CHAPTER 1 What Is Photography?
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
—SUSAN SONTAG
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
—ANSEL ADAMS
There are two sides to photography. First, photography is the capture and display of images by means of film or an electronic sensor; and, second, photography is the art of taking and presenting photographs. As commonly practiced, photography is inseparable from cameras. Of course, photography means “writing with light” and writing is really the operative word. When photography was discovered in 1839, the thing that was discovered was the means for permanently capturing images. Cameras of various kinds had, in fact, been available for centuries.
The original camera, known as the ...
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