The Invention of Photography (New Horizons) /anglais

by Quentin Bajac

The invention of photography was heralded in 1839 in Paris with the debut of the daguerrotype - a unique photograph produced on a silver-covered copper plate. Praised for its veracity, accuracy and its astonishingly sharp detail, the daguerrotype captured the collective imagination. Over the next half-century, photography developed rapidly, progressing from a cottage industry to a semi-industrialized business, with the phenomenal growth of portrait studios marking the medium's popular success. Photography also came to be widely used for documentary purposes such as topographical surveys, scientific investigations, and reporting, while other users championed it as an artistic practice. With the advent of the print on paper, photographic images became truly multiple and, through new methods of printing and distribution, were soon spread around the world. Through a wide range of visual material and an informative text, this study by conservator Quentin Bajac covers these developments and many others, technical and creative, in the remarkable early years of photography.

Genres: Photography

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2002

About the author

Quentin Bajac is a French museum curator and art historian specialising in the history of photography. He is the director of the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Bajac has held positions at the Musée d'Orsay (1995–2003), Centre Georges Pompidou (2003–2010), Musée National d'Art Moderne and École du Louvre (2010–2013) and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2013–2018).
He has published a number of works on photography, most notably the three-volume series—La photographie—on the history of photography (2000–2010), which belongs to the collection Découvertes Gallimard, as well as Parr by Parr: Discussions with a Promiscuous Photographer (2011), Stephen Shore: Solving Pictures (2017), Being Modern: MoMA in Paris (co-author with Olivier Michelon, 2017).
In 2013 Bajac was made a Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Reviews

[Raimondo]

Interesting book, full of illustrations, about the first years of Photograpy. Essential but enough fluid to be pleasurable. Very well conceived the few pages about documents which are some impressions of some protagonists of the time covered by the book (much fun the lines about ghosts and mental images)

[Jonathan]

A fascinating account

[Athoob Al-Shuaibi]

I might be reading same content of many books/articles/essays before. It's an easy read historical book about photography. But be aware of that book. Although it's tiny, it's packed with good information and you might feel a bit lost because of the layout.