A milestone work that examines the democratic idea of photography and
its expansion in common culture, particularly in the United States;
generously illustrated.
This influential text by French historian and theorist François Brunet
considers the invention and history of photography as the birth of an
idea, rather than a new type of image. This "idea photography" combines
a logical theme--that of an art without artistry--and the democratic
political promise of an art for all. Officially endorsed by the 1839
French law on the daguerreotype, this idea reverberated throughout the
nineteenth century in Europe and America. Brunet shows how emerging
image technologies and practices in France and Britain were linked to
this logical/political construction of photography, from the earliest
researches of Nicéphore Niépce, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and Henry
Fox Talbot up to the turn of the twentieth century. The parallel
development of the Kodak camera and Alfred Stieglitz's "straight" vision
in the United States then fulfilled, while also depreciating, the
utopian promise of photography for all. This history reached a
provisional climax with the reflections on images by Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Sigmund Freud, Henri-Louis Bergson,
and Charles Sanders Peirce, reflections that both demonstrated the
novelty of photography and forecast many later debates on its technology
and aesthetics.
The Birth of the Idea of Photography has been enriched with more than
fifty photographs, reproduced in color, from North American and European
collections. This edition also features a new preface by the author.
