Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam, 16 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Introduction This essay mainly refers to the society in which photography arose. We shall look at the economic and social situation when photography appeared and how photography was perceived by the Victorians. Also some aspects of the problematic discussion if photography can become an art are considered in this essay. These aspects are concerning only the nineteenth century and what people thought in that time about this topic. The first chapter tells the history of photography. It covers an overview how photography developed and what advantages each development involved. The second chapter deals with the initial situation when photography was first publicly announced in 1839. We will come across cultural and scientific institutions and the infrastructure of the means of communication in that time. This is important for an understanding of the context in which the invention of photography took place. And therefore to see why photography developed so fast and powerfully in that century. The third section is about photography as a business, concerning its economical and technical expansion. It illuminates the fact that photography was on the way to become a mass media but was still too expensive to reach all social strata. Moreover, we will have a look at the middle class which is held responsible for supporting photography the most, being the bearer-class and upholder of photography. The fourth chapter highlights the functions photography had. It explains which social requirements and conventions photography had to obey to survive. Furthermore, we will pay attention to some reactions that were written down in newspapers and magazines about the new phenomenon. This section, concentrates on the thesis Jens Jäger had formulated in his book Gesellschaft

Die Photographie gehört zu den Selbstverständlichkeiten des moderen Lebens. Alltäglich werden wir mit photographischen Bildern konfrontiert, in Illustrier ten, der Werbung, Büchern usw. Photochemische Prozesse lieferten die Grund lage für den Film, später für das Fernsehen. Am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts wird die Bildproduktion zunehmend auf elektronischen. digitalem Weg durchgeführt. Den "alten" photographischen Verfahren wird ein baldiger Tod prophezeit, aber: Totgesagte leben länger. Obwohl, wie es so schön heißt, diese Arbeit ohne fremde Hilfe abgefaßt wor den ist, habe ich doch die angenehme Pflicht jenen zu danken, die mit Anre gungen und Kritik zur Entstehung dieser Dissertation beigetragen haben. Be sonderer Dank gebührt Prof. Dr. Wohlfeil, der mir den Umgang mit Bildern als historische Quellen nahelegte. Dem Deutschen Historischen Institut in London und seinen Mitarbeitern sowie dem DAAD gebührt großer Dank dafür, daß sie mir den Forschungsaufenthalt in England ermöglichten. Herrn Prof. Troitzsch, der die Arbeit über die Jahre begleitete, bin ich zu Dank verpflichtet. Viele An regungen und Hinweise verdanke ich Herrn PD Alf Lüdtke vom Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen und Herrn Prof. Klaus Tenfelde. Frau Dr.

"This book results from research which was begun with all the casualness, but inherent seriousness, of the nineteenth-century amateur. I had the privilege of frequent access to the archives of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House and began to go through the nineteenth-century photographs in a systematic way. I wanted to go beyond the clichés of the history of photography as a series of often-reproduced masterworks and to find out something about the history of seeing, or at least of thinking about, images in the nineteenth century."--Préface.

This is a book about the fist thirty years of portrait photography in Great Britain, and its purpose is to put this aspect of photography into the context of history. It is a social history rather than a technical one, and the subjects of the book are the photographers, their sitters, and their critics.