The Camera & Photography
Louis Daguerre
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Photography was announced to the world in 1839 with the daguerreotype, a miraculously detailed image on a silvered copper plate — though sitters had to hold still, sometimes braced by headrests, for long exposures. Within decades, faster processes shrank the sitting to a snap, and studios multiplied on every high street.
The camera changed what Victorians could keep. Cartes de visite — small portrait cards — became a craze in the 1860s, collected in albums; families commissioned portraits of the dead; and illustrated newspapers began to show readers the world as it looked. Then, in 1888, Kodak's box camera arrived with the promise 'You press the button, we do the rest,' and photography belonged to everyone.
Its legacy is the image-saturated world. The Victorians invented the snapshot, the family album, and photojournalism — the visual habits we still live by.
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