668
culture was generally reluctant to view photographs as
anything other than mechanical artefacts with utilitarian
functions. Much effort has been put in demonstrating
that 19th-century culture was naive, positivist, utilitar-
ian or otherwise uncritical: unable to see the mark of art
(or of artifi ce or playfulness) in a photograph, blindly
faithful to the “myth” of photographic objectivity, and
profoundly misled in its infatuation with novelty and
progress. Yet the result of decades of specialized schol-
arship has been to unveil the unique visual and cultural
heritage that this supposedly naive century created; and
as some of the most incisive 20th century critics—no-
tably Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—have sug-
gested, the 19th-century fascination with photography
was an accurate response to a major event in the history
of civilization.
François Brunet
See also: Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé; Niépce;
Talbot, William Henry Fox; Calotype and Talbotype;
Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth; Baudelaire, Charles;
Emerson, Peter Henry; Ruskin, John; Werge,
John; Tissandier, Gaston; and Eder, Joseph Maria;
Pictorialism.
Further Reading
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].
Freund, Gisèle, Photographie et société [Photography and Soci-
ety], Paris: Seuil, 1974.
Frizot, Michel, ed., Nouvelle histoire de la photographie [A New
History of Photography], Paris: Bordas, 1994.
Goldberg Vicki, ed., Photography in Print, Writings from 1816 to
the Present, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.
History of Photography, 1997, 21: 2, Why Historiography?
Kemp Wolfgang, ed., Theorie der Fotografi e [Theory of Photog-
raphy], 2 vol., Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1979–1980.
Marien, Mary Warner, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural
History, 1839–1900, Cambridge and London: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Newhall, Beaumont (ed.). Photography: Essays and Images, New
York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1980.
Newhall Beaumont, The History of Photography, 5th ed., New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982.
Potonniee Georges, Histoire de la découverte de la photographie
[History of the Discovery of Photography], Paris: Paul Montel,
1925, repr. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1989.
Rabb, Jane M., ed., Literature and Photography: Interactions
1840–1990, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press,
1995.
Root Marcus, The Camera and the Pencil (Philadelphie, 1864),
repr with an introduction by B. Newhall, Pawlet (Vermont):
Helios, 1971.
Rosenblum Naomi, A World History of Photography, 3rd ed.,
London: Abbeville Press, 1997.
Rouille André, La Photographie en France, Textes et Contro-
verses: une Anthologie 1816–1871 [Photography in France,
an Anthology of Texts and Debates from 1816–1871], Paris:
Macula, 1989.
Scharf Aaron, Art and Photography, New York: Penguin Books,
1986.
Taft Robert, Photography and the American Scene: A Social His-
tory 1839–1889 (1938), repr. New York, Dover, 1964.
Tagg John, The Burden of Representation, Essays on Photogra-
phies and Histories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993.
Trachtenberg Alan, ed., Classic Essays on Photography, New
Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
Walch Peter and Barrow Thomas F., eds., Perspectives on Photog-
raphy: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, Albuquerque,
University of New Mexico Press, 1986,
Younger Daniel P., ed., Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on
Photography 1983–89, with a preface by Alan Trachtenberg,
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.HISTORY: 1. ANTECEDENTS AND
PROTOPHOTOGRAPHY UP TO 1826
The announcements of the invention of photography in
January 1839 by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and
William Henry Fox Talbot were preceded by at least
four decades of experiments by themselves and others
towards this specifi c goal. Indeed, following these an-
nouncements, as many as twenty people, from seven
different countries (Britain, France, United States, Bra-
zil, Switzerland, Germany, Spain), were mentioned as
having already attempted a photographic process of one
kind or another. Among these earlier experimenters were
such fi gures as Elizabeth Fulhame, an Englishwoman
who published a book on the ‘Art of Dying and Paint-
ing’ (1794); Henry Brougham, a Scottish politician and
intellectual (1794); Thomas Wedgwood, the son of the
famous English potter (c. 1800); Nicéphore and Claude
Niépce, French brothers and inventors (1814); Samuel
Morse, an American painter working in New Haven
(1821); James Wattles, a 16-year-old art student living
in Indiana (1828); Eugène Hubert, an architect living
in Paris (1828); Hercules Florence, a French-born art-
ist and inventor living in a small town in Brazil (1832);
Philipp Hoffmeister, an obscure German clergyman
(1834); Friedrich Gerber, a Swiss veterinary surgeon
teaching at Berne University (1836); John Draper, an
American chemistry professor (1836); José Zapetti, a
Spanish painter from Saragossa (c. 1837); and Friederike
Wilhelmine von Wunsch, a Prussian woman artist living
in Paris (1839). All these people, and probably many
more, conceived (or later claimed to have conceived)
of something approximating photography, but none of
them could ever quite perfect a technique that actually
resulted in permanent photographic pictures.
If nothing else, this bevy of claimants suggests that
photography’s conception was the product, not of an
individual fl ash of genius, but rather of various develop-