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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.