demonstration to the public’, for ‘to see with their own eyes the operator so at ease with his instrument, to touch the instrument with their own hands, the public would have been delighted and lost in admiration’. The eyewitness – or, more accurately, earwitness – account of poet Ludwig Pfau, too, is concerned with this dramaturgy of dissemination. He admits that, having ‘taken the meeting’s publicness somewhat too literally’, he had arrived too late to claim one of the few seats allotted to the general public. Waiting in the courtyard, ‘snippets of the news’ leaked out from the proceedings: ‘Iodine of silver!’ cried the one, ‘Mercury!’ shouted the other. Finally, he ‘was able to catch one of the fortunate audience members by his coat tails and force him to confess’. Merely ‘an hour later, the opticians’ shops were already under siege; the opticians were unable to get hold of enough instruments to satisfy the host of daguerreotypists descending upon them’. This breakneck rendition of the facts seems not to have been entirely exaggerated, for by the very next morning a newspaper report relating Daguerre’s process and its history was already in circulation. Its author, the bacteriologist and inventor of microphotography Alfred Donné, wrote with the scepticism of the scientific investigator, probing for more information about the process and demystifying its wondrous productions. A fascinating selection of Donné’s reports reveal a contrarian at work, proceeding in the spirit of empirical rigour, seeking to refine and expand upon Daguerre’s insights. The presence of this steadfastly cautious voice points to the awareness of the Daguerreotype’s limitations almost from its first appearance: its colourlessness, its impractically long exposure times, the chemical instability of its surface, and its resistance to reproduction. Donné’s reflections are a valuable counterpoint to the chorus of enthusiasm often thought to have accompanied Daguerre’s announcement. But even this moderating voice could not curb the demand for knowledge about photography emanating from around the globe; indeed, Donné’s own account was quickly republished in German translation. As this example reminds us, the networks that carried this information were markedly transnational. Since Daguerre sent samples of his breakthrough to several European heads of state, viewers in Vienna and Munich could take in exhibitions of these works even before their Parisian counterparts. Siegel furnishes us with an extraordinary group of texts from the German-speaking lands, which are inflected by somewhat different preoccupations from the more familiar French and British responses. This perspective has been largely unknown to Anglophone readers, and provides us with a valuable reminder of the local idiosyncrasies that flavoured photography’s reception, even for nations linked relatively closely to the medium’s countries of origin. It is thus an enticement for other scholars to establish the tenor of these early responses in the full panoply of national contexts. In these first months, as actual photographs were unstable, few in number, or purposely concealed by secretive inventors, photography became known primarily through language. It is quite astonishing that an entire internationally distributed discourse could come into being largely on the strength of these accounts, and upon the authority of the individuals and institutions who produced them. In these texts, and in their creation, circulation, and verification, we discern the structures through which ‘photography’ became a coherent, if always contested, discourse in the astonishingly compressed space of one year. In gathering these, First Exposures makes its most significant mark by doing what the best scholarship of the last two decades has often done: to make the history of photography a history of ideas, and not just of objects. This is a crucial enterprise, but one that is still in its infancy. Siegel has provided us with the primary sources – and the keen editorial insights – to sustain these investigations.

中文翻译：

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照片的“公共”生活

向公众展示”，因为“亲眼看到操作员如此轻松地使用他的仪器，亲手触摸仪器，公众会感到高兴和钦佩”。目击者——或者更准确地说，是目击者——诗人路德维希·普福（Ludwig Pfau）的叙述也与这种传播的戏剧结构有关。他承认，由于“对会议的公开性有点过于字面化”，他来得太晚了，无法获得分配给公众的少数席位之一。等在院子里，“新闻片段”从诉讼中泄露出来：“银碘！” ”一个叫道，“水星！” 另一个喊道。最后，他“能够抓住他的大衣尾巴并强迫他招供一名幸运的观众”。仅仅“一个小时后，眼镜店就已经被包围了。眼镜商无法获得足够的仪器来满足大量的银版印刷师的需求”。这种对事实的极速演绎似乎并没有完全夸大其词，因为到第二天早上，一份关于达盖尔过程及其历史的报纸报道已经在流传。它的作者，细菌学家和显微摄影术的发明者阿尔弗雷德·多内（Alfred Donné）怀着科学调查员的怀疑态度写作，探索有关该过程的更多信息并揭开其奇妙产品的神秘面纱。多内精选的精彩报告揭示了一个逆势而行的人，本着严谨的经验精神，寻求完善和扩展达盖尔的见解。这种坚定而谨慎的声音的存在表明，几乎从它第一次出现时就意识到了银版照片的局限性：它的无色、不切实际的长时间曝光、其表面的化学不稳定性，以及它对繁殖的抵抗力。多内 (Donné) 的反思与通常被认为伴随着达盖尔 (Daguerre) 宣布的热情合唱形成了宝贵的对比。但即使是这种温和的声音也无法抑制全球对摄影知识的需求；事实上，多内自己的叙述很快就以德文译本重新出版。正如这个例子提醒我们的那样，承载这些信息的网络明显是跨国的。自从达盖尔向几位欧洲国家元首发送了他的突破样本后，维也纳和慕尼黑的观众甚至可以在巴黎同行之前观看这些作品的展览。西格尔为我们提供了一组来自德语国家的非凡文本，这些文本与更熟悉的法国和英国的回应有所不同。这种观点对讲英语的读者来说基本上是未知的，它为我们提供了一个有价值的提醒，提醒我们当地的特质影响了摄影的接受，即使对于与媒体来源国联系相对密切的国家也是如此。因此，对于其他学者来说，在全面的国家背景下确立这些早期反应的基调是一种诱惑。在最初的几个月里，由于实际照片不稳定，数量很少，或者被秘密发明者故意隐藏，摄影主要通过语言而广为人知。相当令人惊讶的是，整个国际传播的话语可能在很大程度上依靠这些叙述的力量以及产生它们的个人和机构的权威而形成。在这些文本中，在它们的创作、流通和验证中，我们看到了在一年惊人压缩的空间中，“摄影”成为一种连贯的（如果总是有争议的）话语的结构。在收集这些信息时，First Exposures 做出了最重要的标志，它做了过去二十年最好的学术成果：使摄影史成为思想史，而不仅仅是对象史。这是一项至关重要的企业，但仍处于起步阶段。