A milestone work that examines the democratic idea of photography and its expansion in common culture, particularly in the United States; generously illustrated. This influential text by French historian and theorist Francois Brunet considers the invention and history of photography as the birth of an idea, rather than a new type of image. This "idea photography" combines a logical theme-that of an art without artistry-and the democratic political promise of an art for all. Officially endorsed by the 1839 French law on the daguerreotype, this idea reverberated throughout the nineteenth century in Europe and America. Brunet shows how emerging image technologies and practices in France and Britain were linked to this logical/political construction of photography, from the earliest researches of Nicephore Niepce, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, and Henry Fox Talbot up to the turn of the twentieth century. The parallel development of the Kodak camera and Alfred Stieglitz's "straight" vision in the United States then fulfilled, while also depreciating, the utopian promise of photography for all. This history reached a provisional climax with the reflections on images by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Sigmund Freud, Henri-Louis Bergson, and Charles Sanders Peirce, reflections that both demonstrated the novelty of photography and forecast many later debates on its technology and aesthetics. The Birth of the Idea of Photography has been enriched with more than fifty photographs, reproduced in color, from North American and European collections. This edition also features a new preface by the author.

Roland Barthes, one of photography's most influential critics, once described the trouble introduced by the advent of photography. Studies of literature and photography tend to assess the literary effects of photography, with literature seen as the older, broader, more established cultural form, and photography the new, alien upstart. "Photography and Literature" instead reverses the angle of vision to examine photography's encounters with literature from the point of view of photography, providing a new way of understanding its interplay with literature and the printed page. Francois Brunet begins by showing how photography's invention and its publication were shaped by written culture, both scientific and literary. In turn he examines its early and durable incarnation in the book format, the ongoing and often repetitive discovery' of photography by writers, and, finally, how, in the twentieth century, photography and literature are seen to trade tools and even merge formats. He also focuses on writings by photographers, from William Henry Fox Talbot's groundbreaking exploration of photography in "The Pencil of Nature" of the 1840s, to Raymond Depardon's correspondence or Sophie Calle's projects with Jean Baudrillard and Paul Auster. Ultimately, Brunet argues that the histories of photography and literature since 1840 have been drawing closer together, and that their convergence has provided recent writing with a new photo-textual' genre. Offering a wealth of examples from autobiography, manifestos and fiction, and a fascinating variety of images from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first, "Photography and Literature" will be of interest to anyone passionate about the historic relationship of text and image.

As a category in art history, circulation is rooted in the contemporary context of Internet culture and the digital image. Yet circulation, as a broader concept for the movement of art across time and space in vastly different cultural and media contexts, has been a factor in the history of the arts in the United States since at least the eighteenth century. The third volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Circulation brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Thierry Gervais, Tom Gunning, J. M. Mancini, Frank Mehring, and Hela ne Valance, who map the multiple planes where artistic meaning has been produced by the circulation of art from the eighteenth century to the present. The book looks at both broad historical trends and the successes and failures of particular works of art from a wide variety of artists and styles. Together, the contributions significantly expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art.

As American settlement expanded westward in the 1860s, the U.S. government undertook large-scale investigations of its new territories. "Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860-1880" presents memorable glass-plate photographs from these federal surveys. The selection includes breathtaking views of such iconic sites as Yosemite, as well as lesser-known ethnographic portraits taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William H. Jackson, and William Bell, among others. The accompanying essays discuss how the photographs were used to promote white settlement, how their distribution at home and abroad contributed to the aggrandizement of the American West, and how the exploitative ideology underlying the use of photography extended to attitudes toward both American landscapes and American Indians.
The images are all drawn from French public collections, which hold an astonishing number of these U.S. survey photographs. Accompanying an exhibition at the Musee d'Art Americain Giverny, "Images of the West" provides a critical new examination of a bygone era.