Photography, printmaking, and the visual economy in nineteenth-century France

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Early in his pioneering History of Photography, first published in 1955, Helmut Gernsheim breaks off from his consideration of Nicéphore Niépce, ‘the first photographer’, to warn the reader about the ‘confusing and at times even misleading’ terms in which the Niépce brothers discussed their experiments in the mid-1820s. As Gernsheim puts it, ‘the nomenclature of the older arts, especially of engraving, was drawn upon by the Niépces’.1 Nearly half a century later, one may well feel that that it is the virtual ignorance of the entire domain of early nineteenth-century engraving, both for its own sake and in relation to the new domain of photography, that causes the confusion, and is liable to lead students of the visual arts of the period astray in some of their assumptions. Without any doubt at all, the horizons of the Niépce brothers were bounded by the conceptions of artistic practice and production of their epoch, and their use of the vocabulary of engraving is a faithful sign of this. What I propose to do in this short article is to sketch out in brief what might be called the visual economy of the period from around 1815 to around 1860, and to show how certain of photographic history's founding myths sit awkwardly in this context. My focus will be exclusively on France, but I hope it may have comparative value for an English scene, which is, of course, different in many important respects.