This history of photography which, marking an ideal continuity with the "Art of the 20th century" series, will be able to respond to the needs for correct information to a general public and supply more specialized investigation of the medium. The first volume (1839 - 1890) of the History of Photography series considers the years of the invention of photography and those immediately following; extraordinary years from both the point of view of history and of the development of the inventions, and also from that of its first distribution and the works realized. From the great early forebears, like Daguerre and Talbot to the great photographic expeditions that placed the world before the eyes of an ever-increasing number of people. This first volume also stresses the fundamental links between photography and the world of science, with anthropology and all the disciplines and aspects of society. The volume concludes with the reading of the events characterizing the relationship between photography and the traditional artistic disciplines, a point of fundamental important in the development of a photographic language. From Oscar Rejlander to Henry Peach Robinson, from the protagonists of the early period of pictorialism, to Degas and Michetti, the discussion concerning the status of photography is from the outset one of the crucial themes around which the thinking of both photographers, scholars and critics developed (including Baudelaire and his famous "excommunication" of photography as art).