What is the history of photography? Or what is the history of photography for - perhaps a better question? Reading a fairly recent 'alternative history of photography' prompts me to ask this question, among others.

In one sense, the history of photography is the complete list of events and actions concerning photography from the first pre-cursoral thoughts or inventions to the latest click of the probably digital shutter. Starting perhaps at Plato's cave with its shadow images and ending (or rather continuing) at the moment you are reading this. The history of photograph is everything about photography that has ever happened and will ever happen.

'A history of photography' is something different. Any history has to poke around in the crude material of 'the history' to find the particular nuggets that fit its intentions. The historian has to decide what things are important, and what is not. There are many histories of photography, dependent on the viewpoint of their creators, although they fall mainly into a number of types.

Early histories tended to stress the technical advances. If we were writing a history of this type, it might start with the camera obscura and early chemical observation of light sensitivity in silver salts, going from there to Wedgewood and Davy's first photographic images created with the solar microscope and thence to Niepce, Daguerre and Talbot. So far at least it is a well-trod path (common to most published 'Histories'.) In the twentieth century it might look at the impact on photography of the miniature cameras (such as the Leica) and advances in picture reproduction that made possible the illustrated press, and other significant advances such as electronic flash, instant film, the 35mm SLR and the digital camera.

Of course, being a history of photography, there would be a need for photographs, and these would doubtless include those by some famous names - perhaps including (as well as those mentioned already) photographers such as Roger Fenton, Robert Capa, W Eugene Smith, Brassai, Edgerton and many others familiar to us all. But there would also probably be many pictures by photographers who we have never heard of - including a number where the photographer was unknown.

Another attempt to put some pattern into the study of photography is to think of it in terms of artistic movements. At times - such as the Photo-Secession at the end of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century - some photographers conveniently regarded themselves in this fashion. Other periods need to have labels and common motivations imposed on them by the historian, and the fit is not always comfortable.

This approach leads to a 'canon', a list of significant photographers through whom we can study the history of photography. It's a convenient approach (and one which to some extent underpins About Photography's 'Directory of Notable Photographers'.) However it can easily allow us to lose sight of the vast bulk of photography. At the time of the Photo-Secesssion, there were perhaps a thousand photographers around the world involved in this movement, of whom a few dozen were producing outstanding work. The total output of all of these photographers in this movement was perhaps a fraction of a per cent of the photography of the times.

Another approach to photographic history is to think of photography in terms of 'genres' such as portraiture, still-life, landscape, documentary, record, reportage, amateur photography... It is an approach that would include many photographs by well-known photographers, but could again lead to the inclusion of pictures from outside of the 'canon', so long as a wide enough range of genres was considered.

Related to this, but approaching the subjects from a different angle, is to look at the social functions of photography at different times, and perhaps also for different strata of society. Thus in the early years of photography, its dominant function for the middle classes was as a means of getting portraits of themselves and their loved ones, while it was also a kind of scientific hobby for some of the richer upper class. Work such as Hill and Adamson's fine calotype portraiture would be viewed largely in the light of the function of photography in providing reference material for artists.

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