The word photography, which is derived from the Greek words for light and writing, was first used by Sir John Herschel in 1839, the year the invention of the photographic process was made public. During the previous decades perhaps as many as ten individuals had tried to make a photograph. At least four were successful: Joseph Nicephore \TNiepce\t, Louis J. M. \TDaguerre\t, and Hippolyte \TBayard\t in France, and William Henry \TTalbot\t in England. Each of them employed two scientific techniques that had been known for some time but had never before been successfully combined. The first of these techniques was optical. Since the 16th century artists and scientists had made use of the fact that light passing through a small hole in one wall of a dark room, or \Lcamera obscur\la, projects an inverted image on the opposite wall. The hole was soon replaced with a lens, which made the image brighter and sharper. By the 18th century the room had been replaced by a portable box, which artists used as a sketching aid. The second technique was chemical. In 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulze had discovered that certain chemicals, especially silver halides, turn dark when exposed to light. The first attempt to use such chemicals to record the image of the camera obscura was made--unsuccessfully--by Thomas \TWedgwood\t about 1800. Daguerre's invention, which was bought by the French government and made public on Aug. 19, 1839, produced a one-of-a-kind picture on metal, the \Tdaguerreotype\t. In contrast, Talbot's invention (1840), the \Tcalotype\t, produced a negative picture on paper; the lights of the image were recorded as darks, the darks as lights. A positive was made on another sheet of chemically sensitized paper, exposed to light through the negative. Because an infinite number of positives could be made from a single negative, Talbot's invention and refinements of it soon predominated. The photograph's capacity to repeat itself exactly and infinitely through the negative-to-positive process was one side of its radical character. The other, of course, was its privileged status as a picture created by nature alone, free from the inevitable distortions of handmade representations. The ever-increasing ease with which photography precisely recorded visual information and distributed it worldwide made it the most powerful tool of communication since the invention of the printing press. Early theories of photography stressed its mechanical nature. To some, this nature excluded the personal intervention that was the stamp of art; to others, photography's potential signaled the demise of painting. Neither view prevailed. Painters continued to paint and photographers proliferated; at best, everyone agreed that the new invention was useful. THE PIONEERING DAYS If photography baffled the theoretician, it welcomed the practitioner. Arcane and mysterious by today's standards, early processes were nevertheless easy enough to learn, and the medium spread rapidly throughout Europe and America. Photography appealed to a few professional scientists and artists, but most early photographers were undistinguished--artisans, handymen of all sorts, and, like several of the inventors, versatile amateurs. These individuals shared neither a common tradition nor a uniform intention. Only in the 20th century did an approximate consensus--or even a coherent argument--emerge about the past achievements and future goals of photography. Because early photographers were largely unfettered by academic convention or demand for a uniform commercial product, the first two decades of photography were rich in pictorial experiment. Among the inventors, Talbot and Bayard were especially sensitive to the beauty of the new medium. Their loving records of often humble subjects announced photography's aptitude for the intimate, personal view. Some of the best early photographers had been trained as artists; none were important artists, however, and many had a talent with the camera that they lacked with the brush. In the 1840s, D. O. Hill and Robert Adamson (see \THill, D. O., and Adamson, Robert\t) made photographic portraits as studies for a large group portrait that Hill finished painting 20 years later. The painting is an awkward failure; the photographs, however, possess a grandeur that recalls--without copying--portraits by old masters. It was as if the training and talent of the painter could only be released in a practical struggle with the camera, the light of the day, and the mood of the sitter. The intuition of Hill and Adamson was shared by an impressive group of French photographers of the 1850s, among them Gustave \TLe Gray\t, Charles MARVILLE, Charles \TNegre\t, E. D. Baldus (b. 1820), and Henri Le Secq (1818-82). Several of these men were, like Hill, painters, and they brought the conviction of art to their work and to their SOCIETE FRANCAISE \TDe\t PHOTOGRAPHIE. They frequently photographed important places and historic monuments, sometimes for the government, but this work was not separate from their private experiments. Their pictures preserve the adventurous spirit of early photography before it became both an art and a business. Although some of them were artists, the French primitives (as they are often called) gave up their professions, if not their ambition, when they took up the camera. In this sense, they were amateurs. Even after the medium began to be dominated by professionals in the 1860s, many of the most inventive 19th-century photographers were amateurs. Perhaps the best of them was Julia Margaret \TCameron\t, who made intense portraits of her friends, many of whom were eminent Victorians. Cameron also composed photographic tableaux in which real people were transformed into characters from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. In their own day, these pictures were admired as idiosyncratic productions; today they are appreciated as precocious examples of photography's responsiveness to fantasy and fiction. The amateurs may be contrasted with photographers such as Oscar Gustav Rejlander and Henry Peach \TRobinson\t, who attempted to challenge painting on its own ground. In England in the 1850s they turned out labored but technically accomplished versions of successful genre paintings, pieced together from as many as a dozen different negatives. These hackneyed failures doubtless encouraged the enemies of photographic art. They may also have benefited the commercial photographers, who recognized (for the time being) that artistic aspiration had no place in their work and went on to make practical--and original--pictures. IMPACT OF MASS PRODUCTION METHODS After 1851, when Frederick Scott \TArcher\t's process substituted glass for Talbot's paper negative, the mass production of \Lalbumen print\ls of extremely fine detail became possible. Until the 1880s this was the medium of the great commercial firms, which fed an enormous popular demand for portraits and for views of famous monuments or strange places. The majority of 19th-century photographs fall into these two categories. Initially at least, portrait and view photographers adopted the pictorial conventions and commercial markets that had been established by painters and printmakers. The low cost of their product and the large scale of their operations, however, changed the meaning of these traditions. By the mid-1850s, when Andre Adolphe Eugene \TDisderi\t popularized the small, cheap portrait, anyone could afford a picture of himself or herself. The effect of this development on the growing self-awareness of the working class and on the self-perceptions of the bourgeoisie cannot be easily overestimated. Thanks to photography, ordinary people possessed an emblem of identity formerly reserved for the rich. Disderi's portraits were visually as well as economically cheap, and some of the serious primitives abandoned photography in disgust at his success. Not all professional portraitists, however, submitted to the tyranny of commercial formulas. \TNadar\t, for instance, and the team of Albert Sands \TSouthworth\t and Josiah Johnson Hawes produced portraits that are at once records of faces and interpretations of personalities. View photography radically expanded access to the art and great monuments of Europe, the Mediterranean, and, eventually, the Far East and the Americas. Traditional and exotic culture, once the privilege of the wealthy traveler, could be known accurately, cheaply, and at home through photographs. At first, topographical photography was the work of dilettantes, such as Maxime \TDu Camp\t, who published their travel photographs in albums of original prints that were made by incipient commercial firms like that of Louis Desiree Blanquart-Evrard. By the 1860s large commercial firms such as Francis \TFrith\t's in England and the Alinari Brothers in Italy were in operation; their approach to photographic documentation was systematic and encyclopedic. At the turn of the century, for instance, the Alinari catalog offered 60,000 views of Italian cities and reproductions of paintings. The new disciplines of art history and archaeology depended enormously on these pictures, and the average person came to take them for granted. Like its contemporary, the railroad, photography made the world seem smaller. The immense appetite for records of pedigreed and exotic monuments also applied to the humble and familiar: everything was photographed. The variety and extent of the visual encyclopedia of the world that was compiled during the first 30 to 40 years of photography is all the more extraordinary because the medium was still extremely cumbersome. Cameras were large and heavy and required tripods. Each glass plate had to be exposed while still wet with a freshly coated emulsion. Consequently, photographers in the field were obliged to pack along makeshift darkrooms. It is commonly said, with some truth, that the precise beauty of early photographs is due to the resolution required to make them. PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION Like artists, but with greater flexibility and on a much larger scale, photographers recorded contemporary events. One of the greatest photographic documents of history-in-the-making is also one of the earliest: the pictures of the American Civil War, made by perhaps 20 photographers, most of them initially under the direction of Mathew B. \TBrady\t. With their clumsy equipment, they could not yet capture the action of battle. Nevertheless, their blunt views of unprepossessing landscapes, littered with the dead, and their frank records of drab camp life changed the popular vision of war; the brutal fact as captured in a photograph was more persuasive than the romantic fiction. Timothy H. O'SULLIVAN, one of the best of Brady's team, spent part of the next decade with expeditions of the U.S. Geographic Survey, photographing the vast, uncharted American West. Pictures by O'Sullivan and his contemporaries William Henry \TJackson\t, Eadweard \TMuybridge\t, and Carleton Watkins are as grand as the landscapes they depict. They also possess a functional clarity and detailed precision that is unmatched by the greatest of paintings. Like the Civil War photographs, they were revelations, both impressive and believable. In the 19th century, photography still had the power of undisputed truth. In the last third of the century that power was enlisted as a tool of social reform. The muckraking journalist Jacob August \TRiis\t began in the 1880s to use photography to expose the appalling conditions in New York City's slums. Two decades later Lewis Hine, a sociologist, supported a campaign for child-labor laws with his sympathetic portraits of young factory workers. Neither Riis nor Hine had the slightest artistic ambition, but their straightforward approach, combined with their talent, yielded a new graphic economy for photography. It is a measure of the complexity of photographic history that this achievement was of no interest to the artistically conscious photographers of the turn of the century. Photography was also applied to scientific inquiry. Cameras were attached to microscopes and telescopes and produced strange pictures that were derived from nature--details of the world that once were invisible. The most famous of these are the motion studies that Etienne Jules \TMarey\t and Eadweard Muybridge made in the 1870s and 1880s. One measure of the immense impact of these photographs was their influence on painters, especially Thomas \TEakins\t, as well as on scientists. Muybridge's and Marey's pictures provided not only a new standard of truth but a new vocabulary of forms. Scientists and social reformers both profited from the continuous technical improvements in photography, which reached a watershed with the introduction of dry plates in the 1880s. The new plates did away with field darkrooms, and their faster emulsions made it possible to stop action. Cameras also became smaller and more portable. In 1888, George \TEastman\t's Kodak, which used flexible roll film, made photography available to anyone who could press a button. Like the first photographic portraits, Kodak snapshots changed people's lives by changing their view of themselves. PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN ART Amid the proliferation of practical applications and new formal solutions, a scattered but energetic group of photographers in the late 19th century sought to cut themselves off from the worldly role of their medium in order to establish photography as a branch of fine art. They endorsed the old claim that to be an art photography must look like established art, and they revived old techniques, in particular the gum-bichromate print, that allowed manual intervention. The hazy forms of such prints had the merit of being instantly distinguishable from the detailed precision of commercial photographs. They also permitted the aesthetic movement's photographers to model their work on the refined painting of the late 19th century, especially that of James McNeill Whistler. In 1889, Peter Henry \TEmerson\t had set the stage for this development by making a sharp distinction between artistic photography and the practical, straightforward work of professionals. Although 2 years later he renounced his claim, Emerson had provided the new group with the high-minded theory it needed as well as with the standard of his own fine pictures. Coincidentally, he inspired a disdain for the plain photograph that persisted for at least a generation. By the early 20th century a lively, although exclusive, international network of societies for artistic photography existed, including the \TLinked Ring Brotherhood\t in London (founded 1892) and the \TPhoto-Secession\t in New York (founded 1902). The new status that the movement won for photography may have been more a function of its polemics than of its pictures, but unquestionably it produced a number of exceptional photographers. Among them were Frederick Henry \TEvans\t and Heinrich Kuhn of the Linked Ring and Alfred \TStieglitz\t, leader of the Photo-Secessionists, and his colleagues Alvin Langdon \TCoburn\t, Gertrude \TKasebier\t, Edward \TSteichen\t, and Clarence H. \TWhite\t. In rough terms, the aesthetic movement rejected truth in favor of beauty; that is, it spurned photography's descriptive ability in favor of elegant photographs based on paintings. In the first decades of the 20th century, however, Stieglitz reversed his position and claimed an expressive role for straightforward photographs. His new pictures of the city, of clouds, indeed of anything, did not look like paintings. With them he showed that it was possible to discover private meanings--"equivalents" of feelings--in any subject, however well-known or inconsequential it might appear to the ordinary eye. This has been the assumption of photographers ever since. In the same decades the French photographer Eugene \TAtget\t arrived at a similar point of view but from the opposite direction. Atget, working in the tradition of the encyclopedic photographers of the previous century, made thousands of views of old Paris. Unknown to his publicity-minded contemporaries and apparently unconcerned about his artistic status, Atget nevertheless invested that tradition with a personal vision. Atget's pictures demonstrate that a photograph is not identical with the subject it depicts but rather is a way of looking at that subject--an interpretation. Thus, Atget, in a struggle to describe what was before his lens, achieved what Stieglitz had in his effort to express his emotions. Independently but simultaneously they showed that photography was a subjective medium--a vehicle for artists. Stieglitz's new work had an immediate and lasting impact. By 1916 his reformulation of photography was powerfully confirmed by the pictures produced by the young Paul \TStrand\t. By the 1920s, Stieglitz had given new direction to another generation of photographers, of whom the most important was Edward \TWeston\t. For this group, the "straight"--that is, unmanipulated--photograph became a creed; mechanical precision, once considered the handicap of photography, now became its major asset. For Weston, however, the straight photograph was not yet a view of the world at large, with all its clutter and complication. Weston's intense artistic will found satisfaction in the small details of nature, resolved, almost abstracted, into harmonies of form. This concern with abstract form was shared by the leading European photographers of the 1920s, who bore no allegiance to the creed of straight photography. Following the example of the surrealist Man \Tray\t and Laszlo \TMoholy-Nagy\t, they discovered unpredictable pictures and new forms by experimenting with the photographic process itself. The most extreme of these experiments was the photogram, a picture made without a camera by arranging objects on photographic paper. Even straight pictures were made at odd angles or in strange lights so that the subject was lost in an unfamiliar pattern. The expressive possibilities of these experiments were matched by the versatility of the small, high-speed cameras--such as the Leica--that were introduced in Europe in the 1920s. The new cameras freed photographers from every encumbrance. It became possible for the first time to follow--and capture--the most rapid or ephemeral action, to record the world as it happened. Among the first to use the new cameras were journalists like Erich \TSalomon\t and Felix H. Man (b. 1893), who recorded any event, the trivial along with the important. Their work was published in the picture magazines, such as \TLife\t and its European counterparts, that began to flourish in the 1930s and that established the new, often lucrative, profession of photojournalism. The editors of these magazines needed pictures that could be quickly understood. Many who used the small cameras, however, especially Henri \TCartier-Bresson\t, Andre \TKertesz\t, and \TBrassai\t, were more interested in taking photographs that could not be reduced to captions. They turned to the anonymous bustle of public places and made pictures that described nothing newsworthy in the conventional sense but suggested the texture of life itself. These photographs also displayed a new, apparently casual form, based on the perception of the moment--Cartier-Bresson called it "the decisive moment"--rather than on the rules of the studio. In the 19th century the time and effort required to make a photograph had argued against taking a chance. After 1930, because photography was quick and easy, it became reasonable to try a shot even if the result was not certain. Photographers, with more mistakes to learn from, acquired a flexible sense of form, one capable of describing the complex situations that (thanks to the small cameras) had become their subject. In the United States during the 1930s, photographers, like other artists, benefited from the make-work projects of the government. Many talented photographers were employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), Works Projects Administration (\TWPA\t), and other federal agencies to record the life of rural America--its embattled farmers, poor sharecroppers, and migrant laborers. Among these photographers were Berenice \TAbbott\t, Walker \TEvans\t, Dorothea \TLange\t, and Russell Lee. Partly because of the FSA, the potential power of photography as a social force became widely recognized. Some of the photojournalists also saw that they could fight social injustice by exposing it in their pictures, and in this effort they found ancestors in Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. A few years later, World War II brought even more exposure to photojournalists such as Margaret \TBourke-White\t, Robert \TCapa\t, Edward Steichen, and W. Eugene \TSmith\t. Walker Evans, perhaps the best photographer of the period, stood somewhat apart from this trend. His pictures seemed artless, straightforward views of the odd junk and generally undistinguished buildings that clutter the country. But the lean order imposed on these humble subjects revealed a grace and a beauty that no one had ever seen before. Evans staked out a claim for intelligence in photography; he showed that a photographer's understanding of his subject may be so convincing that it seems to be the only one possible. In Germany, Evans's older contemporary, August Sander (1876-1964), achieved a similarly compelling body of work in an extensive series of portraits of his fellow countrymen. Like Atget and Evans, Sander used a large, old-fashioned camera and a methodical, deliberate technique. It is mostly through the work of these three men--Atget, Evans, and Sander--that today's photographers have come to appreciate the originality of the practical professionals of the 19th century. CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY After World War II the creative initiative in photography, as in painting, shifted substantially to the United States. One of the most impressive new talents of the 1950s was Robert \TFrank\t. Learning from Walker Evans, he forged powerful symbols from the ordinary stuff of American life. But unlike Evans, Frank used a small hand camera and the adaptable conventions of the photojournalists. His pictures are as rich and varied as experience itself, but their power lies in the fact that they also have a clean, economical style. Among Frank's many artistic descendants are Garry \TWinogrand\t and Lee Friedlander. They have responded to the contest in Frank's work between the world's complexity and the coherence of art by admitting to their pictures more and more of the former and inventing new solutions for the latter. What Frank began, Winogrand and Friedlander have consummated: the analytic intelligence that Evans and Atget brought to the large camera has been transferred to the versatility of the small camera. Frank's counterpart in the 1950s was Minor \TWhite\t. White acquired a fine technique from Ansel \TAdams\t, who has carried on the tradition of straight photography in his impressive pictures of the American West. Adams, like his mentor Edward Weston, sought images of universal scope. White, by contrast, traced the straight tradition to its origins in Stieglitz, where he found justification for his private, even mysterious, photographs. These pictures announced a trend that has not yet run its course. White is the spiritual father of the many practitioners today who use photography for exploring themselves rather than the world around them. The options of such photographers were radically expanded in the 1960s by Jerry N. \TUelsmann\t, who broke the hegemony of the straight photograph. Each of his photographs is a composite of many negatives, fused by incomparable darkroom magic into a seamless whole. Like surrealist paintings, but with the impact of photographic truth, his pictures appear to be careful records of dreams. The only significant technical innovation to be absorbed by the photographic mainstream in recent years is color photography. The materials of color photography have been readily available since 1907 and have long been used widely in advertising and \Tfashion photography\t. Some of the best photographers in these fields, such as Irving \TPenn\t in the 1950s and Richard \TAvedon\t in the '60s, are now appreciated as artists. With the exception of the pioneering pictures of Eliot \TPorter\t, however, color photography has matured as an artistic medium only in the 1970s, especially in the work of Helen Levitt and William Eggleston. In the late 1950s the picture magazines began to fail. The erosion of this public forum for photography coincided with a rapidly growing awareness of the artistic potential of the medium that was no longer limited to a few visionaries. The new population of artist-photographers has found support in the academic community and in the burgeoning market for fine photographic prints. The market in turn has contributed to an expanding interest in photography's rich, if incoherent, history, and photographers themselves have increasingly plundered the past. Into the 1990s, photography, like the other arts, has been marked by a considerable diversity of style and concern. As a result it is impossible to summarize the best work by referring to a few leading photographers. Some of the most innovative contemporary photography has arisen from a new fascination, at turns affectionate or ironic, with the imagery of popular culture, especially advertising and the movies. Many critics have labeled this work "postmodernist," implying that it signals the demise of earlier 20th-century traditions and aspirations. "Postmodernism," however, has joined rather than replaced a wide range of thriving modernist styles, from experimental formalism to documentary realism. To sample this diversity, one need only compare Cindy Sherman's self-portraits, where she adopts whole populations of fictive personalities, and Nicholas Nixon's straightforward pictures of ordinary people, which extend the tradition of classic American photography. The old continues to find new incarnations, in short, while the new adds new meanings to the language of contemporary photography. Peter Galassi Bibliography: Beaton, Cecil, and Buckland, Gail, The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (1975); Bolton, Richard, ed., The Contest of Meaning (1990); Galassi, Peter, Before Photography (1981); Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison, A Concise History of Photography (1965) and The History of Photography (1969); Gover, C. Jane, The Positive Image: Women Photographers in Turn of the Century America (1988); Green, Jonathan, American Photography: A Critical History, 1945 to the Present (1985); Newhall, Beaumont, The History of Photography, 5th rev. ed. (1982); Pollack, Peter, The Picture History of Photography, rev. ed. (1970); Scharf, Aaron, Pioneers of Photography (1976); Szarkowski, John, The Photographer's Eye (1966) and Looking at Photographs (1973); Tausk, Peter, Photography in the 20th Century (1980); The Time-Life Library of Photography, 17 vols. (1970-72).