666
Camera and the Pencil (1864). As many recent studies
have shown, the professional arena indeed included,
through its practices of association, publication, exhibi-
tion, evaluation and training, active channels of critical
evaluation, and even technical concerns were rarely
devoid of aesthetic intent. Meanwhile, a fair amount of
specialized technical information found its way into gen-
eral-interest publications, insofar as photography was
widely perceived, down to the last years of the century,
to be full of evolutive potential, towards new frontiers
such as color and instantaneous photography, and popu-
larization of the basic processes. In fact, the dominant
feature of non-specialized discourse on photography,
notably artistic discourse, was a similar emphasis on the
technical nature of photography, except that it stressed
a mechanical rather than a strictly technical character,
leading often to exaggerated dichotomies between art
and industry, inspiration and imitation, naturalism and
symbolism, and so on, but also, especially in literary
refl ections, to a more profound questioning about the
potential role of photography as an esthetic model. In
short, despite confl icting judgements on the values of
photography, 19th-century culture fundamentally agreed
on its status as invention and technology, which served
both as the unifying category in the realm of professional
expertise and as a threatening or fascinating Other in
general discourse on art and culture.
As late as the very last years of the 19th century, and
into the 20th, authors of histories of photography such
as the Frenchman Gaston Tissandier or the Briton John
Werge construed the history of photography as that of
an invention. Things quickly changed after 1900, that is
to say after the advent of popular photography and the
emancipation of artistic practices and institutions, and
just as collectors started accumulating traces of a bygone
era—prints and plates as well as equipment. The old-
style, professional kind of history was on the decline,
although it survived in the 1920s in works such as those
of Georges Potonniée, and although the subject of pho-
tographic technology was renewed in German-speaking
countries, in the wake of the monumental researches
of the chemist Josef-Maria Eder, whereby technical
history became explicitly scholarly, in fact closer to
the history of science. Meanwhile, and especially after
1930, a new trend appeared that gave an organizing role
to the artistic achievement and the cultural signifi cance
of photography. Although this trend was partly linked
to the strategies of particular collectors and museums
(the classic example being Beaumont Newhall’s col-
laboration with New York’s MOMA), it refl ected, more
globally, the growing recognition of photography as art,
and even more importantly the growing experience of
photography as a familiar hobby and as a popular vector
of memory and culture. This transformation thus went
well beyond the Modernist emphasis on art photography,
as is shown by the contemporary endeavors of explicitly
“social” historians of photography, such as Gisèle Fre-
und, Robert Taft, and even Walter Benjamin. Although
it was fairly eclectic and did incorporate the technical
element, the new model of photographic history which
emerged from these pioneering efforts, and which fl our-
ished after 1970—essentially the fi eld of photographic
studies as it is known—focussed on the visual heritage
of photography, which it made available in ever fi ner
reproductions to ever wider audiences. Because pictures
were easier to make and to reproduce, the history of
pictures became more signifi cant than the history of
their making. Thus, the popularization of photography
and photographic culture resulted both in the rise of a
broader interest in its history, and in the gradual mar-
ginalization of the very dimension—technology—that
had theretofore dominated that history. But this was a
minor regret in the face of the new visual culture that
emerged from these efforts, and in view of the historic
achievement that this evolution represented. For indeed
the history of photography, in evolving from a history
of processes and practices to a history of pictures and
meanings, mirrored the very evolution of photography
towards its own historical aspirations for a simplifi ed
method of making pictures and a universal form of
visual expression.
Beyond the concern of early 20th-century critics for
the place of art photography in art history, this view of
photography as a universal visual mode of expression
has led to important redefi nitions of the fi eld since 1970.
Thus, fi rst of all, the worldwide expansion of photog-
raphy in the 19th century has been more accurately
accounted for. Whereas earlier generations of historians
and commentators addressed almost exclusively the de-
velopment of photography in Western Europe, research
in or about other parts of the world has considerably
renewed the fi eld. A major example of this phenomenon
is the reevaluation of the 19th-century contribution of
the United States in the evolution of photography, which
was largely ignored in the specialized literature at least
until 1900, in spite of awards granted to some Ameri-
can photographers at various international exhibitions
in the 19th century. Because of the leading role that
American critics and museums took in the development
of the fi eld in the 20th century, 19th-century American
photography became a topic of unequalled interest and
documentation, the U.S. emerging as a particularly ac-
tive, creative, and culturally open photographic nation,
while prints and albums by some especially sought-
after 19th-century American photographers reached
market prices comparable to those of great French
and English calotypes. Although this example shows
that historiography and the market will follow global
economic and political hierarchies, the development of
photographic studies has also focussed increasingly on