ONE hundred and fifty years ago, photography was invented not once but twice.
In France, Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre made public the Daguerreotype process, which fixed an evanescent image on a mirrored metal plate. Two weeks later, in England, William Henry Fox Talbot announced what he called photogenic drawing, a method that produced a negative on sensitized writing paper. It is no exaggeration to say that the world has not been the same since.
The two inventors had temperaments that were nearly diametrically opposed. Daguerre, famous in Paris for his diorama theater, was a promoter and showman who appropriated the idea for photography from a hapless genius from the provinces, Niecephore Niepce. Talbot was an aristocrat, a country gentleman and amateur scientist whose experiments were motivated by his own inability to draw. Had it not been for Daguerre's well-publicized announcement, Talbot might have keep his photographic process to himself for years.
Nonetheless, it is Talbot's process, and not Daguerre's, that forms the basis for photography as we know it today. Because Talbot's prints were created from negatives, multiple copies of a single image could be made quickly and easily. In a sense, his invention did for visual imagery what the printing press had done for the written word, spreading its domain across social and geographic boundaries. It led to the formation within Western culture of a pervasive, democratic and undifferentiated flux of photographic images and their reproductions - a phenomenon that artists like Andy Warhol have made a central subject in today's art.
Besides inventing the negative-positive process of photography, Talbot produced the first published book to be illustrated with photographs. Called ''The Pencil of Nature,'' it was intended to demonstrate the potentials of the photographic process. To an extent that seems remarkable today, it did just that - even though Talbot's original plan to publish 50 plates in 10 volumes was curtailed to 24 plates in 6 installments, which appeared from 1844 to 1846.
All 24 images from ''The Pencil of Nature,'' along with eight variants that found their way into some copies, can be seen on display for the first time in a small gem of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The show, which was organized by Maria Morris Hambourg, an associate curator in the museum's department of prints and photographs, has charms out of proportion to its size. Its specimen prints are sure to send collectors and connoisseurs of 19th-century photography into paroxysms of pleasure and envy, and, more important, it has much to tell us about the ways photographic images have functioned in the world for the last 150 years.
In his ''History of Photography,'' Beaumont Newhall observes that the plates in ''The Pencil of Nature'' are ''mostly of architecture, still-life arrangements, or works of art.'' But this analysis misses Talbot's breadth of purpose in selecting which images to include. There are three pictures, for example, that show the photographer's possessions arrayed on shelves: his china, his glassware and his books. In his commentary on the image of the china, Talbot noted that such a picture might serve as evidence if pieces of the collection were stolen. In essence, he foresaw not only the future of photography for insurance purposes but the entire arena of photographic documentation as well.
Talbot included pictures of sculpture, lithographs and drawings to show how photography could be of use in the study of art. He published a facsimile of a printed page to demonstrate how writing could be duplicated. His images of a piece of lace, each one unique, were made by using the lace itself as a negative. If only the inventor could return today to see art-history students looking at slides of paintings in lecture halls, to watch photocopy and fax machines churn out duplicate pages and to admire the creative photograms of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.
Talbot and his assistant, Nicholaas Henneman, also took some of the world's first tourist snapshots. On a trip to Paris in 1843, they captured an elevated view of the city's boulevards that is uncannily similar to Daguerre's own image of the Boulevard du Temple, taken five years earlier. Within another 10 years, photographers would be journeying as far as Egypt to record the wonders of other lands. Today, we have pictures taken on the moon.
A few of Talbot's plates show evidence of an overt esthetic intention. ''The Haystack,'' with its leaning ladder, and ''The Open Door,'' with its askew broom, are genre pictures pure and simple. Those and a still life called ''A Fruit Piece'' consciously echo the prevailing painting styles of the day. Of ''The Open Door,'' Talbot wrote, ''We have sufficient authority in the Dutch school of art for taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence.''
The picture that seems most modern, or perhaps more accurately post-modern, is called ''The Ladder.'' Purporting to be a vignette of life on Talbot's estate, it is a carefully arranged tableau for which the three figures around the ladder had to pose for perhaps a minute. One looks at it and thinks of Bruce Charlesworth, Eileen Cowin, Nic Nicosia and a half-dozen others who now make a point of stage managing their images.