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King, who had trained with the renowned Swiss natural-
ist Louis Agassiz, clearly understood the desirability of
having a photographic record of his expeditions along
the 40th parallel (1867–69; 1872), since he recruited
the experienced Timothy O’Sullivan for his campaigns
into the Great Basin of the American West. King’s cata-
strophist ideas were considered by the majority of the
progressive scientifi c community as outmoded. None-
theless, King’s reports and O’Sullivan’s startlingly aus-
tere photographs would appear to support the argument
of relatively sudden traumatic upheaval of the earth’s
surface. Like his fellow geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden,
who employed the photographer William Henry Jackson
on his own surveys of the West (1870–78), including
Yellowstone, King had to gain government support for
his scientifi c activities by demonstrating the economic
potential of mineral-rich areas of the wilderness. Pho-
tographers thus engaged in geographical exploration
could serve both pragmatic and speculative roles in the
gathering of evidence for specifi c geological study. Yet
the photographic securing of imagery of the earth in its
extreme forms also signaled artistic and emotionally
evocative inclinations present in the nineteenth-century
cultural imagination.
Gary D Sampson
See also: Bedford, Francis; Bisson, Louis-Auguste
and Auguste-Rosalie; Bourne, John Cooke; Civiale,
Aimé; Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé; England,
William; Herschel, Sir John Frederick William;
Jackson, William Henry; Llewelyn, John Dillwyn;
O’Sullivan, Timothy Henry; Schlagintweit, Hermann,
Adolph, and Robert; Stewart, John; Talbot, William
Henry Fox; Documentary; Expedition Photography;
Landscape; Mountain Photography; Panoramic
Photography; Science; and Survey Photography.
Further Readings
Bartram, Michael, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of
Victorian Photography, London: Weidenfi eld and Nicolson,
1985.
Frizot, Michel, ed., A New History of Photography, Köln: Köne-
mann, 1998.
Hallam, A., Great Geological Controversies, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983.
Marien, Mary Warner, Photography: A Cultural History, New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.
Naef, Weston J., Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape
Photography in the American West, 1860–1885, Buffalo:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery and New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1975.
Rudnick, Martin J.S., “The Emergence of a Visual Language
for Geological Science, 1760–1840,” History of Science 14
(1976): 149–195.
Sampson, Gary D., “The Success of Samuel Bourne in India,”
History of Photography 16 (Winter 1992): 336–347.
Thomas, Ann, Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images
as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, New York: Hill
and Wang, 1989.GERMANY
Until the year 1871, when the Second Emperorship was
installed by the Prussian King, it was nearly impossible
to name Germany as a political, economic, or social unit.
Before this date one had to consider the German speak-
ing countries, with the exception of the Swiss republic
and the Austrian kingdom, as a loosely woven carpet
consisting of dozens of minor kingdoms, dukeships, and
counties. The two largest countries were the kingdoms of
Prussia and Bavaria—and they, especially their capitals
Berlin and Munich, played the most important roles in
early German photography which is distinguished as
such here only for reasons of linguistic practicability.
When the fi rst announcements of photography arrived
from Paris in German papers by January and February
of 1839, there were lots of expectations among scientists
and journalists which were widely discuseed in numer-
ous articles and booklets. Academies began to discuss
the science and art of depicting nature with light which
had no name yet. The astronomer Johann Heinrich von
Maedler was among the fi rst to use ‘photography’ in
the Berliner Zeitung of February 25, 1839, and a little
later some entrepreneurs immediately started with their
own experiments. Among those who could claim to have
‘invented’ a photographic method of their own were
the Munich professors Carl August Steinheil and Franz
von Kobell; another one was the inventor Johann Carl
Enslen, then 80 years old.
An important role for the introduction of photography
in Prussia was fulfi lled by the scientist Alexander von
Humboldt who had seen a number of daguerreotypes
at a presentation on January 7, 1839, in Paris and had
written several letters and articles about them. When
William Henry Fox Talbot was about to claim the con-
tinental patent rights for his invention, Humboldt had
already set the critical limits for looking at photographic
images by insisting on the extreme sharpness in draw-
ing details “that no painter would draw.” Humboldt’s
words were so clear about photography’s fi rst and only
quality in the depiction of detail that the calotype with
its aesthetic roots in pictorial painting had no chance in
German countries for nearly two decades.
Those who had heard of the stunning qualities of
the daguerreotype had to wait until August 18, 1839,
to see the new method presented to the public and the
fi rst equipment sold. Among the fi rst to order a set of
cameras, plates, and chemicals was the Berlin art dealer
and entrepreneur Louis Ferdinand Sachse—but when
his material arrived in Berlin everything was broken
and inoperable. Thus the fame of having produced the