The Beginning of Photography

1                  First, the name. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel, who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.         Before mentioning the stages that led to the development of photography, there is one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man called de la Roche (1729-1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was …

…a camera in a shop window in Berlin, bought it, and photography in earnest began. Many years later he wrote "I bought it and carried it to my room and began to fool around with it. It fascinated me, first as a passion, then as an obsession." From 1892 he was becoming famous for his photographs of everyday life in New York and Paris. There is a tremendous atmospheric quality in many of his outdoor scenes.20