Photography
On August 19, 1839, the daguerreotype was announced at the Academy in Paris. Light could now form an image without a human hand, a machine had begun to take over the work of copying that painting had always carried. A well-known story goes with this: that the painter Paul Delaroche saw it and declared, from this day, painting is dead. Look closer, though, and the earliest record of that line appears thirty-four years later. At the time, Delaroche himself wrote about the invention warmly, calling it an immeasurable service to art, and he kept painting until he died. The famous quote seems to have grown in later, not been spoken then. What actually happened was not a killing but a release. Freed from the job of copying, painting could ask what only painting could do, and Impressionism was the first clear answer. A quieter revolution happened too. Portraits had belonged to the wealthy, but by 1849, Paris alone counted a hundred thousand sitters a year in photography studios. The number of people who could leave their face behind had jumped by an order of magnitude. One more thing: the studio this map uses as the venue for the first Impressionist exhibition, Nadar's, belonged to a photographer. Technology and painting were sharing a room from the very start. Then in 1888 the technology opened up once more. The advertisement for the Kodak camera George Eastman put on sale was a single line: you press the button, we do the rest. Until then only someone who could develop film could take a photograph. That one line separated taking the picture from finishing it, and handed photography from the specialist to everyone. The camera in your pocket right now is the latest form of that promise.