The invention of photography in 1839 sparked both fascination and dread among artists: while portrait painters, for example, were rightly afraid of a drastic decline in their business, others quickly discovered the numerous possibilities the new medium opened up for them.

The playful and creative engagement with the medium, which had been the norm until then, came to an end precisely at the moment when the Vienna Secession first exhibited photographs as independent works of art. Discovering painters as photographers and photo collectors opens up a view into a previously unimagined world of images. Interest in the technical image runs through the entire spectrum of 19th-century painting: whether artists specialized in history paintings or Oriental scenes, or created interior designs, formal portraits, or intimate genre scenes, none of them shunned photography. The initial and by no means unfounded fear that technology would marginalize the visual arts gave way to an inventive integration of these new possibilities into their own creative processes; numerous examples now demonstrate for the first time just how creatively Austrian artists approached this. Even the small, reflective daguerreotypes—unique pieces with fascinatingly precise detail—served as models for print portraits for artists like Josef Kriehuber, but it was not until the paper photograph, which became widespread in the 1850s, that truly offered painters new possibilities for application.