In 1826, French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce pointed a crude camera out of his window in Le Gras and waited. The blurry result, a rooftop and a barn, is the world’s oldest surviving photograph. The whole process took eight hours.Two hundred years on, we take more photos in a day than existed in the whole of the 1800s. A new book, This Is Photography, looks back over the two centuries, one photo at a time, from Niepce’s rooftop to the first snap sent from a mobile. Editor Nathalie Herschdorfer, who put the book together, calls it “a story that is...