Inaugural lecture from Professor Francis Hodgson

Overview and video

Photography still carries a tag of being 'marginal'. That dates from fear and incomprehension at the time of its invention, early in the Victorian period, when too much was made of the intervention in the process of machines. Yet the history of photography is the history of a continuous boom.

Depending on which numbers you believe, more photographs are now taken every day than were taken in the first hundred years of the medium. And the boom is not just in volume: it is not just that we carry fast and very effective cameras in our pockets with distribution mechanisms built-in. Photography has spread to all disciplines - all aspects of life. Francis Hodgson has been writing about photography for many years mainly to a non-specialist audience and will present a little of his conviction that whatever else photography is, it is not marginal.