Photography was born in France in 1826, when a chemist made the first surviving photograph by exposing a pewter plate for eight hours. Soon after and with great excitement, Louis J. M. Daguerre (1789-1851) introduced the daguerrotype, a more practical photographic process that required exposure times of ten to fifteen minutes. The invention of the photo negative came in 1839, followed in 1851 by a wet-plate process that Civil War photographer Mathew Brady used successfully to take more than seven thousand photographs of the American conflict. By the 1850s photography had established itself as a legitimate commercial enterprise. The tintype, introduced in 1855, was a fast and cheap method of making portraits. Although tintypes often produced poor-quality images, they were extremely popular and readily available to the masses.

Another large market for photography was travel pictures. Nineteenth-century audiences hungered for the exotic, and scenes of foreign...