Through an analysis of French photographic culture from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the author sheds light on the interdependence between artistic expression and society, reconstructing the main phases of the radical transformation of the vision of the world produced by the techniques of the photographic image, and highlighting the role it played in its early days in the evolution of the individual portrait, and later of the collective portrait. Devoting particular attention to the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century, Freund analyses, from the perspective of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, the relationship of the affective and aesthetic system with mechanical production and reproduction, as against the authentic veneration for works considered unique in which earlier generations had grown up.