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| Sir Coutts Lindsay Oak Tree ca. 1850 salted paper print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Louis-Rémy Robert Still-life with statuette and vases 1855 carbon print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
"In these deplorable times, a new industry has developed, which has helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith and to ruin what vestige of the divine might still have remained in the French mind. Of course, this idolatrous multitude was calling for an ideal worthy of itself and in keeping with its own nature. In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly-wise is this: 'I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature. Thus, if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art.' An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his messiah. And then they said to themselves: 'Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude' (they believe that, poor madmen!), 'art is photography.' From that moment onward, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshipers. Strange abominations manifested themselves. By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these 'heroes' to 'hold' their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and charming scenes of ancient history. It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite. I am convinced that the badly applied advances of photography – like all purely material progress, for that matter – have greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius, already so rare. Poetry and progress are two ambitious men who hate each other with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along the same road one of them must give way."
– Charles Baudelaire, from his report on the Salon of 1859, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiliand and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999)
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| Louis Fleckenstein A Pastorale ca. 1903 Kallitype Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| John Jabez Edwin Mayall The Prince of Wales ca. 1856 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Roger Fenton Billiard Room at Mentmore ca. 1858 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Gertrude Elizabeth Rogers Gnarled Tree ca. 1860 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri Portrait of artist Rosa Bonheur ca. 1861-64 albumen print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Charles Aubry Peaches ca. 1860-69 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Felice Beato Pappenberg Island, Bay of Nagasaki ca. 1865 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Adolphe Braun Hunting Still-life, France ca. 1867 carbon print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Giuseppe Ninci View of Roman Forum ca. 1868 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Braun, Clément & Co. Roman Forum ca. 1870 carbon print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| W. & D. Downey, Photographers Sarah Bernhardt as Empress Theodora 1884 albumen print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Kusakabe Kimbei Young woman standing near tree ca. 1870-90 hand-colored albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |