Everybody takes photographs. You have probably taken a few hundred yourself. We all have an interest in photography, but how much do we know about the medium’s history and evolution? For years television people have talked about making a big, definitive series on photography. Now, finally, it has been done by BBC Four; and it is very good.

In six 50-minute episodes, The Genius of Photography tames this great, wayward subject, cajoles it into manageable chunks and holds it up to the light. It would have been easy simply to display loads of historic photographs and discuss the careers of the great photographers. But The Genius of Photography goes beyond lists and confronts the medium as an art form, but with all the ambiguities that make it so interesting.

Watching the series is like leafing through a fat photography book enlivened by a good script. Images are held in long, lingering frames on the screen while the narration puts their creators in cultural context.

The series begins with the camera obscura images of the modern photographer Abelardo Morell. We watch him black out the windows of a room in a Venetian palazzo, cut out a small hole in the blackout material and let in an inverted image of a Palladian-domed church, which is projected on to the far wall of the room.

Early on comes the story of Louis Daguerre, the painter and theatre set designer, who in 1837 announced the invention of the daguerreotype. Meanwhile, his rival, William Henry Fox Talbot, a writer on botany and cuneiform, invented the earliest form of photograph that could be reproduced on paper from a negative.

The first episode covers the origins of the photograph and we are shown a daguerreotype being made as a kind of “mirror with a memory”. The pace hots up after this as photography becomes commercially viable and widely collected. With George Eastman’s introduction of the Kodak in 1888 and his slogan “You press the button – we do the rest”, people were enticed into carrying a camera and taking spontaneous shots. For the first time, people began to look the camera in the eye and say “cheese”.

Among the interviewees is Philip Jones Griffiths, the veteran Magnum photographer who has covered many of the conflicts of the second half of the 20th century. He talks about the “visual orgasm” of knowing you have got the shot, and discusses the work of his fellow Magnum photographer, Henri Cartier Bresson, the big-game hunter of photography, who patiently stalked his subjects before pouncing. The producers have wisely steered clear of too much photo-journalism (and, for that matter, fashion photography), although they cannot help lingering over the photogenic Robert Capa, the first celebrity war photographer, who had two rules of photojournalism: the first to get close, the second to get closer. Less well known is Tony Vaccaro, an American soldier-photographer, still living, who describes his own experiences taking photographs while on patrol, risking his neck to get shots as gunfire burst around him.

The narrative then moves from war – D-Day, the Holocaust and Hiroshima – to the American photographic journeys of Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, William Klein and William Eggleston, undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. The story becomes very US-centric here until we are brought back into European waters with the marvellous tale of the spat in 1994 between the Magnum veterans and Martin Parr. Magnum’s founders had set up the agency as a cooperative in 1947. It was to become a bastion of 20th-century photojournalistic values – politically engaged, liberal and serious.

Parr, a British photographer, shoots deadpan, and often vulgarly comic social critiques. Magnum photographers travelled the world; Parr took pictures in the local supermarket. When he applied to join, Cartier Bresson reportedly said: “I don’t know who you are. You are from another planet.”

Sadly, Cartier Bresson is no longer alive, but Jones Griffiths steps in to describe Parr’s work as “meaningless”. “Anyone who was described as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite photographer certainly didn’t belong in Magnum.” At the final ballot Parr scraped in by one vote. The irony is that Parr, a brilliant and eccentric loner of a very British sort, is the least clubbable person I know.

The theme of money runs strongly through the final episode, in which photography begins to be collected as fine art. Today, artists use cameras as readily as a palette and easel, and galleries show photographs as often as any other kind of art. Photography festivals have spread across the world and prices have climbed into the stratosphere. Last year a beautiful photograph of a pond in moonlight taken in 1904 by Edward Steichen, a vintage print made by the photographer with a perfect pedigree, was sold at Sotheby’s for $2.6 million.

The mechanics of print lines and editions are explained as well as the practices used for “improving” a shot. Today, of course, computers do the work. We are shown the complex practices of photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, who works with a large team of actors, lighting specialists and camera experts as well as digital wizards to make his fictional narrative tableaux.

This is nothing new. In 1851, as the series explains, Camille Silvy made a photograph of a river scene. Directing in exactly the same way as Crewdson 150 years later, he put members of the working class on the common land, put the bourgeoisie on a boat, added an artificial sky, changed the leaves on the trees, and pasted a cloud on the horizon. Someone else even operated the camera.

The series is comprehensive and thoughtful. One quibble is that there are too many Americans – photographers, dealers, curators, historians. Could there not have been more of the unexpected? But, given the ground they covered in a year, the programme-makers probably didn’t have time to find any surprises.

The Genius of Photography, Thur, BBC Four, 9pm

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