WI daguerreotype photographic process discovered earlier?

[sarapen]

It's an essay, I can't remember which book I read it from but apparently it's online:

The essay
The wikipedia summary

It's fairly famous actually so you needn't feel guilty about reading it and taking time away from your academic work, I have no doubt you'd soon find its applicability in other areas. It was mostly an attempt to reconcile attitudes towards art in the industrial era. It also keeps being referenced in articles about digital reproduction, it's been popping up more and more lately.

I don't read German at all and I usually have to grit my teeth when reading translations, something about the prose makes it hard for me to concentrate on the contents of the writing. But, Walter Benjamin is one of the rare exceptions.

And I've also found your arguments interesting, it's good to engage in this kind of in-depth discussion again. Out of curiosity, from what part of the academy are you arguing from? Me, I mostly come at things from an anthropological perspective with a dash of sociology.

 

[Claudius]

WI the daguerreotype photo process was discovered a hundred or even two hundred years before its discovery in 1820s -- 1830s France? The basic camera obscura was known from Renaissance times, yet it took until the early 19th century to mate the projection of an image onto a dark panel with the "fixing" of an image onto a silver plate coated with silver chloride.

How would events like the French Revolution look through the eyes of a daguerreotype camera? Even earlier, would the lost buildings of the Great Fire of London be preserved for all time through primitive photography? Would the ability to fix images within the space of minutes dramatically change the course of wars? The invention of the daguerreotype validates Kuhn -- scientific discoveries arrive in leaps and bounds.

Sir Isaac Newton could have done it. He was a genius, wrote a treatise on optics including the use of the camera obscura and was facinated by alchemy. He almost killed himself apparently experimenting with mercury vapor, one of the key ingredients in the daguerotype process. Perhaps if he hadn't gone off on that whole Physics thing...

 

[proximefactum]

It's an essay, I can't remember which book I read it from but apparently it's online:

The essay
The wikipedia summary

It's fairly famous actually so you needn't feel guilty about reading it and taking time away from your academic work, I have no doubt you'd soon find its applicability in other areas.

You bet -- I could go a lot of ways with this. I'm not a neo-Marxist by any means, so that's not how I "read" social constructions. But it would be interesting to compare this model with my own homegrown models.

And I've also found your arguments interesting, it's good to engage in this kind of in-depth discussion again. Out of curiosity, from what part of the academy are you arguing from? Me, I mostly come at things from an anthropological perspective with a dash of sociology.

I work with the cults of late Roman and Hellenistic antiquity. Mostly Mithraism. I also like to study Latin/Greek philology, but I don't really get a lot of time to do that.

 

[Guilherme Loureiro]

Oh yeah, you're right, I'd forgotten about the Crimean War photos. I was thinking more in terms of war journalism and showing the mangled bodies of soldiers, but I guess the social mores of the time probably would have never allowed it. The only pre-WWII photojournalism I can think of that shows dead bodies are from the Philippine-American War, and it was almost certainly because the dead bodies are of people who aren't white.

I'm fairly sure there were such pictures after the Battle of Antietam. Ah, here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Gardner_(photographer)

 

[Mark E.]

A daguerreotype process invented by Francis Bacon in the 1590s may have left us a photographic portrait of an elderly Elizabeth I, but it would not have sparked the types and kinds of social changes that occurred after Daguerre's OTL invention of the 1830s.
Bill

That is true for the time, but an early photographic process would have sparked developments in chemistry that would have penetrated society within a century or so. The social changes of the 19th century were a culmination of many factors and photography was only a small portion. So, no matter where you insert the "accidental" invention of daguerrotype photography, you will start a chain of events based on new work in science, technology, printing, etc.