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 photographers perspective to show how a sense of being therethe immediacy, takenness, and embodiment inherent in a photographoriginates in the Western art of everyday life before photography. Moisey argues that photographys spirit appears in art before its inventionand that its invention sets the standard of first-person subjectivity on which Impressionism and Modernism were raised.

Spanning over four centuries from the Renaissance to today, the book shows how pictorial models of the present shift from world pictures to embodied, situated encounters