This is a very interesting book because of the historical research done by the author. It provides a lot of information about the lives of photographers such as Nadar, Disderi and others. There are even some statistics on the photographic market and habits in France. It’s a very enjoyable read. But you have to take the analysis with a certain amount of humor to avoid getting annoyed. I was amused to find in it the perfect caricature of photography as just another instrument of the “class struggle”, a view that was very much in vogue in the 1960s/70s and still finds loyal followers. In this vein, the author argues that the success of photography was mainly due to the fact that it offered the petty bourgeois the possibility of being on a par with the aristocrats by having themselves portrayed at very economical prices, as if photography were the oil painting of the poor.

The exception to this neurosis of social ascension is the artist photographers. They are presented in a romanticized way as beings far above these mundane issues. They are selfless, motivated only by the pursuit of the purity of art.