Chapter 15 - The Emerging Language of Photography

Summary

The 7th of January 1839, the day on which Daguerre’s invention was announced to the public, is just one mark on photography’s long evolutionary calendar. Daguerre and Henry Talbot had succeeded in producing images years earlier using entirely different processes, although, for most of the 1830s, few people had seen them. Plenty, however, had heard about them: words inevitably preceded images. This chapter focusses on letters and other writings in which the concept of photography was taking shape in the decade before photography officially began, and it considers the wider public discourse in which such writing participated. It proposes that photography’s private pre-history reflects epistemological developments and anticipates literary and cultural shifts. While it focusses on English-language letters and draws primarily from Talbot’s correspondence, it also makes use of translated commentaries from periodicals and papers, departing from the tidy conventional narrative of invention and history to consider instead a messier ongoing conversation about something humans very much wanted: something that, throughout the 1830s, didn’t yet answer to the name of photography.