.
The overwhelming majority of articles published in
the specialized magazines that appeared in several
countries after 1850 were of a technical nature. Much
of this specialized writing was generated by an ongo-
ing technological evolution, which constantly changed
instruments, materials, and procedures. Even, however,
when they expressed artistic concerns, as indeed they
often did, photographic authors typically translated
these concerns into technical language, as for instance
in early discussions of soft focus as a means of achieving
atmosphere and ideality. Likewise, and in the wake of
the inquiry into the origins of the invention that started
in 1839, 19th-century histories of photography were
technical histories. Generally written by practitioners
and most often intended also as manuals, these books
would summarize the chronology and the technology of
the inventions and various processes, typically describ-
ing methods in detail, discussing “applications,” and
emphasizing the spread of photography into the most
diverse branches of human activity, as befi tted trade
publications. This professional discourse echoed the
social perception of photography as a technical activity,
involving cumbersome apparatus, suspicious chemicals,
and occult operations, all the more intriguing since their
primary use was to draw one’s portrait; and yet it often
embodied artistic concerns, as in Marcus Root’s The