Geoffrey Batchen, professor, School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington If all history is ultimately about the present, what kind of historical account of photography can speak to our contemporary moment, a moment when this medium has been incorporated into multi-media communication devices which themselves are the very embodiment of global capitalism? This paper addresses this issue by tracing a history for early photography that makes the activity of reproduction and dissemination its central narrative. Photography’s origins are thereby located in the advent of industrial modernity and consumer capitalism, and within the inexorable logic of mass production and distribution. This is a story, then, about the multiplication and dispersal of photographic images rather than about the creation of any singular photograph. In short, this version of photography’s history destabilizes, rather than secures, the identity of the photograph, undermining all fixed certainties and declaring, once again, that 'photography' is the name of a problem rather than of a thing.