The Use of Photography by Nineteenth-Century Art Historians

The advent of the photographic processes of Daguerre and more specifically William Henry Fox Talbot heralded a new age in the study of the history of art. Coupled to the parallel revolutions taking place in academic and popular publishing and the rise of a new type of antiquarian, historian, and archaeologist, photography was in keeping with the mid-19th-century desire for attention to detail and verifiable accuracy. ¹ In spite of this, professional historians of art have failed to give clear and precise credit to what has become a fundamental tool, an integral part of the methodology of a complex discipline. Furthermore, examination of photography's specific form and function within the discipline has been highly limited and superficial. ² One of the great imponderables of 19th-century art historiography is why photography, even after the rise of photo-mechanical reproduction in the 1870s, was not unanimously accepted by art historians as the primary and unimpeachable system of image reproduction. Instead, photography has been adopted and adapted to become an essential yet little understood tool which rarely undergoes objective discussion and analysis.