The daguerreotype, announced in 1839, was treated for three decades mainly as a means of documentation: sharp, detailed, free of personal interpretation. The common view in painting circles was that the machine merely recorded what it saw and therefore made no choices — and where there is no choice there is no art.

In the 1860s two photographers refuted that view from opposite directions. In Paris, Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) stripped away the ornate studio set: a plain ground, soft light from one side, a figure without props. His portraits of Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt and Victor Hugo are taken as the beginning of a psychological portraiture that records the person by the face rather than by the social role. On the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron worked the other way: long exposures, deliberately softened focus, close framing that fills the frame. The photographic journals of the day criticised her 'faulty' prints as technical incompetence; Cameron argued that the blur was a decision rather than an error, and by registering her prints for copyright she positioned photography as authored work.

The consequences ran past photography itself. As the recording of faces and landscapes passed to the machine, painting stopped seeking its legitimacy in likeness — one leg of the road from impressionism to abstraction stands on that handover. In the same years photography took the portrait out of the realm of class privilege and into the middle class; millions of cartes de visite were printed annually across Europe in the 1860s. That an image could be multiplied is also the ground on which Walter Benjamin's argument about the aura would be built a century later.