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First page of “Photography and Its Origins”

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Photography and Its Origins

Recent decades have seen a flourishing interest in and speculation about the origins of photography. Spurred by rediscoveries of “first” photographs and proclamations of photography’s death in the digital age, scholars have been rethinking who and what invented the medium. Photography and Its Origins reflects on this interest in photography’s beginnings by reframing it in critical and specifically historiographical terms. How and why do we write about the origins of the medium? Whom or what do we rely on to construct those narratives? What’s at stake in choosing to tell stories of photography’s genesis in one way or another? And what kind of work can those stories do? Edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, this collection of 16 original essays, illustrated with 32 color images, showcases prominent and emerging voices in the field of photography studies. Their research cuts across disciplines and methodologies, shedding new light on old questions about histories and their writing.

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Since the late 1970s, when the history of photography became an academic subject, and with increasing interest in photography in the art market, there have been frequent calls by various scholars for a 'new kind of history' of photography. These calls were part of what Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson described in a special photography issue of October (Summer 1978,) as a renewed scholarly 'discovery' of the medium, characterized by the 'sense of an epiphany, delayed and redoubled in its power.' This rediscovery carried the message that photography and its practices have to be redeemed 'from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it had been consigned.'1 The calls for a new history of photography suggested that the time has come to substitute Beaumont Newhall's hegemonic modernist classic The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present with new text/s.2 Newhall was a librarian and later the first director of photography of t...

An exact date for the invention of photography is evasive. Scientists and amateurs alike were working on a variety of photographic processes for much of the early nineteenth century. Thus most historians refer to the year 1839 as the "first" year of photography, not because the sensational new medium was invented then, but because that is the year it was introduced to the world. After more than 175 years, and for the first time in English, "First Exposures. Writings from the Beginning of Photography" brings together more than 130 primary sources from that very year – 1839 – subdivided into ten chapters and accompanied by fifty three images of significant visual and historical importance. This is an astonishing work of discovery, selection, and – thanks to Steffen Siegel's introductory texts, notes, and afterword – elucidation. The range of material is impressive: not only all the chemical and technological details of the various processes but also contracts, speeches, correspondence of every kind, arguments, parodies, satires, eulogies, denunciations, journals, and even some poems. Revealing through firsthand accounts the competition, the rivalries, and the parallels among the various practitioners and theorists, this book provides an unprecedented way to understand how the early discourse around photographic techniques and processes transcended national boundaries and interconnected across Europe and the United States.

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Photography is ubiquitous within global culture, but we hardly understand its meaning. And we have only a dim comprehension of its origin. Unlike cinema, which contains the complexities of motion and montage, the photograph is simple and, for the most part, brutally realistic. Perhaps the photograph has seemed too obvious to merit prolonged scholarly attention. Histories of the medium abound, but their authors follow a patt ern exemplified by Alison and Helmut Gernsheim’s distinguished History of Photography, first published in 1955. By the standard account, the first inklings of photography appeared when a 5th century scholar noticed a camera-like phenomenon, and culminated in the 1820s, when Nicephore Niepce doped a pewter plate with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed it within a camera obscura. At their most comprehensive, standard histories include references to the mediaeval scientists who experimented with pinhole optics and ultimately invented the camera obscura. Though the...

IMAGE. Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, 2021

The following takes a historical look at the shifting conceptions of photography from the 1950s on, identifying foundational premises which have determined the discourse of photography into the 21st century while also creating contradictions between theory and practice. Using the controversial reception history of Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition as an example, core aspects of photography’s performativity are elucidated, which conventional theory has failed to accommodate. Further, historical as well as emerging resources are identified which facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of photography’s social significance.

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hotography is ubiquitous within global culture, but we hardly understand its meaning. And we have only a dim comprehension of its origin. Unlike cinema, which contains the complexities of motion and montage, the photograph is simple and, for the most part, brutally realistic. Perhaps the photograph has seemed too obvious to merit prolonged scholarly attention. Histories of the medium abound, but their authors follow a pattern exemplified by Alison and Helmut Gernsheim’s distinguished History of Photography, first published in 1955. By the standard account, the first inklings of photography appeared when a 5th century scholar noticed a camera-like phenomenon, and culminated in the 1820s, when Nicephore Niepce doped a pewter plate with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed it within a camera obscura. At their most comprehensive, standard histories include references to the mediaeval scientists who experimented with pinhole optics and ultimately invented the camera obscura. Though the ...

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This article proposes an approach for visual history, in which, it is fallowed the trajectory of the photograph produced by French photo- grapher, Marc Riboud, in 1967. It is adopted a non linear perspective of historical time to analyze the routes of the image and the historical elaboration of the visual representations. The analysis, based on Hans Belting’s Anthropology of image, fallows in different visual cultures the birth of similar images.

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