ABSTRACT
The most important photographs of the nineteenth century are surely those first views of remote peoples and places brought back to the Western world by a pioneering generation of expeditionary photographers. Consider Felice Beato’s wayside view of a porter with carrying panniers on a road passing through the countryside of Hokkaido. An expeditionary movement was under way only a very few years after the announcement to the world, in 1839, of L. J. M. Daguerre’s process, as travelling daguerreotypists moved through the Near East, recording classical temples and Christian holy places. The photographers themselves possessed remarkable qualities of personal force. War photographers, working to supply an ephemeral market in history as hot news, have at the same time created enduring records of human action. The personal career of Brady, a leading studio photographer in Washington, demonstrated the difficulties involved in accommodating a high and serious vocation to the necessities of a daily retail trade in portraits and views.
