Photography is one among the inventions of the early 19th century that has changed the course of social and political history. The invention of photography was presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1939 by the inventor Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre. His invention, however, was less a single person’s achievement than the result of a quest by several pioneers of the era, among them Nicéphore Niépce and Henry Fox Talbot, for a process that would enable the fixing of an image focused by a lens on a plane surface. Since the Renaissance, some painters had been using a device called the camera obscura, which used a lens to cast an inverted image on a canvas, which the artist then used as a guide to composition ...

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