Origins
The development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century--announced simultaneously by Daguerre in France (1839) and Talbot in England--signalled not only a technological achievement, but the arrival of a particular viewpoint, a new way of envisioning the world. As Alan Trachtenberg writes in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, "photography entered the world . . . as a word, a linguistic practice," rapidly becoming "a common verb that meant telling the literal truth of things" (17). Adding to this conception of the image as authoritative was the mechanism of the daguerrotype, the dominant form of the medium in its first twenty years. Daguerrotypes lack a negative, and in this sense, they are unique, conferring the status of a simulacrum--as opposed to a mere "copy"--upon each exposure. Before they were phased out in the early 1860's, daguerrotypes came to possess a status as cultural artifacts, carrying a physical presence superior to that of subsequent types of images. At a time of enormous economic and social change (approximately 1840-1860), the daguerrotype was equated with the power to arbitrate, seeing matters through the "eyes of God."