John Minihan capturing photography's magic moments

Photographs have a curious power to stir the imagination, there is nothing quite like them for communicating a sense of the past.

Next year photography will be 175 years old. Louis Daguerre is credited with the birth of photography. In Paris in 1839 he exclaimed: “I have arrested the light.” The resulting image, called a Daguerreotype, was both positive and negative, depending on the lighting and angle in which it was viewed.

Every Daguerreotype was unique and the advent of the Kodak camera in 1888 made photography accessible to amateurs as well as professionals. Artists not immune to its allure began experimenting with the camera as a means of observing the world. A new interchange between art and photography began to develop.