A session exploring some of the 100 original texts that, now brought together in an anthology, talk about the origin and the first decade of photography as narrated by its protagonists. These texts, the vast majority of which have been translated into Spanish for the first time, are distributed in three volumes: Utopia, Materiality and Praxis.

Martí Llorens and Rebecca Mutell will comment some passages of the volume Utopia to immerse us in the first uncertain steps towards photography, from the precursory ideas to its tangible materialisation, highlighting the efforts and challenges faced by the pioneers who laid the foundations of this revolutionary medium. In the volume Materiality, we will trace the exciting period surrounding the public announcement of photography, exploring the diverse reactions that this discovery provoked in society, marking a crucial milestone in visual and cultural history. Finally, with Praxis, we will focus our attention on the first practical applications of photography, revealing new artistic and scientific possibilities, and generating debates about its professionalisation and evolution.

It is not only by looking at their photographs that we can understand and explain the work of the pioneers of photography. For this reason, inquiring from the 21st century about the utopia tenaciously pursued by Niépce, Daguerre or Talbot, among others, can perhaps now help us to reflect on the place that photography occupies today in a world in which the dystopian gaze seems to have definitively replaced the utopian vocation that characterised its pioneers.