670
unsuccessful.... Nothing but a method of preventing the
unshaded part of the delineation from being coloured by
exposure to the day is wanting, to render the process as
useful as it is elegant.
Although the two men could not fi nd a way to stop
their images from continuing to develop and going
completely black, their fi ndings were republished in
at least fi fteen different journals or books in England,
Italy, Scotland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United
States, Germany and France. Widely known in the schol-
arly community, these fi rst steps towards photography
informed the later and more successful experiments of,
among others, Daguerre and Talbot.
As Joel Snyder has pointed out, it is important to
recognise that what made these later experiments suc-
cessful was the ability of people like Talbot to utilize
reliable and dependable quantities of chemicals like
silver nitrate and silver chloride and work with new
elements and compounds, such as iodine, bromine and
sodium thiosulphate, all of which were simply unavail-
able before the 1830s. However the story of photogra-
phy is interesting precisely because, as evidenced in
the experiments of people like Wedgwood and Davy,
its conception preceded the ready availability of these
chemicals—the desire to photograph emerged well
before the scientifi c ability to fulfi ll that desire. Indeed
photography’s various inventions were as dependent
on available materials and trial and error as on modern
scientifi c knowledge. Attempts to perfect a photographic
process were also often conducted in the context of
other experiments. The Niépce brothers, for example,
initially attempted to make photographic reproductions
of engravings using light-sensitive bitumen, inspired
by the establishment of the fi rst successful lithographic
premises in Paris in 1813 and by a fi nancial incentive
scheme offered by the French government to improve
the process. They went on to attempt to capture views
of landscape formed in the back of a camera obscura,
using paper soaked in silver chloride, as early as 1816,
and then, in their heliographic process, using pewter
plates coated with their light-sensitive bitumen solu-
tion. The earliest extant example, a view from their
studio window, dates to about June 1827. Wedgwood
and Davy were both involved in industrial research on
ceramics and dying textiles in the 1790s, Samuel Morse
worked on a sculpture-copying apparatus at the same
time that he fi rst experimented with photography and
later developed an electric telegraph system, the Niépce
brothers also built a marine engine and attempted a per-
petual motion machine, and Talbot took out numerous
patents on processes that he hoped would have profi table
applications. Photography was, in other words, one of
many inventions driven by the combined forces of the
Industrial Revolution and consumer capitalism.
This context reminds us of the larger history of
which the invention of photography was but one small
part—the ascendancy to political and economic power
of the middle classes and the attendant proliferation of
their values and desires. The infl uence of middle-class
ideology is evidenced, for example, in the emphasis
placed within this Romantic period on the sensory and
emotional experience of the individual human subject.
This licensed an exploration in both art and science of
the extremes of human experience—sexual desire, mad-
ness, grief, nightmares, fantasy. But it also had important
ramifi cations for philosophy and political theory. The
rights of the individual, both political and personal, were
a topic of great interest in the later eighteenth century.
The most provocative of the various commentaries on
these issues came from Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, especially his idea that the state derives its author-
ity, not from some divine right, but from the consent of
the citizenry (from a “social contract” between monarch
and citizens). Henceforth, every individual should have
the freedom to seek happiness as long as it was compat-
ible with the general good.
This new concept of the nature of human nature was
expressed most forcefully in the ideals of the French
Revolution of 1789 (“Liberty-Equality-Fraternity”).
But it was also manifested in the demand for portraits
from members of the European middle class seeking to
confi rm their new social status and sense of self in the
form of an image. Few members of this class could af-
ford a painting, so alternative ways of producing portrait
images had to be found. In the 1750s, for example, the
silhouette was invented, involving the production of
the outline of a shadow profi le that was cheap, rapid,
portable and relatively easy to make. A machine was
soon devised for making these kinds of portraits even
more easily. A further improvement on this process, the
physionotrace, was invented by Frenchman Gilles-Louis
Chrétien in 1786. This comprised a mechanical com-
bination of silhouette and engraving, requiring only a
single sitting and enabling multiple reproductions of the
portrait image to be prepared. The physionotrace portrait
was inexpensive and convenient (requiring even less
skill to make than the silhouette), but tended to produce
a stylized, static expression on the face of the subject.
Although portraiture was not the primary aspiration of
the early photographic experimenters (successful por-
trait photographs would not be made until the 1840s),
it is important to remember that their experiments took
part in the midst of this general push to mechanise and
automate all representational processes.
We seem to have strayed some distance from the
practical problem of inventing a workable system of
photographic image-making. But we have to remember
that, as Talbot concedes in his 1844 essay, photography
began as an idea, as a “philosophic dream.” A history
of the technical development of the photographic ap-