ABSTRACT
Many of the first photographic images were made without cameras, including photogenic drawings, cyanotypes, and other forms of contact prints. Because photographic processes relied as much on light's interaction with photosensitive chemicals as they did on the camera, photographs could be thought of as inscriptions of the natural world made by the natural world. The conception of photography as a medium of light was even more central to William Henry Fox Talbot and Sir John Herschel, whose experiments on light led them directly to invent photographic media, and who codified this genealogy in the names they gave to the medium: "photogenic drawing" and "photography", respectively. Photography thus created natural objects (photographs) that existed in dialectical tension with the nonmaterial agent in nature that produced them according to the laws of nature. Photographs in this view have meaning less as perfect copies or pictorial representations than as emblems of the laws of nature that unify light and intellect.
