How do you define photography in a single sentence? No-one can agree – so this new book charts 200 years of it instead

A vintage sepia-toned portrait of a young, barefoot girl with short dark hair wearing a loose, tattered white dress while leaning against a textured stone wall. — Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’, 1858. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 16.3 × 10.9 cm (6 1/2 × 4 3/8 in.) (Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005)

Ask a room full of photographers to define photography and you'll get a room full of arguments.

Indeed, as This is Photography: The First 200 Years recounts, in 2010 the artist Mishka Henner compiled 3,000 different sentences attempting to pin down what the medium actually is, pulled from critics, philosophers and photographers who'd each convinced themselves they'd cracked it.

In 2024, someone did it again with 3,500 sentences. Neither project settled anything.

The big anniversary

That anniversary is going to be inescapable this year, and rightly so. France has already announced a year-long bicentenary programme running from this September through to September 2027.

As we reported back in January, the centerpiece exhibition will open at the Grand Palais in Paris this autumn, and Herschdorfer's book arrives as a companion of sorts. It's just that this is a single-volume history you can actually hold, rather than an itinerary of exhibitions you'd need a year to visit.

A historic black-and-white daguerreotype photograph capturing an elevated view of a building-lined Paris street — This photo features the first people ever caught on camera. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), *Boulevard du temple*, 1838. Daguerreotype. (Image credit: Bavarian National Museum)

A historic sepia portrait photograph showing the French painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier in a dark overcoat, captured in profile looking toward the right.

Nadar, Honoré Daumier, 1856–58 (Image credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund (1995.36.106))

A vintage photograph showing a young newsboy holding papers on a city sidewalk next to a mailbox pole, while the long shadow of the photographer and their tripod stretches out in the foreground. — Lewis Hine (1874–1940), John Howell, an Indianapolis newsboy, Indiana, 1908 (Image credit: Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC)

For me, the structure is the best and most interesting thing about this book. Rather than grouping work by genre or geography, it runs strictly chronologically, from 1826 through to 2026, pairing key photographs and objects with short contextual entries.

Longer thematic essays are woven in-between, contributed by writers including David Campany, William A Ewing and Darius Himes, covering everything from the birth of photojournalism to the rise of the photobook as its own art form.

And that timeline approach does something that a genre-based book can't: it enables you to watch photography argue with itself in real time.

Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies sit in the same continuum as Rosalind Franklin's DNA imaging; Man Ray's darkroom experiments and Cindy Sherman's constructed selves become part of one long, unbroken conversation rather than separate exhibits in separate rooms.

With 1.9 trillion photographs now taken every year, according to the publisher's figures, that continuity is worth being reminded of. That Niépce's single, eight-hour exposure and this morning's Instagram selfie are, basically, the same act.

Why the timing matters

This shouldn't, in a sense, be so surprising. After all, Herschdorfer directs Photo Elysée in Lausanne and curates for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, so she's spent a career watching institutions wrestle with exactly the question this book sidesteps:

What actually belongs in the photographic canon, and who gets to decide?

A candid, colorful 1960s photograph capturing a group of adults and a young boy laughing together while sitting with their legs dangling over a concrete sea wall at a public bathing area. — From The Anonymous Project, Lee Shulman, 1953 (Image credit: The Anonymous Project/Lee Shulman)

A vibrant color photograph of a woman in a sleeveless blue-green dress holding four large colorful plastic jugs, with six more matching jugs arranged in a line on the ground in front of her. — James Barnor (b. 1929), *Sick-Hagemeyer Assistant, Accra*, 1971, printed 2023. C-print, 50 × 60 cm (19 ¾ × 23 5/8 in.) (Image credit: Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronniere. © James Barnor)

A black-and-white photograph capturing a tight line of men in work clothes and caps looking back toward the camera, with several of them holding large, insulated thermoses. — Liu Zheng (b. 1969), *Convicts Fetching Water, Baoding, Hebei Province*, 1995. Gelatin silver print, 37.2 × 37.2 cm (14 5/8 × 14 5/8 in.) (Image credit: © Liu Zheng)

Her answer here, running Zanele Muholi and Barbara Kruger alongside Nadar and Edward Steichen, is refreshingly unbothered by hierarchy. Everything gets its year, its context, its place in the line.

For anyone covering, teaching or simply obsessing over photography, this may well become the reference you reach for when a client, student or editor asks, "Where did this actually come from?" And with Paris about to spend a year celebrating the answer, its timing couldn't be better.

This is Photography: The First 200 Years, edited by Nathalie Herschdorfer, is published by Thames & Hudson in the US on October 06 2026, priced $55, and in the UK for £40 on August 27.

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Tom May is a freelance writer and editor specializing in art, photography, design and travel. He has been editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. He has also worked for a wide range of mainstream titles including The Sun, Radio Times, NME, T3, Heat, Company and Bella.