This monumental survey presents the history of photography from its nineteenth-century origins to the digital threshold, combining technical evolution, aesthetic developments, documentary practice, social use, and artistic experimentation. Edited by Michel Frizot and written by an international group of specialists, the volume assembles a vast visual and textual narrative in which photography is approached not merely as a sequence of inventions, but as a complex cultural and historical force. Richly illustrated throughout, the work has become a major reference in photographic historiography. The volume is structured chronologically and thematically, beginning with pre-photographic experiments, daguerreotype and calotype processes, and the industrial expansion of photography in the nineteenth century. It proceeds through portraiture, ethnographic photography, documentary traditions, pictorialism, modernism, avant-garde practices, photojournalism and late twentieth-century transformations. The book combines essays, visual dossiers, reproductions, and historical analyses, positioning photography simultaneously as technological medium, artistic practice, documentary instrument and social phenomenon. Its scope and scale make it function both as scholarly reference work and visual encyclopedia of photographic history.