PhotograPhy, Geography and

For more than 150 years, geographical concerns have shaped photographic practices, and photographic technologies have nurtured and documented geographical pursuits. This complex, dynamic, and mutually influential relationship between geography and photography can be studied from historical, practical, and theoretical perspectives. In 1839, two, quite different, processes for making permanent images “from Nature” were announced. These early photographic technologies offered a new way of encountering the physical and human world. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre's method of producing a unique image on a silver-coated copper plate and William Henry Fox Talbot's paper-based negative-positive process were quickly harnessed to geographical purposes in the form of field observations, travel accounts, prints, book illustrations, and teaching aids—uses that have survived and become increasingly sophisticated in an age of geographic information ...