LIGHT & The CITY
The Untold Story of the Birth of Photography in America
A Documentary Film Now in Development
Light & The City will aims to correct historic record and attribution, restore visibility to overlooked innovators and their descendants, expand the cultural understanding of how photography took root in the U.S. and introduce newly uncovered documents, objects, and evidence now coming to light.
Light & The City will tell the story of photography’s beginnings in America — not as a borrowed European achievement, but as a homegrown act of invention rooted in New York’s workshops, rooftops, and factories.
Project Overview
For nearly two centuries, the history of photography in America has been told through a familiar cast of figures—Mathew Brady, Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz, and others who shaped the medium in its later evolution. But new archival research led by Eric Taubman, founder of the Penumbra Foundation, has brought forward documentary evidence that reshapes the origins of this history entirely.
Taubman’s findings uncover the foundational roles of the Lewis and Drummond families, whose work in New York beginning in 1839—the same year photography was announced in Paris—marks the earliest known photographic manufacturing, distribution, and process innovation in the United States. Their forgotten contributions reveal a previously unrecognized industrial, scientific, and family-based network at the very birth of American photography.
This new research demands a new telling of history.
Preliminary Synopsis
Light & The City begins in 1839, when Samuel Morse returned from Paris with news of the daguerreotype and opened one of the first photographic classrooms atop New York University. But the story quickly moves beyond Morse, tracing the rise of William and W.H. Lewis, whose Chatham Square workshop became America’s first photographic manufacturing and distribution company, later expanding to New Windsor, New York — a town so shaped by the industry that locals called it “Daguerreville.”
The narrative deepens with the arrival of Alonzo (A.J.) Drummond, whose marriage into the Lewis family linked early American photography to the development of carbon printing and industrial process refinement.
Through newly surfaced primary sources, rare archival images, and on-location cinematography, the film reveals how photography grew not from galleries, but from factories, family enterprises, chemical workrooms, immigrant knowledge, and the economic energy of a rapidly changing city.
With Eric Taubman as the film’s historical guide (off-camera), Light & The City restores New York’s role not merely as a backdrop but as the birthplace of American photographic culture — years earlier, and far more industrially rooted, than history has yet acknowledged.
This is not a revision — it is a restoration.
Production Framework
Development: Documentary Film Fund (501c3) with the institutional support of Penumbra Foundation. Producer: Heritage Film Project Executive Producer: Eric TAUBMAN (Penumbra Foundation) Director: Eduardo MONTES-BRADLEY; Line Producer Soledad LIENDO Tentative Budget: $340,000 USD Length: 30–60 minutes All terms are preliminary and non-contractual, reflecting a shared intent to continue developing the project jointly as research and funding advance.