Towards the end of the 19th century photography underwent another major development as it gave birth to cinematography (the subject of a future series of posts).
Photography itself was advancing at a rapid pace, the works of the earliest photographers now beginning to reach the mass market via a wondrous array of books, many of which would become extremely influential:
These latter decades of the 19th century saw terrible wars, the beginnings of world's fairs and important explorations of far-flung peoples and places, many of these duly recorded by a photographer:
The photographers responsible for such works were able to draw upon an array of manuals and handbooks specific to particular photographic processes, as well as books on composition, lighting and related aesthetic matters:
Book collectors building a private library about photography can pick up many of these late 19th century works for as little as a few hundred dollars per title, although the more influential the work is, and the better the condition of the book (many are not known to exist at all in Fine condition), the more money one will have to expend to add a particular title to one's bookshelves.
Specific photographers are arguably the most popular focus of many private libraries about photography, and several now famous photographers were active in the latter decades of the 19th century. Often their contemporary publication in book form is known only from one or two titles (such as the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron), while the work of other photographic luminaries was not published in book form (especially all known photographs) until many decades after their death (such as the photographs of Lewis Caroll):
What many collectors new to this field overlook is that the first publication of a now famous photographer's work may well have been in a periodical, not in a book. Some of these periodicals have become famous in their own right over the past century or so, due to the high caliber of photography they were able to attract:
One of the best ways to view many of these earliest titles about photography is to pay an online visit to the private library Photobibliothek.ch (located in the vicinity of Schaffhausen in Switzerland).
The most comprehensive printed bibliography of titles about photography remains Roosens’ & Salu's 4-volume History of Photography: A Bibliography of Books (London: Continuum Intl. Pub. Group/Mansell, 1989-1999), although it obviously is now some years out-of-date. This title contains extensive coverage of works about individual photographers, with Vol. 1 covering photographers born before 1914, Vol. 2 covering photographers born up to 1936, Vol. 3 covering photographers born up to 1950 and Vol. 4 covering photographers born after 1950. (An updated version on CD-ROM [Windows only] was published in 2003 by the Antwerp FotoMuseum). A slightly more comprehensive online bibliographic database is available at PhotoLit (updated through October 2006), although it only covers works published since 1839.
In tomorrow's post, the last in this series, we will look at more recent examples of titles by specific photographers, many of which now command substantial premiums in the marketplace....
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