A
photograph 'speaks' for itself through the language of vision, but in an
entirely different way from any other graphic medium. Over the past 160
years photographs have become part of the conceptual world in the same way
that artefacts are part of our perceptual world. However, photographs
become the stuff of history only when we provide expansion beyond the
realms of picture storytelling by referencing written records and
artefacts.
This
book pieces together the lives and careers of largely forgotten men and
women who pushed forward the boundaries of the visual world. From the very
start, in 1839, and throughout the nineteenth century, there was no
mainstream movement in the art-science called photography. Irish
photographers, like their contemporaries elsewhere, not only sustained but
also added to the predominant currents along photography's evolutionary
path both philosophically and technically. Thanks to long overdue
reprints, some of the achievements of Coghill, Grubb and Joly can here be
assessed at first hand.
Their
story is part of a larger one where patents bedeviled the progress of the
calotype tor years; commercial rivals struggled to survive; leisured
amateurs compiled their albums; the slow and costly daguerreotype mirror
went dark, and the difficult to manipulate wet plate collodion process
triumphed in adversity until the plates turned dry.
