A SUPERBLY ILLUSTRATED, lively, inti­mate history of one of the great aesthetic adventures of the modern world-the making of the first photographs.
Here arc the fascinating early experi­ments with processing, the first primi­tive attempts at colour photography, the ingenious equipment invented for spe­cial effects-and here are the prints that resulted, now precious beyond measure. First-hand accounts by the pioneer photographers vividly recall the pursuit of a historic event, a spectacular land­scape, a fleeting facial expression.
There are chapters on the work of the inventors=-Niepce, Fox Talbot, Da­guerre, and Bayard-and on the profes­sionals, like N adar, who photographed everything from the Paris sewers (by electric light) to Sarah Bernhardt. Bourne made a record of the landscape of India and the Himalayas that was, and perhaps still is, unequalled. The beginnings of documentary photography-fohn Thom­son's London types for instance, and the very undocumentary work of Julia Mar­garet Cameron-showed two paths photography could follow. Yet another, the development of photography as an analytic technique, can be seen in the work of Marey and Muybridge. The de­velopment uf colour photography brings the text to a close, and a selected bibliog­raphy rounds out the volume.
Aaron Scharf, well known for his ear­lier books, Creative Photography and Art and Photography, was an adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation on the programmes out of which this book grew.