etymology of 'photography'

‘photography’, etymology of, from photos (ϕοτοσ), light, and graphos (γραοσ), writing, delineation, or painting. Although ‘heliography’, ‘photogeny’, and ‘daguerreotypy’, were first used as alternatives, ‘photography’ eventually gained universal precedence as the preferred name. First published by the German astronomer Johann von Mädler in the Vossische Zeitung, the name appears to have occurred to Charles Wheatstone and Sir John Herschel independently in England. (Hercules Florence in Brazil had already used the term photographie—albeit to describe a cameraless process—in his experimental notebooks in 1833-4, but these were not discovered until much later.) Herschel had long been the authority on new nomenclature, and his use of the term in ‘Note on the Art of Photography’, 14 March 1839, was a catalyst for its adoption as a properly inclusive name for both ‘photogenic drawing’ and ‘daguerreotypy’.

— Kelley E. Wilder

Bibliography

• Schaaf, L. J., ‘Sir John Herschel's 1839 Paper on Photography’, History of Photography, 3 (1979)