ABSTRACT
In my chapter I aim to contribute to an almost unwritten history of looking at photographs. Bringing together photographic examples from the medium’s formative years (especially Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s famous view on the Boulevard du Temple) and recent treatments and commentary on those early photographic sources, I want to emphasize the importance of imagination in the process of beholding and deciphering photographic information. Without constantly admitting it while looking at photographs, we know imagination is always at work in order to produce meaning. Even though photographic information seems to be just 'there', it actually results from mentally driven processes. In a verbatim sense, 'imagination' plays a crucial part in producing these images. Driven by such an interest, we touch pivotal questions: What do we see when we behold a photograph? What is nothing else than mere projection—brought to us by our imagination? Discussing early reports on the photographic experience (among others by Alexander von Humboldt, Samuel Morse, and Edgar Allan Poe), I try to lay open the importance of verbal discourses when it comes to a visual experience.
