Photographs are imbued with a certain level of veracity as
recordings of the external world. This accuracy is perceived as being at
a higher level for photographs than for other two-dimensional
representations of the world such as drawings and paintings. Do
photographs deserve this attention? Where does the veracity dwell, and
from where did it arise?
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Two of the recognized inventors of photography, Louis Daguerre and
William Henry Fox Talbot, had no doubt that their inventions possessed
high veracity. Talbot tided his first book The Pencil of Nature
(1844-46), and Daguerre called his version of the fixed image an
"imprint of nature" and claimed that the daguerreotype
"is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the
contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power
to reproduce herself." (1)
On a day-to-day level, logic dictates that we must accept that a
photograph can be used to represent, in some way, the external world as
it is perceived, conceived, and understood by humans. People use
photographs to represent the real world: for instance, to identify
persons (using passports, drivers' licenses), to document results
in scientific and medical research, and to illustrate fashion trends.
However, using a photograph for illustrative purposes or to verify
scientific findings is not the same as accepting that a photograph
accurately depicts the external world.
Up until the advent of digital imaging, only a few critics and
commentators on photography ever questioned the veracity of photographs.
Since the earliest attempts at fixing an image created by light falling
onto an emulsion, most of those who have made and viewed these images
have been convinced of the inherent veracity that photography supposedly
holds in regard to depicting the external world. Since the mid-1800s,
the general population has considered photography a better
representation of the external world than painting, despite logical
evidence to the contrary--until digital technology prompted a
re-examination.
The camera obscura had long been used as a tool to aid the accurate
drawing of scenes from the external world. With the daguerreotype of
1839, the image from a camera obscura had been fixed, as had been
achieved by Joseph Nicephore Niepce as early as 1824 (2) and Talbot in
1839. Photography, as a recording mechanism in the mid-1800s, was
different from anything that predated it. Accurate painting and drawing
is time consuming and requires skills many people lack. Though
preparation of photographic plates also required a specific skill set,
it no longer tested the manual dexterity and mastery of the brush,
pencil, or pen.
Many now argue that the historic veracity of photography has been
brought into focus by digital imaging because "digital imaging is
revolutionizing the way we think about photography." (3) Yet
silver-based photography has always had its manufactured images, its
abstract images, its "doctored" images and distortions of the
external world. The introduction of digital technology into the imaging
field and, in particular, computer-based seamless montage technique has
merely called the veracity of photographic images into question by a
larger audience. Manipulation has been part of photography since the
earliest times. Allegorical and propaganda pictures were created that
did not represent a real world. The reason that manipulated photographs
and unmanipulated photographs have coexisted since the beginning of
photography without raising more explicit questions as to the difference
may lie within the paradox that unmanipulated photographs derived a
higher level of veracity from manipulated photographs.
WHERE DOES THE VERACITY LIE?
The veracity of photography was present from the disclosure of the
various techniques that became modern photography. To some extent, the
veracity predated the introduction of photography because veracity is a
characteristic of the image created by the camera obscura. The level of
veracity bestowed upon the camera obscura image (appropriately applied)
was transferred to the photographic image (inappropriately applied--for
no lesser reason than the resultant photographic image, unlike the
camera obscura image, was monochromatic and textured by the surface
coating).
Some commentators suggest that photography inherited its veracity
from the Physionotrace, where a subject sat in the device and had their
profile traced onto a copper plate from which multiple copies could be
printed. The emerging middle class, who mostly subscribed to this
method, believed that the images thus produced "a mechanically
transcribed truth." (4) However, Silvia Kolbowski places the
verisimilitude of the photograph upon an early photographic experiment
in which Niepce reproduced an image by means of contact printing an
oiled engraving onto a light sensitive emulsion. (5) Mary Warner Marien
suggests that postmortem photographs, part of the Victorian mourning
ritual, were partly responsible for people's belief in
photography's high veracity--mostly over painting and memory. (6)
Jennifer Green-Lewis places the beginning of the rise in
photography's veracity in that same time Roger Fenton was sent to
photograph the Crimean War (1854-56). Yet Fenton's photographs show
the battlefield after the bodies were cleared away and, therefore, are
not accurate pictures of some of the truths of the event. She says,
"Fenton's pictures unambiguously contradicted the newspapers
of the day and the later history books." (7) Green-Lewis says the
photographs outweighed the written reports in the beliefs of the readers
of the day because "they were perceived as independent and
unmediated facts," (8) whereas the written reports had the bias of
the author attached. Yet, the rise in popularity of stereographic
photographs during the late 1850s and 1860s contributed to the perceived
high veracity of photographs by adding a three-dimensional illusion of
depth (9) when carried over into single view, black-and-white
photographs. Kolbowski says the verisimilitude of photography "is
still loudly proclaimed in the mass media and many areas of the
academy." (10)
Martha Rosler points out that many early landscape photographs were
double-exposed or double-printed to render clouds in the sky because the
orthochromatic emulsions of the era were incapable of achieving results
where clouds and landscape were both correctly exposed at once. She says
that veracity posed no problems for the photographer or viewer because
the manipulations "were in the service of a truer truth, one closer
to conceptual adequacy" (11) This statement presents a
contradiction for veracity's true meaning; on one hand, the
veracity is determined by the viewer, while on the other hand, veracity
is presented in manipulated images. In supporting the high veracity of
photography, Lancet (1859) suggested that "[p]hotography is so
essentially the Art of Truth--and the representative Truth in Art--that
it would seem to be the essential means of reproducing all forms and
structures of which science seeks for delineation." (12)
Paul Burrows suggests it is the camera operator, the photographer,
who is the untruthful one, more so than the photograph. "The camera
lies" (13) because the photographer is in control of the treatment
of subject matter in the picture. He says this extends to the picture
editor, caption writer, or others in the chain when the photograph is
used in a publication. Yet while the photographer is the first
responsible influence on a photograph apart from the subject (who may be
unaware of being photographed) and usually must bear the brunt of
accusation, it is not the photographer who gives photographs their
veracity--not directly. Daguerre, Niepce, and Talbot believed that
photographs were the product of nature, not of an operator. (14)
Elizabeth Ermarth (15) and Green-Lewis identify the creator "of the
realist photograph (the documentary picture, the medical record, the mug
shot) ..." (16) as a non-person, or at best a collective anonymous
author wherein they are perceived to have minimal influence over the way
the subject is shown. But the camera itself is a tool, an inanimate
object incapable of taking a photograph by itself without human
intervention.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS
At a time when the human eye was thought to be an accurate,
reliable, and uninterpretive instrument for viewing the external world,
the camera obscura was thought to be the equivalent of the human
eye--the "retine physique" (17) or physical eye, and therefore
incapable of distorting reality. Of those camera obscuras fitted with a
lens, some produced dark and vignetted images with muted hues. Just as
with modern photography, the equipment determined the quality of the
image. The idea of high veracity came to photography from the camera
obscura even though the first fixed images hardly resembled the image as
viewed by the camera obscura, or that of the scene in the real world.
The ability of daguerreotypes to show "extraordinary
resolution of detail, continuous tonal recording, and [optical]
perspective" (18) was a reason cited for the invention's
popularity as a scientific tool. But daguerreotypes are small and
difficult to view because they must be held at the correct angle to the
illumination source. (19) Likewise, they are monochromatic and present
an image that is laterally reversed. Talbot's paper
negative/positive process obtained lower resolution but the resultant
prints were larger and easier to view. At the time of its introduction,
photography was "celebrated for its putative ability to produce
accurate images of what was in front of its lens." (20) This was
largely because "images were seen as being mechanically produced,
and thus free of the selective discrimination of the human eye and
hand." (21) Yet scenes in photographs are rendered in such a manner
as to show the external world in a way different from how it is viewed.
Apart from the characteristics already mentioned, any subject movement
was blurred because the early daguerreotypes needed up to a 30-minute
exposure. Marien writes, "For many people in the nineteenth
century, the photograph alloyed a mirror's fine detail with a
window's view of the world," (22) and Green-Lewis points out
that "the discourse that shaped the early understanding of
photography's relationship with truth was distinguished by an
eagerness to overlook its human agency." (23)
Green-Lewis posits two misconceptions about photography's
veracity: The misconception of the "lack of intrusive surface of
other media ... like a pane of glass between the viewer and the world
..." (24) and, consequently, that "being invisible,
photography is also assumed to be more accurate than other forms of
representation." (25) The photographer is seen, under this
definition, as an uninvolved innocent bystander merely using a detached
machine, the picture produced by autogenesis. There are marks on a
surface, just no "marks of human labour." (26)
PROCESSING THE PHOTOGRAPH
The photographic process itself is as problematic as the equipment
used in the "hands-off" nature of the process that reinforced
perceived levels of veracity in the early years of its development.
Beyond the initial stages, for much of its history, the processing side
of photography has been hidden from the photographer by multinational
corporations that have controlled the developing and printing of
photographs since 1888 for the amateur market. This created a
mystification of the process in the mind of the general public, who
remain unaware of the manipulative factors of that production. As Mary
Price puts it, "the assembly line performance of operations"
(27) that were once done by the photographer, once relinquished by the
amateur, meant that "claims to manipulation" (28) no longer
survived for the snapshot and the perception of veracity increased. If
the general public had remained more aware of the manipulations possible
in processing the photograph, the veracity of photographs may not be as
high as it is. However, this does not take into account the knowledge
possessed by professional photographers, picture editors, and others of
the techniques of photographic production.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Early photographic processes varied in their ability to produce
consistent quality. On one hand there is the "grainy, soft and
shadowy quality of, for example, the Hill and Adamson portraits of the
mid-1840s ..." (29) compared with the "crisp, detailed
appearance" of the work of Edouard-Denis Baldus of 1851. (30) The
calotypes of Louis De Clercq from the mid-1850s are soft with a narrow
tonal range. Talbot's first images were not very sharp because his
table salt and nitrate of silver coating penetrated his paper's
fibers. (31) The albumen prints from Gustave Le Gray's glass
negatives from the 1860s are sharp, full of fine detail with a wide
tonal range. It is difficult to distinguish them from photographs taken
a hundred years later with modern materials. While soft, grainy
photographs would hardly lead a viewer to say such an image resembles
the external world, the sharp, finely detailed images might. Except they
are monochrome and do not resemble, in that regard, the colored external
world, and might show detail more sharply than the human eye can
resolve. So how a conclusion that photography should have a high
veracity came about at the beginning of photography is difficult to
fathom using these criteria.
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONCEPT GENERALLY
Max Kozloff (32) suggests that photographs partly receive their
high veracity because people believe they affirm the external world. But
as John Berger says, "The relationship between what we see and what
we know is never settled." (33) Many of the comparisons that gave
rise to photography's veracity were with painting or human memory,
(34) not comparisons with the external world. Yet in the nineteenth
century, photography did not have the high veracity it gathered to
itself in the twentieth century. Susan Sontag claims that "the
consequences of lying" (35) are greater for photographs than for
paintings because a fake painting falsifies the history of art whereas a
fake photograph falsifies reality. Green-Lewis says of photography:
"Doubts concerning its limitations, however, were largely
outweighed by enthusiasm for its possibilities, and the camera was far
more widely regarded as an instrument of revelation than of
deceit." (36) Revelation, however, does not imply truth; it merely
reveals detail.
Many photographers make photomontages or staged tableaux in
attempts to create a more desirable image than is possible simply by
pointing a camera at the external world. In this regard they are aware
that photography has a veracity that can be exploited to convince the
viewer that their created scene is more truthful than a similar scene
created by painting. John Tagg suggests that, by the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, the increasing use of photographs by medical, legal,
and government instrumentalities helped establish a truth in photography
alongside the veracity it derived from its hands-off mechanical nature.
(37) Photography provided a "metaphorical substance" (38) to a
truthful relationship of reality and provided confirmation of what
reality ought to be. "The camera had by the [1890s] become a means
of establishing identity as well as verifying authenticity...."
(39) Particularly pertinent, says Tagg, is the use of photographs by
British police. Of two written guides for police photographers from
which Tagg quotes, he says police were "unshaken in their belief in
the photograph as a direct transcription of the real." (40) He
suggests that the police photographers who wrote the guidebooks see
falsifications such as cropping, retouching, or any interference with
the negative as "perversions of this purity of nature." (41)
William Ivins says that for people "the nineteenth century began by
believing that what was reasonable was true and it wound up by believing
that what it saw a photograph of was true." (42)
At most, it might be said that photography shows the shape and
forms of objects more correctly than other means of three-dimensional
representation. In a report to the United States Secretary of the
Interior in 1875, Dr. Ferdinand V. Hayden, an expedition leader
criticizing poor quality illustrations of topographic features made
twenty years earlier, says, "The truthful representations of
photography render such careless work so apparent that it would not be
tolerated at the present day." (43) The illustrations Hayden was
referring to showed mountains "with angles of sixty degrees
inclination, covered with great glaciers and modelled upon the type of
any other than ..." those they purported to represent.
Retrospectively, it is most obvious that some of the belief in
photography's veracity stems from such comparisons with poor
quality illustration, and not from comparisons with the object in the
external world. This should be seen as criticism of some illustrators,
not necessarily verification for photography.
In 1909, George Bernard Shaw wrote along similar lines about the
"terrible truthfulness of photography." (44) He was comparing
a painting of a pretty girl, whom the painter calls "Juliet"
after Shakespeare's character, with a photograph of a pretty girl,
whom the photographer calls "Juliet." As Shaw describes it,
the photograph "is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to
be Juliet." (45) Like in the previous example, this is affording
photography a high veracity while comparing a photograph with a painting
and not with the object in the external world. This situation might
indicate that the clear meaning of the perceived high veracity as it
applies to photographs has changed over time. The terrible truthfulness
of photographs once meant "as compared with painting" whereas
more recently it has come to mean "as compared with the object in
the external world." This change might have been brought about by
the introduction over time of sharper images due to faster emulsions in
conjunction with faster shutter speeds, truer color images, and a more
sophisticated appreciation of images.
Always, the photograph's "direction has been towards the
revelation of truths," (46) and this accelerated with the beginning
of deliberate documentation of things and events, came to maturation
with the establishment of photojournalism, and continues still. As an
exercise of propaganda--brainwashing--photography's veracity has
been hugely successful, but it seems not to be the product of a sentient
mind, only a theme running through history, an inevitability based on a
fraud.
Veracity did not exist for photographs before the first photograph.
Whatever veracity was contained in illustrations made using the camera
obscura transferred to photography, but the higher claim came from the
process itself, first called by Daguerre. As Alan Thomas suggests,
"It took the Victorians, both photographers and the public, some
time to learn" the visual language of photography. (47) George
Levine states that nineteenth-century realism "was not a solidly
self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in
representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create
a new reality." (48)
Perhaps a mistaken belief in a high veracity for photography lies
not in a concept but in the language used to talk about the subject. As
Green-Lewis explains: "The verb to photograph is not distinct from
its noun form." (49) This understanding continues in present times
with reference to taking photographs rather than making them. The
picture, this suggests, "is already there, we do nothing to change
it ... merely carry it away...." (50) The language has allowed a
confusion to arise in the mind of the viewer.
THE MIND OF THE VIEWER
Stanley Cavell supposes that the difference between the object
itself and a photograph of the object is sense-data. (51) If the
sense-data of the photographed object were the same as the sense-data of
the object "we couldn't tell a photograph of an object from
the object itself." (52) Those who believe in the veracity of
photographs do so because they want to believe it and because they have
a vested interest in doing so. Professional photographers need to sell
photographs to earn a living; newspaper owners and editors want to sell
newspapers; critics and commentators need to enliven the debate to
continue being published; and so on. The idea perpetuated and the public
caught the craze. Ivins writes that the viewers of early photographs
talked of "photographic distortion" until photograph-viewing
was so commonplace that the audience became conditioned to photographic
images and the distortion was gradually displaced in their viewing mode,
which in turn led to descriptions such as "photographic
precision" and "photographic truth." (53) Patrick Maynard
suggests that viewers' puzzlement about what early photographic
images actually were about, that is, what and how they depicted the
external world, "should have signaled an already existing unclarity
in their understanding of traditional media as well." (54) In this
regard, viewers of camera obscura images did not (or perhaps could not)
separate in their minds the image projected (even if it was imperfect)
from the image as seen.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Independently, Jean Hagstrum (55) and Geoffrey Batchen point out
that the terminology of the nineteenth century might cloud the
definitions for today's reader. If the meaning of terms such as
truth and reality were understood differently in the nineteenth century
from what they are in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries then
comparisons between how modern viewers perceive photography's
veracity and how their nineteenth-century counterparts perceived it are,
perhaps, impossible to make. As a continuum through time, the
understanding of veracity might be misconstrued, tautegorically, wherein
writers of the nineteenth century mean one thing and readers a hundred
years later construe something else. Batchen expands on Hagstrum's
idea by suggesting that landscapes viewed with optical devices were
"no longer seen as a guarantee of unmediated reality" (56) but
were taken as metaphors, one of which he lists as
"real-ideal." (57) It may be difficult, if not impossible, for
the modern scholar to ascertain the correct meaning and nuance of the
thinking of the time even from the writing of the inventors of
photography and their contemporaries who commented on and criticized the
results.
Logic will only apply when like is compared with like. The
difference in appearance between the image projected in a camera obscura
and the scene in the external world is marked, but not very much so. The
difference in appearance between the image in the camera obscura and the
daguerreotype or calotype is marked, very much so. It requires more than
logic to infer the same true things from both images even when it is
conceded that there is similarity in detail, tonal range, shape, and
form. The ardent desire to see a fixed image formed by the camera
obscura was strong enough in the mind of the general public that when
this was achieved by Daguerre, Talbot, and others, the public ignored
the discrepancy between the tiny, monochromatic recorded image and what
the scene from the external world would have looked like.
A photograph freezes a moment in time and usually retains much
detail from the scene depicted. If the image shows too much detail
beyond that which humans can discern from looking, the resulting
photograph will not match what is seen in the external world; if the
photograph has low resolution (as do Talbot's early images) the
resultant photographs will not match the external world as humans see
it. In both these ways photographs are different from how humans see the
external world so that the picture cannot faithfully represent anything
the viewer has seen or experienced in the external world. The most
convincing argument for photography's veracity is that viewers
"imagine correctly and in great detail how their subjects
are...." (58) Derrick Price and Liz Wells warn that direct
comparison with perceptions now are inappropriate because in the
mid-nineteenth century "drawing was received differently" (59)
so photography was perceived by some as replacing "the
informational sketch," (60) more so than interpretative or creative
painting. Photography was "seen as offering mechanical accuracy
combined with a degree of quality control." (61) "It showed
the world without contrivance or prejudice" (62)--at least until
the pictorialists abandoned straight photography.
Price and Wells point out that the renewed debate about
photography's veracity opened up by the introduction of digital
imaging "shows that, in everyday parlance, photographs are still
viewed as realistic." (63) Certainly, the primary characteristic of
photography is the dependence upon the object present at the moment of
making the original exposure. In all cases, because of its production,
the photograph has an individual and distinctive relationship with the
object in front of the camera. "This physical presence is the
origin or source of the possibility of an image and, consequently, the
image stands as an index of the once physical presence." (64) Many
commentators, including Roland Barthes and Goran Sonesson, have
identified these criteria. And as Price and Wells expand, "It is
this indexical status [that] is the source of the authority of the
image." (65) Barthes, as Price and Wells point out, regards
photographs as signifying reality "rather than reflecting or
representing it. The emphasis is upon what the viewer as
'reader' of the image takes as the principal cues and clues
for use as the basis of interpretation." (66)
The use of photographs in heritage tourist venues to depict a
history that might be unrelated to the original purpose of the
photograph has renewed photography's "implicit claim to
authenticity." (67) For instance, a photograph of factory laborers
taken to emphasize the unsafe working conditions might be later
presented to depict the fashions of the era or the appearance and stance
of members of a particular trade. To some extent, veracity was thrust
upon photography in its early stages as a reaction to contrived images
such as Oscar Gustave Rejlander's Two Ways of Life (1857) and Henry
Peach Robinson's Fading Away (1858) and "practitioners of the
medium were urged to stick to images of observable reality" (68)
because the photograph's optically accurate image better resembled
human vision. This ignored the fact that both examples given could just
as well have been staged and photographed on one negative as created in
a darkroom from many negatives. This debate was, however, a concurrent
debate about photography as high art more so than about its veracity,
having already been assumed, as can be seen in the idea that rendering a
photograph "a little out of focus" (69) would make it less
real and more painterly, as the pictorialists believed. This sacrifice
of detail went against a demand for photographs to "submit to the
iron law of 'things as they are'" (70) held by some
practitioners and critics of the time because "photography is
pre-eminently the art of definition." (71) Perhaps it was the
newness of the imaging medium that confused nineteenth-century thinking.
Marien describes photography as providing "a new kind of
verisimilitude, not quite a copy, not quite an actuality...."(72)
Human understanding of reality, and beliefs about
photography's depiction of reality, is the product of education,
cultural influences, ability to discern information, and reactions to
the development of ideas over time, along with the mind's sequences
of self-righting and filtering of knowledge. There are social
experiences that condition particular beliefs, mental function,
development, adaptation, and organization that may be in conflict or
allied to each other. A natural truth can be misinterpreted for many
reasons--propaganda, misunderstanding, misconception, etc.--and
accumulate over time. The key to this discussion ultimately lays in the
general public's belief in a high veracity for photographs. Having
grown up with a notion that "the camera never lies," having
taken photographs themselves and seen the resultant image so similar to
what they saw in the viewfinder, the average person supposes the high
veracity of photographs either without considering the matter deeply
enough to ponder the opposite or ignoring the characteristics of the
photograph that do not resemble the characteristics of the external
world: such as black-and-white images of colored scenes, and
still/frozen scenes from a moving continuum. In some instances they see
photographs of people they know well, including themselves, and consider
that the image does not look like that person, or themselves, yet the
belief stands unquestioned as to photography's high veracity. The
illusion is an allusion. Miles Orvell expresses the idea that "the
cultural significance of the camera lies not in the image it produced,
but in how people thought about it." (73) To take this idea and
place it in the context herein brings the notion that people who want a
high veracity for photographs will draw such a conclusion. In effect,
people take the veracity of photography as a given and give away the
notion of accurate representation.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
MICHAEL SHAPTER is an Australian medical and forensic photographer
who has published three books of his fine art photography, and is
currently completing a doctoral degree.
NOTES 1. Louis J.M. Daguerre, "Daguerreotype" in Alan
Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven:
Leete's Island Books, 1980), 12. 2. A.D. Bensusan, "Letters to
the Editor" British Journal of Photography 149, no. 7389 (2002),
11. 3. B. Blackman, "Intro--analog photography & digital
imaging" in Creating Digital Illusions; available at
www.image-ine.com/high/b_works/ab_analog_digital_works.html. 4. John
Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1988), 40. 5. Silvia Kolbowski,
"Playing with dolls" in Carol Squiers, ed., Over Exposed:
Essays on Contemporary Photography (New York: New Press, 1999), 162. 6.
Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History
1839-1900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75. 7.
Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the
Culture of Realism (London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 102. 8.
Ibid. 9. Marien, 78. 10. Kolbowski, 162. 11. Martha Rosler, "Image
simulations, computer manipulations, some considerations" Ten-8
2(2) 1991, 54. 12. Lancet, January 22, 1856, 89. 13. Paul Burrows,
"What you see is what you want to see," ProPhoto 58, no. 7
(July 2002), 5. 14. Marien, 3. 15. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and
Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983). 16. Green-Lewis, 227. 17. Dominique Francois Arago, Comptes
Rendus Hebdomadaires des Seances de Academie des Science (Vol. 8)
(1839), 270. 18. Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking
Through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 72. 19.
Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 61. 20. Derrick Price and Liz Wells,
"Thinking about photography" in Liz Wells, ed., Photography: A
Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2000), 13. 21.
Ibid. 22. Marien, 39. 23. Green-Lewis, 103-104. 24. Ibid., 109. 25.
Ibid. 26. Ibid., 119. 27. Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange,
Confined Space (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 30. 28.
Ibid. 29. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions & Practices (Media &
Societies Series, Vol. 4) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 4. 30. Ibid. 31. Maynard, 42. 32. Max Kozloff, Photography and
Fascination (Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1979). 33. John Berger, Ways of
Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 7. 34. See Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"The stereoscope and the stereograph" in Trachtenberg, ed. See
also note 1 and Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Sun-painting and
sun-sculpture," Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861), 14. 35. Susan
Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977), 86. 36.
Green-Lewis, 3. 37. Tagg, 60-61. 38. Green-Lewis, 20. 39. Ibid., 68. 40.
Tagg, 98. 41. Ibid. 42. William Mills Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual
Communication (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 94. 43. Alan
Thomas, The Expanding Eye (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1978), 37. 44.
Ibid., 163. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 77. 47. Ibid., 161. 48. George Levine,
The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
19-20. 49. Green-Lewis, 64. 50. Ibid. 51. Stanley Cavell, "More of
the World Viewed" in Stanley Cavell, ed., The World Viewed:
Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979), 20. 52. Ibid. 53. Ivins, 138. 54. Maynard, 119. 55. Jean
Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
56. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 81. 57. Ibid. 58. Maynard, 29. 59.
Price and Wells, 13. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 15. 62. Ibid., 16. 63. Ibid.,
18. 64. Ibid., 34. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 43. 67. Ibid., 60. 68. Marien,
88. 69. William Newton "Address to the Photographic Society of
London," Journal of the Photographic Society 1 (March 3, 1853),
6-7; and Henri De la Blanchere, "L'Art du photographe,"
Amyot Editeur (1859), 3. 70. H.J. Morton, "The Sister Arts,"
Philadelphia Photographer 3 (March 1866), 72. 71. Henry Peach Robinson,
"Pictorial Effects in Photography," 1971 reprint (Pawlet, VT:
Helios Press), 145 (first published in 1869). 72. Marien, 111. 73. Miles
Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture,
1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 199.
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