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François Brunet (1) (1960–2018)

Autor von Photography and Literature (Reaktion Books - Exposures)

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The Birth of the Idea of Photography is an excellent, academic, study of both photography and how photography was perceived in the nineteenth century. I have some reservations about the book--it's occasionally opaque, and I'd argue that Brunet overstates his thesis--but I highly recommend it.

It turns out you can't discuss how people thought about photography without talking about photography itself--cameras, processing technique, publishing, the legal environment, and so forth. The fact is that this book talks more about process and invention than it does about perception. But the various things are thoroughly mixed throughout its 365 pages.

As is often the case, photography was "invented" by more than one inventor at more or less the same time. I use quotes because both folks credited with this invention carefully called it a discovery. The book begins with a discussion of 1839, which is the year generally accepted as the date of the invention of photography. Like most inventions, there were clear predecessors, and the inventors--Nicholas Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce in France, and Henry Fox Talbot in England--drew on techniques discovered by others. The first two chapters are mostly about Daguerre, exploring how he (and Niepce) developed the Daguerreotype process, how it was publicized, and the legal tangles created in various places (it was what we'd now call open-sourced in France but was patented in England; the result was a godawful mess). The book explores those things at a level I found annoying; the author cites work I'm unfamiliar with without telling much about why I'd care. He concludes that 1839's essentially an arbitrary choice for the date the technique was invented, but that it makes more sense than other candidate dates.

The third chapter's about Talbot, and basically accepts the inventor's account of how he developed his process, which was very different from Daguerre's. There's also discussion about how this process was publicized and used. Both Talbot and Daguerre were clearly trying to find a better way to create drawings, and talked about the results as though they were indeed drawn--by the light, and the image's subject. They seem to have had no perception that a photograph might have some other purpose than documentation.

Or maybe they did. The book discusses how both processes were often used to create formal portraits; indeed, the author comes close to claiming that was the main use. The book's fourth chapter attempts to give an overview of how photography was used from 1839 through the end of the century. There's some excellent discussion in here, though Brunet inclines to a mechanistic interpretation I'm not sure can be fully defended.

Chapter five is mainly about George Eastman and his Kodak, and how the Kodak transformed photography from a profession into a middle-class practice. Eastman's concern wasn't photography per se; instead, his work concerned selling--and processing--film; essentially, he was a manufacturer, and his inventions only incidentally concerned photography. But he introduced changes to the way folks perceived photography, and those were important. There's mention here and there about middle-brow art resulting from these changes, but to my view the argument's not well developed.

The last chapter tries to tie things together, but I'd say it fails. There's a lot of discussion of Sigmund Freud, but it's not clear to me whether he's using Freud's work as an example or a source of analysis (sorry). His discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce's work is more fruitful. And there's a short discussion of the theories of Arthur Stieglitz, but it's disappointing; while Stieglitz had been mentioned here and there in earlier chapters, this short essay doesn't adequately explain his importance to the history of the theory of photography. I was hoping for more. All in all, the chapter manages to be both over-detailed and over-generalized, a difficult achievement. I'd probably say the same thing about the entire book.

Despite my misgivings, this is an important and interesting work. I'm glad I read it.
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joeldinda | Dec 8, 2020 |

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