A Gift of Light

And while critics disputed the new medium's meaning and purposes, photographers took their pictures in the thousands." "Containing many photographs unavailable in any other collection and seen here for the first time, A Gift of Light will be an important source of information for historians of photography. The essays, plates, notes, and bibliography will be of service to historians of the Victorian era and French romanticism. And the book as a whole will engage and delight the general reader-viewer curious about photography, about daily life, history, and travel in the nineteenth century, and about how photographic images came to have such an overwhelming presence in our own lives and culture."--BOOK JACKET.