Photography

The first photograph ever - 1826

View from the Window at Gras

By: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
The Daguerreotype

The father of a dead girl holds her

body in his arms. The mourning
picture was a common use for the
daguerreotype.
The first nude photograph ever -
1839
“I always thought of photography as a
naughty thing to do – that was one of my
favourite things about it.” – Diane Arbus
(Sontag, pp 150)
1888: First Kodak camera
You press the button, we do the rest
The first digital camera prototype -
1975
The importance of capturing a moment in time
Digitization
Manipulation
To collect photographs is to collect
the world (Sontag, 1977: 3)
Mallarmé said that everything in the world
exists in order to end in a book…
… Today, everything exists to end in a
photograph. (Sontag, 1977: 156)