674
Daguerre. In 1822, two years before he commenced his
photographic experiments, Daguerre and Charles Marie
Bouton opened their Diorama in Paris. In the Diorama,
viewers sat on a platform that slowly moved so that
different views of the same painted scene, enhanced by
special lighting and other effects, could appear to gradu-
ally reveal themselves. This apparatus was described by
its inventors as “imitating aspects of nature as presented
to our sight, that is to say, with all the changes brought
by time, wind, light, atmosphere.” Again, their interest
is in the representation (that is, the fi xing in place, in
space) of transcience, of the capturing in pictorial form
of the passing of time, of the momentary. Their interest,
in other words, is in providing what we would now call
a photographic mode of representation.
It has been suggested that photography’s conception
in the decades around 1800 emerged from a unique and
complex confl uence of social, cultural and technical
developments. As a consequence, photography as a
general historical phenomenon has to be understood not
just as a new art form or a product of modern science,
but as a conceptual consequence of dramatic shifts in
our notions of representation, knowledge, power, and
subjectivity.
Geoffrey Batchen
See also: Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé; Talbot,
William Henry Fox; Great Britain; France; United
States; Brazil; Switzerland; Germany; Spain; Niépce
de Saint-Victor, Claude Félix Abel; Niépce, Joseph
Nicéphore; Wedgwood, Thomas; Davy, Sir Humphry;
Morse, Samuel Finley Breese; and Daguerreotype.
Further Reading
Batchen, Geoffrey, Burning with Desire: The Conception of
Photography, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997.
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On vision and
modernity in the nineteenth century, Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1990.
Eder, Joseph Maria, History of Photography, New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1890, rev. 1945.
Galassi, Peter, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of
Photography, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981.
Gernsheim, Helmut, The Origins of Photography, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Snyder, Joel, ‘Review of Peter Galassi’s Before Photography,’
Studies in Visual Communication, 8: 1 (Winter 1982),
110–116.
HISTORY: 2. 1826–1839
The period 1826-39 is dominated by the experiments
and inventions of the French artist Louis Jacques Mandé
Daguerre and his compatriot Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
By January 1826, when Daguerre wrote to Niépce about
the possibility of fi xing the images of a camera obscura,
the latter had already worked out the fundamentals of
his photographic process, which he called heliography.
Niépce had begun experimenting with photochemical
processes as early as 1816, achieved notable results by
1824, and produced the world’s earliest extant stabilized
camera image sometime in 1826–27 (View from the
Window at Gras, Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center). Niépce visited Daguerre in Paris in
August of 1827. He then travelled to London where he
failed to interest the Royal Society in his heliographic
process, which was based on the photosensitivity of
bitumen of Judea, an asphalt used in printmaking. Un-
like Daguerre, Niépce was concerned throughout his
experimentation with the possibility of multiplying
images through engraving. The earliest known image
of this kind, an etching of a horse and its leader, was
produced on a copper plate in July or August 1825
(Paris, Bibliothèque nationale). Several other plates,
reproducing different prints through contact on various
metals, have also survived, the most famous of which
is the Cardinal d’Amboise (Chalon-sur-Saône, musée
Nicéphore-Niépce). In order to reproduce engravings,
Niépce varnished the back of a proof, thereby rendering
it translucid. He then placed the print on a plate coated
with bitumen. Upon exposure to light, the bitumen
hardened under the un-inked areas of the print, but re-
mained variably soluble under the inked areas. He then
brushed the plate with acid diluted with water, which
gradually attacked the metal, according to the thickness
of the bitumen covering it. After repeated washes, he
produced a reversed image etched onto the plate, which
could then be used to print paper copies on an engraver’s
press. Niépce initially wished to engrave views produced
on plates in the camera in the same way, although no
such plates or proofs have been found. The View from
the Window at Gras is rather a direct image obtained
with bitumen on a pewter plate, which appears positive
under raking light.
Before meeting Niépce, Daguerre had been working
with phosphorescent materials in a camera obscura in an
attempt to produce incandescent paint for his Diorama.
The Diorama was a building designed by Daguerre that
housed two large, semi-transparent paintings illuminated
by natural light. Through the use of colored screens
interposed between the paintings and the windows that
lighted them, Daguerre achieved various effects of time,
light, and movement in the painted scenes. He was an
astute critic of Niépce’s heliographic plates not only
because of his extensive knowledge of lighting effects
gained through the Diorama, but also from a solid un-
derstanding of printmaking techniques. Prompted by
Daguerre’s criticism of his photoengravings, Niépce
focussed his attention after his return from London on
camera images, which he called “points de vue.” At
Niépce’s suggestion, the two men formed a company
on December 14, 1829 in order to exploit the invention