First Seen: Portraits of the World's Peoples, 1840-1870

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Within weeks of the almost simultaneous announcements of successful photographic processes in England and France, photographers set out to capture the world's peoples and races, classes and ranks, from intimate domestic portraits, to studies of the different, the exotic, the picturesque, and the unknown. Published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition of more than 240 rare vintage images drawn from the Wilson Centre for Photography-one of the world's finest private collections-this book reveals these first encounters. The innate human fascination with other people accounts for the first daguerreotype of a Borneo tribesman by Jules Itier, the first images of the people of Madagascar by William Ellis, and Ernest Benecke's haunting images of the common people of Egypt. More formal surveys arose from the colonialist enterprise and the nineteenth-century intellectual project to understand the world through cataloguing and mapping. Photography introduced an unprecedented ability to visually record human difference precisely at the moment newly-minted sciences like ethnology, anthropology, geography, and archaeology were seeking techniques for exploring, cataloguing and classifying the physical and human world.