Photography so permeates the modern world that one sometimes has difficulty remembering that there once was a time when it was dismissed as decidedly inferior to other plastic arts:
...a new industry has arisen which contributes not a little to confirming stupidity in its faith and to ruining what might have remained of the divine in the French genius. The idolatrous crowd postulates an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature -- that is perfectly understandable. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated public, above all in France...is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature....Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art.’ A vengeful God has granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the public says to itself: ‘Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same thing.’ From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal....Some democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the people.... - Charles Baudelaire
The principles that underlie photography were known as early as the 5th-4th centuries BCE, so folks collecting books about photography do not lack for titles dedicated to this subject. One can build a private library of books about photographic theory, about photographic history, about photographic technology. They can collect books that focus on a single aspect of any of these, books that look at the evolution of each of these, books that celebrate a particular photographic practitioner or a particular photographic subject...even exhibition and auction catalogs of each of these.
Over the next several posts, we will examine each of these, beginning with the history of photography and the earliest known surviving photograph of the real world recorded by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826:
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