ABSTRACT
Photography seems to be almost by definition a practice driven by technology. From the organic process based on chemicals to the digital process based on bytes, each technological advance in turn made its predecessor obsolete. Art historians saw in photography a different historical debate. Social historians call everyday snapshot photography the vernacular. Photography was a technical process whose time had come at the beginning of this industrial age, and other inventors demanded credit for being first. Photography for the masses turned back to photography from the scientists for a way to get around the expensive uniqueness of the daguerreotypes. The new photographic process could respond to a cultural need for personal memories as well as a growing commercial industry marketing photographic depictions of other places and cultures. The emerging profession of documentary photojournalists grew to seriously challenge nineteenth-century photographic conventions as practitioners tried to record daily life during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
