This Is Photography

In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura to produce what is widely viewed as the first photograph, an incredibly hazy view of some houses. This fact would make the medium of photography 200 years old, which is why Nathalie Herschdorfer, a Swiss curator and director of Photo Elysée, produced This Is Photography: The First 200 Years. The problem with photography is that it was invented the wrong way around, which makes the writing of histories more complicated than it should be. By this I mean that you have a much easier time looking at photography today and then going back in history to understand what is going on than by looking at the various fits and bursts with which the medium started and by then trying to make sense of it all. The second problem is that on its own, photography has no meaning. If you focus on its artifacts, the photographs, you might arrive at all kinds of conclusions. But those conclusions tend to be flawed, given that in order to understand what…