ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the experiments of one oft-cited proto-photographer, Sir Humphry Davy. It proposes that some of the very issues producing a historiographical contretemps today were once interrogated during the most intensive years of photography's prehistory. It is true that Davy's trials, conducted with Thomas Wedgwood, failed, like those of his many predecessors, to fix images into permanence. More significantly for the subject of writing photography's origins, Davy's approaches show people how and when the evidentiary standards and categories that inform current historiography were invented. An early account of the prehistory of photography, published in 1843, noted that Wedgwood was "obliged to preserve his copies in an obscure place to take a glimpse of them only in the shade, or to view them by candle light. The chance to rewrite the story of photography's origins has proven an almost irresistible lure, beginning within days of the momentous announcements of 1839.
