Histories

This chapter charts the development of thought about photography and its evolution in the twentieth century, scrutinizing select but prominent accounts of the history of photography in Europe and North America that have affected the way photo history is conceived in the English language. Late nineteenth-century photography histories were frequently aimed at an audience of potential amateur photographers, combining a history of the medium with an introduction to the practice. Gaston Tissandier's account anticipates the standard structure of histories of photography to come, situating the medium's origins in pre-nineteenth-century practices, though subsequent histories will push those origins earlier than the sixteenth century. In view of the preceding technical, scientific, and practice-based histories of photography, German philosopher Walter Benjamin's rich and multilayered 1931 essay "Little History of Photography" is all the more unusual in its attention to the conceptual and psychological aspects of photography's various materialities.