Book Review for the 1984 edition

In this day and age of fully automatic cameras and one-hour film processing labs, it is easy to forget the series of photography-related inventions that have afforded us the present-day luxury. Not many of us have stopped to think about the state of photography 50 years back or even 150 years back. However, if you ever get bitten by the curiosity bug, Naomi Rosenblum's "A World History of Photography" is an authoritative one-stop resource for all your questions. It seeks to explore how and why photography, as an artistic and documentary medium, has attained a position it occupies in contemporary life.

This books is truly a world history, treating the development of and contributions to photography from around the world, particularly Europe where this art form originated. It covers a variety of fields such as the evolution of photographic equipment, innovations in chemistry, catalytic effects arts and photography had on each other's development and how photojournalism changed the way we perceive the world. Since all these areas developed in parallel, to do full justice to their coverage and yet maintain a coherence of subject matter, the chapters are not organized strictly chronologically. Each section of the book is arranged chronologically and chapters within the section cover parallel developments in various areas, within that era. Hence, if you are only interested in learning about how photographic equipment has evolved from the camera obscura to today's point and shoot cameras, you only have to read the chapters on technical history, ignoring the chapters in between. That said, I should also mention that this book has a deeper treatment of photography as an art form rather than as a scientific technology. An extensive bibliography listed at the back of the book, will however provide adequate material for the research minded. Most of the images included in this book (803 in all) are rare, one-of-a-kind images, including the first recorded photograph by Joseph Nicephore Niepce entitled "View from His Window at Le Gras", an image made around 1827. Short profiles of key figures are included at the end of relevant chapters, whose contributions to this art form are indispensible.