Here’s the fly in the ointment: the history of chemical/mechanical devices used to create images and the history of photography are not one and the same. Photography -the recording of a trace of light on a surface- began way before man inhabited the earth and always involves a yin yang existence. There’s the trace and the perception of the trace. It’s a limit of western thought, I guess, that “enables” us to think of these as separate things: they aren’t.