I strongly advise anyone who wants to start learning Photo-History to disregard the well-meaning advice of where to start given by others, specially to start at the beginning, or with "firsts".
Your point of entry should be your own, one that you are already curious about/interested in. Not someone else's point of interest, what they think you ought to know, or the order in which they think you should learn it.
Let your passion be your guide, and you will not grow weary, or feel like you have to push past mountains of information. There may be a particular photographer whose work haunts you; a time and place when things happened that have influenced you; ideas that sing to you; or a picture that looks like your own dreams. In my opinion, that is the place to get your feet wet.
Start by googling on the web, your local library, bookstore
or Amazon.
One last word of advice. This is a history of real people, not superheroes.... people who struggled, devoted their lives to this, sometimes succeeding. Mostly failing. Of ascendancy and decline. It's not all lollipops and moonbeams. Learn about them, too, not just the work. There is tendency to deify the "greats", and that often has a very negative effect on those starting out.
The one thing I can guarantee you is that you will be rewarded. For example....
This last saturday, I had the consummate pleasure of holding in my own hands for the first time, a print of Stieglitz's The Steerage. It was a gravure, as most of them are, not very big....and after all these years, I was ready for this unexpected pleasure.
Stieglitz's own words ran through my head and heart.... his account of the exciting moment when he took it, how and where he printed it....its reception when first shown....what many others have written about this image...and when he, as an old man, abandoned by all he helped (yes, the 'greats' in photography turned their backs on him), dying of a bad (and perhaps broken ) heart, saw it in a shop, and wanting to own a print of it, writes about how many days he would have to go hungry in order to be able to afford to buy it and own it once again.
--- Luis
