The Photographer's Eye

By the end of the century, for the first time in history, even the poor man knew what his ancestors had looked like.

In 1853 the New York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that year. Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation, misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.

If photography was a new artistic problem, such men had the advantage of having nothing to unlearn.