This website presents academic research articles on the early history of photography published by R. D. Wood between 1970 and 2008. In addition a few items that never reached printed publication have been placed here (see especially additional material on Daguerre’s Diorama, and some Miscellaneous sources of early history of photography), as well as three webpages of unpublished correspondence by the author on many aspects of the subject.
The website is
archived (since 2010) at the UK Webarchive.
A full URL basic listing is provided above, but with the listing on the Home Page most items have additional comments regarding the original publication.
When using the Home Page it is always displayed with a Contents menu in a frame on its left side of the screen, thus the full contents are easily available.
Also note that many of these articles are also available as PDFs: PDF files menu.
This is a personal site only in that it provides the publications on the history of photography of one person.
However it is appropriate here to at least add the personal reason why this site is named as Midley. The author’s paternal ancestors through much of the nineteenth century, in particular at the period the subject of these articles are set — in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s —, lived at Midley in the middle of the Romney Marsh (at the south west corner of Kent on the English Channel). They were agricultural labourers and shepherds — or, to use the local word, ‘Lookers’. It must have been a hard life on the Romney Marsh at that period. Yet Thomas Wood and wife Elizabeth were obviously healthy having fifteen children, all who lived to become adults. In the Midley area resided only about six families in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet at some earlier period there must surely have been a larger number of residents of the area, for there had been a small chapel in existence which has very long since survived only as a ruin, prominent in the surrounding flatness of the Marsh. Photography in the mid-19th century certainly did not touch their lives — they were typical of a neglected rural working class, ignored at the time and unknown now.
In my research on the history of the 1830s and 1840s (appropriate to dedicate it to those ‘Lookers’ at Midley of that period), I have been struck by the existence of many significant contributors to the beginnings of photography who have been greatly neglected or are entirely absent from what might be called the standard histories of the subject. The parameters of the early history of photography have become set, for example, by the self-promoting character of W. H. F. Talbot. The ‘standard’ texts need to be read and known, of course, but spend only a little time looking at primary sources, then the inevitable conclusion can be that the historiography of the subject remains contained within very narrow boundaries. Instead the history of photography requires some of the fresh air and wide open sky characteristic of Midley of the Romney Marsh.
What has been published from research by the author on primary sources (and what other research needs publication!) reconstructs forgotten episodes of the early history of photography no more than the surviving stones of the Midley Chapel can represent the original church. Maybe, dear reader, you can add a brick sometime to provide a fuller view of a Midley emblem history of photography.