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20th-century writing on photo-history may, arguably, be
ascribed to this professional model.
To complete this survey of nineteenth -century photo-
historians, it must be noted that aside from the scientifi c
and professional writers, there were a few attempts
—though not many— at more cultural, or philosophical,
interpretations of the invention of photography. Some
important accounts of photography’s beginnings were
thus penned by a few artists and art critics —such as
the Frenchman Francis Wey—, or essayists and writers
such as the Frenchman Charles Baudelaire, the Eng-
lishwoman Elizabeth Eastlake, or the American Oliver
Wendell Holmes. It is surprising to see how much these
early, often bold, commentators foreshadowed the later,
more celebrated theses of twentieth-century critics such
as Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes. Until the end of
the century, however, photo-history, like photography
itself, remained very much the province of afi cionados
and professionals, while the general public had to be
content with brief overviews placing it among the won-
ders of the century.
Though this entry cannot concern itself with the many
succeeding generations of photo-historians after 1900,
some remarks are in order as to how these later writers
participated in the changing perceptions of nineteenth-
century photography. To be sure, the major shift was
from the perception of photography as invention to its
recognition as art, and that paradigm change was deeply
infl uenced by the crusades of virtually every avant-garde
from Modernism to Conceptual art, as well as the strate-
gies of infl uential collectors and then museums. Photo
historians participated, often actively, in this shift, a
major example being Beaumont Newhall, art historian
turned curator of photography at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art (MOMA) and then the single most in-
fl uential photo-historian of the twentieth century, who
increasingly regarded the history of nineteenth-century
photography as a history of pictorial expression, rather
than one of technology. At the end of the twentieth
century, the training of art historians routinely encom-
passed photography, and especially its “primitives,”
by now fi rmly established on the art market and in the
artistic canon; ever-more expansive exhibitions and
monographs were devoted, largely by historians with
a training in art history, to a growing number of early
masters. But this inclusion of photo-history into art his-
tory, the subject of much passionate debate after 1980,
must not be overestimated, and neither should the work
of twentieth -century photo-historians be reduced to it.
At least three other separate trends must be noted here.
First, many collectors of early photographs were also
experts on “photographica” (materials, objects, practices,
etc.), and, from Gabriel Cromer to Helmut and Alison
Gernsheim, Floyd and Marion Rinhart, or Michel Auer,
they have not only kept alive an interest in the history of
photographic technology but expanded it in many ways.
Second, it must be stressed that, exactly at the same time
as Modernist-inspired exhibitions of the photographic
art pioneered its recognition in the 1930s, in Germany,
France, and the United States, other perspectives on the
early history of photography emerged, in the very same
countries, from the inspiration of folklore studies, social
history, and sociology. Examples include, in the United
States, Robert Taft’s Photography and the American
Scene (1938), but, more decisively, the important Ger-
man works of Helmut Bossert and Heinrich Guttman,
Heinrich Schwarz, Siegried Kracauer, and even Gisèle
Freund, all of which left their imprint on the shorter and
better-known essays by Walter Benjamin. This sociologi-
cal trend, which, among other things, paid close attention
to the reception, spread, and social uses of photography
in the nineteenth century, has arguably exerted, if indi-
rectly, just as strong an infl uence as the art-historical
model did on later more cultural histories of photogra-
phy, of the kind exemplifi ed, in the 1980s and 1990s, by
Naomi Rosenblum and especially Michel Frizot. Lastly,
one cannot but observe, since 1990, that photography and
photo-history have been increasingly understood as the
matrix of a broader cultural history of images or visual
culture, and that their appeal largely outreaches the realm
of any specialized branch of cultural history.
François Brunet
See also: Talbot, William Henry Fox; Daguerre,
Louis-Jacques-Mandé; Herschel, Sir John Frederick
William; Brewster, Sir David; Eder, Joseph Maria;
Werge, John; Vogel, Hermann Wilhelm; Société
française de photographie; Société héliographique;
Lacan, Ernst; Stieglitz, Alfred; and Wey, Francis.Further Reading
Baier, Wolfgang, Quellendarstellungen zur Geschichte der
Fotografi e [Sources Towards the History of Photography],
Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1977.
Bolton, Richard (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories
of Photography, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
Brunet, François, La naissance de l’idée de photographie [The
Birth of Photography as an Idea], Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2000.
Eder, Josef Maria, History of Photography, New York: Dover,
1978 [1945 translation from Geschichte der Photographie,
4th ed., Halle: Knapp, 1932].
Etudes photographiques, # 16, May 2005, “Les nouveaux enjeux
de l’histoire.”
Freund, Gisèle, La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième
siècle, Etude de sociologie et d’esthétique [Photography in
Nineteenth-Century France, A study in Sociology and Esthe-
tics], Paris: A. Monnier, 1936.
Frizot, Michel (ed.), A New History of Photography, Cologne:
Könemann, 1998. (transl. from Nouvelle histoire de la pho-
tographie, Paris: Bordas, 1994).
Gernsheim, Helmut, The Origins of Photography, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1982.