Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Photography emerged as a new medium in two distinct ways in the first half of the nineteenth century born of a desire common to more than one place and time to ‘fix’ images refracted through lenses. There were unique positive images: in France the daguerreotype was announced in 1839 but pioneered in the 1820s by Joseph Nic?phore Ni?pce and then in the 1830s by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. A negative-positive process on paper was also presented to the world in 1839 likewise the result of many years of experimentation by William Henry Fox Talbot in England. Looking with hindsight at this singular moment in the history of image-making (and knowing what came next) it is tempting to treat the origin of photography as if it had been a kind of bilateral nationalistic race like those to build the atomic bomb or put a man on the moon. But the conditions for the development of photo- graphy had been present for many years before it finally occurred suggesting that rather than it having been a sudden breakthrough in 1839 it was in fact more surprising that it had not happened sooner. Two vital elements were necessary for the photographic image as we understand it today or to be more precise as we understood it before the digital age. The first was to accurately project an image of the outside world within a camera obscura (the precursor to the little black box that we call a camera) by means of a lens that could focus light onto a small internal surface. And the second was the chemical capacity to ‘fix’ this projected image onto the surface on which it was cast-in literal terms to make a light-sensitive support that would remain ‘fixed’ at the point that the image was cast into the camera. This is why photography was first described as ‘drawing with light’ or ‘the art of fixing a shadow. (MP)