The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography

A dynamic prehistory of photography tracing the medium through more than four centuries of Western art

The prehistory of photography is often told as a story of science, of a magic arising from the camera obscura and advances in chemistry, but not as a history of art. In this exhilarating and erudite book, Andrew Moisey uses a practicing photographer’s perspective to show how a sense of “being there”—the immediacy, takenness, and embodiment inherent in a photograph—originates in the Western...