Pictures that are made, not taken, are the focus of this exciting collection of worksby 90 American artists who are using appropriation, computer technology, performance, and numerousother sources of inspiration to stretch the limits and expand the possibilities of photographicart.

This book chronicles for the first time in a detailed fashion the critical days of the invention and development of photography. In particular it explores the relationship between two Englishmen who played a key role in photography's early years; the preeminent scientist Sir John Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot, the artist and scientist who had invented his own photographic process years before Louis Daguerre announced his discovery in Paris in 1839. Drawing on hundreds of Herschel's and Talbot's letters, notebooks, and diaries, Larry J. Schaaf tells the story of the evolution of photography as expressed through their words, and in the process he sheds light on some questions over which others have puzzled. Given that the camera and the necessary chemistry had coexisted for years, why rather than how was photography invented? Why did Talbot keep his own photographic process secret until Daguerre's announcement? Why did Herschel make such fundamental contributions to the process of photography, yet take very few pictures himself? Who or what provided the visual training that allowed Talbot to grow into the first photographic artist? Schaaf skillfully describes the complexities of the events, the personalities and interests of the participants, the often vital role played by trivial circumstances, and the chaotic nature of the progress of photography. He narrates the rivalry between Talbot and Daguerre, showing how it mirrored the differences between France and Great Britain in their support of science and art. Enhanced by more than 100 reproductions in color and in duotone of some of the earliest photographs ever made, this book vividly re-creates both the invention of an art and the art of invention.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

This encyclopedia of inventions provides the dates, the details and the stories of how we gained some of the things we now take for granted. Every possible invention is covered from the simple paperclip to the irritating parking meter.