During downtime in Japan, when I’m on trains or relaxing after the onsen, and when I am not chasing waterfalls, I’ve been reading A Brief History of Photography by David S. Young (RockyNook, 2024). This is a fascinating book. If I could give it ten stars rather then the nominal 5-star top rating I would. It is an incredible and monumental achievement of organization, research, and compilation. Obviously a labor of love that took years to accomplish, the author (or “your scribe” as he often refers to himself) is to be sincerely congratulated.

I learned a great deal from this book about all kinds of things, from chemistry to optics to the business and politics of camera and lens manufacturing. Though we exist in a digital era, we should keep in mind that photography derives from optics and physics, regardless of the capture medium. As the saying goes, those who forget the past will…forget some important things.

Anyone who is remotely interested in serious photography should read this book. That said, I have some caveats and quibbles. I’ll get to my concerns in a bit.

The book is organized chronologically starting more or less with the camera obscura as fully described in 1558 by Giovanni Battista della Porta. Obviously, the entries get denser the closer we get to modern times.

I think I’m becoming a pretty “rare bird” as an actively practicing professional photographer in the digital era with my origins firmly in the olden analog days (I opened my first studio in New York City in 1978). In that light, I seriously enjoyed the trip down memory lane bringing up hardware with fantastical names that I’d long forgotten, like the Metz Mecablitz, a small strobe, and the Miranda SLRs, one of my first “serious” cameras.

Some notable people that played a role in my professional life are also mentioned; for example, Jacob Deschin (see a 1950 sidebar) who gave me my first solo exhibition in Manhattan at the Modernage Discovery Gallery, and Herbert Keppler (also a 1950 entry), who gave me exposure at an early point in my career in Modern Photography.

I learned some fascinating things on my journey through this book: for example, about the Leica Freedom Train. Apparently Leica and the Leitz family saved numerous souls from the Nazis at great personal risk (see the entry for 1938-1939 relating to this).

The author notes that following the end of World War 2 just before the iron curtain came down, the U.S. “liberated” 126 Zeiss optical technicians to the west, to found the Zeiss campus in Oberkochen in Bavaria because optical science has always had important military applications (see the entry for 1945). I feel compelled to add for color what I was told in the Zeiss cafeteria in Oberkochen: the reason that the small town of Oberkochen was chosen as the location for Zeiss West Germany is because that is where the rescue convoy ran out of gas.

I do have a problem with the book’s title. A book that weighs in at almost 400 pages of fairly small type is probably not best described as “brief.” But, quibbling aside, everything except the hardware side of photography is badly neglected. Sure, there are token entries for Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Weston, and a few other iconic names. But essentially, the entire artistic, aesthetic, and ideational side of photography—not to mention the business practice of making imagery as opposed to the business of making cameras and lenses—are ignored.

Photography has always had two strands of innovation: the tinkerers and inventors on the one hand, and those who pushed artistic, creative, and image making innovation on the other. No book can legitimately be called a history of photography without tackling both.

The annual PSA Progress Awards have been given each year since 1948 to honor “outstanding contribution to the progress of photography or an allied subject.”  If you look at the list of awardees, it tackles this divide in a more evenhanded way. Along with the tinkerers and inventors such as Edwin Land and the Knoll brothers, artists such as Adams, Weston, and more recent photographers such as Art Wolfe and Frans Lanting are each given their place. Without cameras you wouldn’t have photographers, but without photographers you don’t bother to make cameras.

A more descriptive title would have been something like The Rise and Fall of the Analog Camera and Lens Industry. OK, I know it’s not very sexy as a title, but there’s a fascinating story here about the arc of a technology, with echoes of Ozymandius. When I was starting out in photography, who would ever have thought that Kodak would one day in the not too distant future go belly up?

On this topic, note that the subtitle is From the Very Beginning to the Age of Digital. Actually, the digital entries in the book are pretty sketchy. This is not entirely unexpected, as it is more reasonable to write “history” about events that are in the historical rearview mirror than it is to write history about an ongoing work-in-progress.

Most of the many fascinating sidebars in the book are titled “Trivia,” and this began to irritate me as many of them are not trivial at all. As an editorial choice, there should have been a great deal more variety in sidebar headers, or at least something less dismissive. It was something of a relief to me as a reader to come across the few sidebars titled “Oddities”—and lord knows there are indeed some extremely odd photographic contraptions shown in these sidebars.

I highly recommend this book. Click here to buy it directly from the publisher RockyNook (for a 40% discount use the code HDAVIS40 at checkout — in full disclosure I think I get a small affiliate fee) and click here to buy from Amazon.