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fi rst German daguerreotypes was divided between Carl
August von Steinheill who exhibited his daguerreotypes
in early September 1839 and Johann Christian Gottlieb
Noerrenberg, Professor of Astronomy at the University
of Tuebingen whose oldest daguerreotype is said to have
been developed in the same week and still exists today.
Sachse’s apparatus was repaired fairly quickly which
allowed him to take part in the burgeoning photographic
movement. In fact, from the end of September 1839
on, a number of amateur photographers successfully
produced their fi rst images in Berlin.
Except for the near total exclusion of the calotype,
the early German photographic history reads like the
ones of the neighbouring countries. One can draw a
map of the wandering daguerreotypists; there is a cer-
tain emphasis on the south west and the far north areas
where more portraitists seem to have rambled around
than in the vicinity of larger cities like Munich, Leipzig,
or Berlin. From 1845 on, the fi rst studios were opened;
by the early 1850s, each city address book listed large
quantities of photographers offering portraits, corps
pictures, and—with the success of the wet Collodion
process from the mid 1850s onwards—scenic views of
landscapes, famous buildings and mediaeval towns. The
development of German industry followed the United
Kingdom and France, and thus the subjects of German
photographers participated in portraiture and landscape
photography until the late 1850s.
Compared to other European countries and seen from
the aesthetic side of the craft, Germany lacked fathering
fi gures for the fi rst two decades of photography. There
was no William Henry Fox Talbot, no association like
the one of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, no
Barbizon school. Nothing in Germany could be equalled
to these geniusses. Among the better daguerreotypists
are Carl Ferdinand Stelzner and Hermann Biow from
Hamburg, Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann from Leipzig,
Alois Loecherer and Antonia Correvont from Munich,
and fi nally, Trudpert Schneider and his sons Heinrich
and Wilhelm from Ehrenstetten near Freiburg. All of
these photographers were far better than the average
craftsman in their fi eld but none of them could be called
a world-wide fi rst rate photographer. With their series
on the damages caused by the Great Fire in Hamburg in
May 1842, Carl Ferdinand Stelzner and Hermann Biow
are certainly among the fi rst men to use photography for
journalistic purposes. Unfortunately, with the exception
of a few singular images by Biow, this series is said to
be lost as Hamburg’s senate could not decide to buy
them, as the records claim, due to “the possible lack of
durabilty” of this new kind of imagery.
Even from the technological view of the matter, Ger-
many had nothing more to offer than improvements of
inventions made somewhere else. But from the 1850s
onwards, these improvements were substantial both in
optics and in the chemistry of photography. The German
optical industry was initiated by Emil Busch’s takeover
of his uncle’s fi rm at Rathenow near Berlin in 1848. By
1852 the business not only produced lenses with the help
of steam engines but opened a department that manufac-
tured camera bodies of all kinds. In 1852, Jakob Wothly
from Aachen successfully licensed his own printing
process. In 1854, Eduard Liesegang opened his fi rst pho-
tographic studio in Elberfeld (today: Wuppertal) which
subsequently became the fi rst wholesale retailer for
chemicals and apparatus. By 1857 the company started
albumen paper production, and a year later started to
manufacture cameras and lantern slide projectors and by
1863, the company moved to Duesseldorf where it still
resides. The German photographic industrial concentra-
tion on mechanical engineering, optical specimen, and
chemical production was developed from these earlier
enterprises. Although larger parts of this industry were
not installed before the late 1870s and early 1880s, these
beginnings in the 1850s show all signifi cant focal points
for future developments.
The 1860s saw a formative disposition in German
photography due to both the political developments and
the growing tourism within German countries. Portrait
photography centered around Munich, Berlin and Ham-
burg as there were the larger groups of very important
people to be included in albums of contemporaries—a
European fashion from the late 1850s onwards which
helped to install a collective memory with the even larger
success of the carte-de-visite and cabinet formats. The
most important German contribution to this genre was
formed by a long series of photographs portraying the
members of the Frankfurt parliament of 1848, the fi rst
attempt of a democratic government ever within these
states. Hermann Biow from Hamburg began the task of
depicting the 831 elected parliamentarians; later he was
followed by Jacob Seib from Frankfurt and Phillip Graff
from Berlin. As all of them worked in the daguerreotype
process their resulting images had to be transferred
into drawn lithographs which were printed and sold in
large quantities throughout all German countries. Seven
years later the next series of its kind was released but
the political landscape had changed considerably. And
in 1856, Franz Hanfstaengl portrayed in his ‘album of
contemporaries’ the royal suite of the Bavarian King
Maximilian II, royalties and courtiers.
Additionally, photography began to merge with the
growing interest in tourism from the 1850s onwards.
Along the Rhine and the Elbe, in picturesque cities
like Frankfurt on Main and Dresden, around important
buildings like the Cologne cathedral and the Heidelberg
castle, one could fi nd entrepreneurs who not only pro-
duced images but sold them with their own publishing
houses and printing presses. Hermann Emden in Mainz
started this business successfully in 1856 as one of the