1839. Daguerre, Talbot et la publication de la photographie - Une anthologie

Paris, 7 January 1839. The politician and famous scientist François Arago gave a presentation to the Académie des Sciences on a new process, invented by Louis Daguerre, that made it possible to fix images formed in the focus of a camera obscura. Immediately, the world began to listen, and within a few days, before anyone had had the chance to see a daguerreotype, the news that science could now reproduce nature spread from one end of Europe to the other and reached America. Caught off guard, William Henry Fox Talbot, who had produced his first ‘photogenic drawings’ in Great Britain a few years earlier, rushed to make his process public.

From that date onwards, many people, whether scholars, journalists, artists or travellers, contributed to inventing metaphors, establishing comparisons, forging concepts and developing reasoning – in short, establishing the canons and frames of reference for the discourse on photography.

This anthology focuses on writings from the two countries of origin of the first photographic processes, France and Great Britain, written in or just before the year 1839. These are complemented by texts from the German-speaking world and the United States, attesting to the rapid spread of photography and its discourse.