The Origins of Photographic Discourse

In 1939, one hundred years after photography had been disclosed to the world, the thicket of received ideas about the medium's invention was so dense that even such an astute observer as Paul Valery could not extricate his thoughts from the tangle. For years the French poet and critic had been recording his unique perceptions of science, history, and contemporary culture. His commentary-filled notebooks gradually acquired the reputation of an informal national archive. Yet when Valery addressed the French Academy on January 7,1939, in observance of photography's centenary, he merely reworked mythopoetic conventions: "And then came Daguerre," Valery intoned. "With him, the photographic vision was born and it spread by singular leaps and bounds throughout the world. A marked revision occurred in all standards of visual knowledge." Sans ornement, this was what people had been saying for decades: Photography was unprecedented powerfully, mysteriously, unprecedented. For Valery, and many others, photography had not evolved gradually in the manner of other nineteenth-century inventions. Instead, the medium had erupted into the social world like Athena emerging fully formed and impatiently precocious from the head of Zeus. Photography had no apparent childhood, no period of adolescent experimentation, and no interval of incremental progression in the public eye. Even after one hundred years of thought and experience, 1839 remained an annus mirabilis. The arrival of photography resisted rendering in ordinary terms. The medium's enigmatic origins aroused the kind of agreeable frisson nobody much cares to extinguish with plain facts. Those who witnessed the advent of photography in 1839 discussed its debut in the language of exceptions. Long before it could effect sig-