A history of nineteenth-century photography whose object is not so much photography itself but the photographic, that is, the set of conceptual categories that make an image specific as a photographic image, a choice that does not preclude the narrative, at times even detailed, of the events that marked the first decades of the medium’s life, but always with the intention of drawing continuous and bold connections between past and future, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, developing surprising links and solutions with respect to what is usually proposed in manuals. Beyond identifying subtle technical homologies capable of turning into true photographic philosophies, as happens for instance between the carte de visite and the photomatic, or convincing operative correspondences, as in the case of the valorisation of the “banal” that links the first Kodak with today’s cult of the snapshot, the book’s constant search for the photographic brings out the medium’s most significant concepts: from voyeurism to memory, from exhibitionism to the obsession with the archive, from the mirror to the construction of the imaginary.