Photography
A machine records what was in front of it, and the image stops being a witness's account.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Daguerre announces his process in 1839, and Fox Talbot's negative-positive method allows multiple prints. Within two decades photography documents war at Crimea and Antietam, colonial expeditions, criminals and the surfaces of the Moon. It changes painting by removing its documentary function, and changes evidence, memory and identity. It also arrives with an assumption of objectivity that was never quite true.