A bird’s-eye panorama of a century and a half of photographic invention and creation, exploring different "ways of seeing" through a series of key images, the most significant of the various trends and ideas, set in sequence and analysed in their mutual relationships by the historian Michel Frizot. Volume I: from invention to photographic art (1839-1880); volume II: the medium of modern times (1880-1939); volume III: from the instant to the imaginary (1930-1970). Among the many authors: Nadar, Edward S. Curtis, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Mario Giacomelli, Edward Weston, Lisette Model, William Klein, Les Krims, Christian Boltanski and Josef Koudelka.