The Photographic Imagination historicizes the conception of photography in the early nineteenth-century in England, in particular the works and texts by William Henry Fox Talbot, as part of a historical shift in which new systems and methods of knowledge were constituted after the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for the study of nature. It locates the conditions for the conceptualization of photography within the legacy of British empiricism and the introduction of time into formations of knowledge. By addressing photography not merely as a medium or a system of representa ... More

The Photographic Imagination historicizes the conception of photography in the early nineteenth-century in England, in particular the works and texts by William Henry Fox Talbot, as part of a historical shift in which new systems and methods of knowledge were constituted after the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for the study of nature. It locates the conditions for the conceptualization of photography within the legacy of British empiricism and the introduction of time into formations of knowledge. By addressing photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation, but also as a specific epistemological figure, it challenges the prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, it points to the material, formal and conceptual differences between the photographic image and the camera obscura image by analyzing the philosophical and aesthetic premises that were associated with early photography. It thus argues that the emphasis in early accounts on the removal of the “artist’s hand” in favor of “the pencil of nature,” did not mark a shift from manual to “mechanical” and more accurate or “objective” systems of representation. In the 1830s and 1840s the photographic image, unlike the camera obscura image, was neither seen as an emblem of mechanical copying nor of visual verisimilitude. In fact, its conception was symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological ground which informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.