Chapter one
The myth of photographic truth

Photographic images have historically enjoyed, in our societies, a unique role, based for the most part on their supposed credibility. They have been acknowledged to offer a truthful visual representation of the world and our societies accept(ed) as truth sentences such as "Photographs don't lie," "A picture is worth a thousand words," and "Seeing is believing."[5] For instance, many historians take old photographs for granted as document of things that were or happened and unquestionably use them to investigate our past. In the judiciary system [6] , the reliability of conventional photography - its power of authentication - has led it to be termed, "The Silent Witness" and courtrooms have admitted photographs as evidence without collateral testimony to incriminate or prove someone's innocence (Guilshan, 1992: 368). States and governments utilise them to identify and classify their citizens through visual identification and photojournalists are believed to bring home the truth of what is happening in the world. How did photographs earn this privileged belief that we have in them; that they are accurate representations of reality? What are the peculiarities which set photography apart from other modes of representation? What are the foundations on which photography has rested its claims as an objective reflection of reality?
As we shall see later, the progress made in electronic imaging radically challenges the very idea of photographic objectivity. Therefore, it is fundamental to examine these questions if we are to address fully the current debate elicited by the new technology.
This chapter will attempt to answer these questions by examining the fundamental characteristics of the photographic medium and the manner in which it can be distinguished from other visual media, as well as the different assumptions - historical, technical and socio-cultural - that have helped establish photography as an accurate, objective, copy of the real world.

A Brief Technical History of Photography

Before examining these characteristics, I believe it is important to briefly consider the major milestones that constitute the technical history of photography, since, as David Crowley and Paul Heyer have noted, the history of communication technology is pivotal to understand socio-cultural changes (Crowley and Heyer, 1995: 1). A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to the development and history of photography [7] and much of it emphasizes that, like every other discovery, photography was the result of accumulated technical and chemical knowledge covering a period of no less than three hundred years. Indeed, most historians of the medium acknowledge that the general principles of photography were made possible only when two scientific processes, that had been known for quite a long time, were finally combined. The first process, the Camera Obscura (literally "dark room"), was optical while, the second process, the means of fixing the image, was chemical.
The pinhole camera obscura effect, a natural phenomenon, had been observed by artists, scholars and intellectuals as far back as the fifth century B.C. At that time, it was known that a pinhole on the wall of a dark room produced an upside down image on the opposite wall and basic optical principles of the pinhole were commented on in Chinese texts. Philosopher Mo Ti, for instance, recorded the formation of an inverted image with a pinhole or screen and was aware that rays from the top of an object produced the lower part of an image when passing through an opening (Grepstad, 1996: HREF). In the Western hemisphere, Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C., reportedly observed the principle of the pinhole image formation. In Problems, Book XV, 6, the Greek philosopher wonders: "Why is it that when the sun passes through quadrilaterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce figures rectangular in shape but circular? [...]" (Aristotle: 333). In Book XV, 11, he writes:

Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broad-leaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same reason as that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone? [...] (Aristotle: 341).

Aristotle found no satisfactory explanation for his observations and the problems would remain unresolved until the sixteenth century (Grepstad, 1996: HREF). Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries however, many scholars such as Alhazen, Erasmus Reinhold, Roger Bacon and Gemma Frisius referred to the pinhole device and its applications to astronomy in their works.
Arabian scholar Ibn Al-Haitam (965-1040), known as Alhazen in the West, is considered to be the earliest author on the topic of the camera obscura for an essay entitled "On the Form of the Eclipse" (Eder, 1945: 37). In the thirteenth century, philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (1214-94) utilized the principles of the camera obscura for astronomical observation. Thanks to his method, eclipses of the sun could be viewed without damaging the eye. In 1545, astronomer Gemma Frisius is believed to have published the first drawing of a pinhole camera obscura in De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (see figure 1).
The camera obscura, first devised for scientific ends, was adopted and perfected over centuries within the fields of drawing techniques. During the Renaissance period for instance, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) exploited the process as a drafting aid. In addition, he wrote the first detailed description of the camera obscura in several of his works, including his Codex Atlanticus. In this manuscript da Vinci describes not only his experiment to make copies of plants: "The paper must be coated with lampblack, mixed with sweet oil, and then the leaf of the plant must be colored with type on the printing process. It is then printed as usual, and so the leaf (i.e., the impression from it) will appear dark in the low parts and light in those parts which are high [...]" (in Eder, 1945: 33-4), but also provides a clear description of the principle of the camera obscura:

In the facade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole (in Eder, 1945: 39).

However, it is fellow Italian Giovanni Battista della Porta, a scientist from Naples, who published the first account of a theory of the photograph. Della Porta has long been regarded as the inventor of the camera obscura, since in his 1558 Magia naturalis, sive de miraculis rerun naturalium (Natural Magic), he describes the use of an optical lens to replace the pinhole on a camera obscura (Clarke, 1997: 12). This process improved definition and allowed an image to be sharply focused on a piece of ground glass, allowing the operator to trace a picture on a sheet of paper laid over the glass. However he was by no means its inventor. In fact, the very term camera obscura was coined by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who, in the 1620s, invented the portable camera obscura (Grepstad, 1996: HREF).
After gaining knowledge of the physical properties of the camera obscura, many of its users dream of capturing its images in some permanent manner. Just like the pinhole image preceded the construction of the camera obscura, the knowledge of light-sensitive substances preceded the actual operation of being able to (chemically) permanently fixing an image. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, scientists and chemists had been experimenting with the reaction of light to certain metallic salts and were aware of the fact that some colours became bleached in the sun. However, they made little distinction between heat, air and light and further development was provided by Johann Heinrich Schulze's (1687-1744) major discovery. In 1727, the German scientist found that silver salts darkened when exposed to sunlight and published results that distinguished between the action of light and heat upon silver salts. For Austrian historian Josef Maria Eder, Schulze's discovery made the German scientist "the inventor of photography in its first inception" and his findings began "a new epoch in the history of the invention of photography" (Eder, 1945: 62). Following Schulze's findings, Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) of Britain was one of the first to link optics and chemistry together, in order to record the camera obscura image by means of the action of light. Between 1795 and 1802, he experimented intensively, and in June 1802, in collaboration with chemist Sir Humphry Davy, he published the results of his experiments in the Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain under the title "An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver." Thanks to his findings, Wedgwood had some success using chemicals to capture images. By casting a shadow on a chemically treated surface, he created photographic-like images. Unfortunately, once produced, the images stayed sensitive to light and could only be viewed in dim light. When exposed to light the images would disappear and Wedgwood was never able to fix them durably.

More successful in his attempt to record permanently images of the camera was French lithographer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), one of the three recognized pioneers of photography, who finally combined the optical and chemical knowledge that had been accumulated over the centuries. In the summer of 1826, Niépce reportedly produced the world very first permanent photograph, a view from his window at Le Gras (see figure 2), when he inserted a polished pewter plate made light-sensitive with bitumen of Judea, a type of asphalt that becomes insoluble when exposed to light, into a camera obscura (Newhall, 1980: 17). An exposure of more than eight hours was required to affix the blurry image of his country estate. This first permanently captured image was named a "heliograph" (literally sun drawing, "helio" being the Greek prefix for sun and "graph" the suffix for "written" or "drawn). The quality, however, was very poor (it did not reproduce colours for instance) and despite several attempts Niépce could not improve his process. Therefore, a few years later, in 1829, he formed a partnership with Parisian scene painter and proprietor of the Diorama [8] Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) who had been experimenting to capture camera obscura images. The partnership lasted until Niépce's death, four years later.
Daguerre continued to experiment and soon discovered a way of developing photographic plates, a process which greatly reduced the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. He also found that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt. In January 1839, Daguerre's photographic process, the daguerreotype [9], was made public in Paris. Daguerreotypy consisted of a silvered copper plate that was sensitized over fumes of iodine and was then exposed in a camera for several minutes. After the exposure, a positive image was developed by treating the plate with mercury fumes, which brought out a light image on the silver surface. Finally, the image was fixed in sodium chloride (common salt), washed in water and dried. On January 6th, 1839, La Gazette de France declared:

We announce an important discovery by our famous diorama painter, M. Daguerre. This discovery partakes of the prodigious. It upsets all scientific theories on light and optics, and it will revolutionize the art of drawing. M. Daguerre has found the way to fix the images which paint themselves within a camera obscura, so that these images are no longer transient reflections of objects, but their fixed and everlasting impress, which like a painting or a drawing, can be taken away from the presence of the objects (in Newhall, 1980: 17).

Nevertheless, Daguerre's discovery was officially announced only on August 19, 1839 by scientist François Arago at the Institut de France. The invention was widely acclaimed, starting in the 1840s a "daguerreotypemania" in France, but also in the United States (see figure 3 and Freund, 1974: 30). The Daguerreotype process, though producing amazing images - La Gazette notes for instance that the images had "a truth which nature alone can give to her works" (in Newhall, 1980: 17), had some major drawbacks: it was expensive, easily damaged - since the image was on the surface of the plate - and more important, each picture was unique, since duplication was impossible. The only way to reproduce a daguerreotype was to photograph an existing plate. These disadvantages, coupled with others, such as long exposure times that did not allow to photograph people and make portraits, as well as a growing need for a means of copying pictures, led to the decline of the daguerreotype. Therefore, by 1860 the daguerreotype was obsolete and was supplanted by Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot's negative-positive process. Talbot's invention remains the basis of photographic technique, and earned him the title of the "inventor of modern photography," in Eder's words (Eder, 1945: 63).

In 1834, Talbot (1800-77), a mathematician, botanist and classical scholar, conceived of a process he called "photogenic drawing" and published his results in a paper to the Royal Society of London, "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or, the Process by which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist's Pencil," January 31, 1839. Thanks to this process Talbot actually produced paper negatives as soon as August 1835. The small negative, 1" square, depicted a window of his home, Lacock Abbey and was of poor quality compared with the striking images produced by the Daguerreotype process (see figure 4).

By 1840, however, Talbot had made some significant improvements and introduced a negative paper process named "calotype" (Greek for "beautiful picture") [10] which he patented in 1841. Compared with Daguerreotypes the quality of the early calotypes was still somewhat inferior (as the images were printed on paper, inevitably, the imperfections of the paper were printed alongside when a positive was made). Despite this drawback, the great advantage of Talbot's method was that the process involved both a negative and a positive (unlike the daguerreotype which resulted in a unique positive image as we have seen earlier) and as the negative image, the calotype, was repeatable indefinitely in a positive print, finally allowing multiple prints.
From this point forward, developments in chemical processing affected glass plate, film, and paper negatives and positives, continually shaping the industry, technology, and art known as photography.
In 1851, for instance, two Frenchmen made important technical improvements on Talbot's calotype process. Louis-Desiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802-72) invented the Albumen paper which yielded a clearer image than Talbot's salt prints and Gustave LeGray announced his waxed paper process, which improved the clarity of calotype negatives. The same year, in England, a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer (1813-57), with the Collodion/wet plate process. This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure times to one to three minutes and produced a negative with an acute resolution of details, using glass as a support. However, its major drawback was that developing had to take place immediately after the image had been taken. The collodion was made obsolete in 1871 when English physician Dr. Richard Leach Maddox (1816-1902) discovered a way of using Gelatin (an organic material obtained from animal protein which had been discovered only a few years before) instead of glass as a basis for the photographic plate. His discovery led to the development of the dry plate process. This process marked a turning point in photography since it made wet-plates and darkroom tents unnecessary. Moreover, dry plates could be developed much more quickly than with any previous technique. Initially it was very insensitive compared with existing processes, but it was refined to the extent that the idea of factory-made photographic material was now becoming possible. The day where photographs could be taken without any specialized knowledge was getting closer...
The next step forward came with the invention of Celluloid in the early eighteen-sixties, and when John Carbutt, in 1888 persuaded a manufacturer to produce very thin celluloid as a backing for sensitive material. George Eastman (1854-1932) is particularly remembered for introducing roll film in 1884. Four years later he introduced a handy camera, invented the name "Kodak" and photography was finally able to reach a much greater number of people as cameras were put into mass circulation (Eder, 1945: 489). No history of photography would be complete without mentioning Sir John Frederick William Herschel, a close friend of Talbot and a fellow photographic experimenter, who in addition to broadening the knowledge of photochemical actions, will mostly be remembered as the person who coined the word "photography" in a lecture he gave before the Royal Society of London, on March 14, 1839 (Eder, 1945: 258).
As we have seen, photography, though its components had been known for centuries, only appeared in the nineteenth century and many critics have tried to understand the medium beyond a mere succession of technological innovations and obsolescences, attempting to comprehend why and how the technology appeared precisely during this particular epoch. As Geoffrey Batchen expresses in his book Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, it is fundamental to examine "why it took so long to invent a workable photographic process or why such a process was conceived in the first place" (Batchen, 1997: 129).
There are two major explanations, some would say "tales," for the emergence of photography. On the one hand, in William J. Mitchell's words, "commentators of more positivistic and conservative outlook," argue that technical innovations emerge on their own, creating new social and cultural potential (Mitchell, 1992: 20). The determinist vision that "new technologies are discovered by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions of social change and progress" as Raymond Williams puts it, (in Winston, 1996: 1) suggests that, paraphrasing Martha Rosler, cultural imperatives follow technology. If one examines the popular accounts that surround the discovery of photography, one will realize to what extent these discourses relate the discovery in terms of serendipity, a "eureka" discovery due mostly to good fortune. This is for example illustrated in the movie The Governess. This 1998 picture tells us the story of a nineteenth-century young woman who assists her employer in trying to capture images formed by the camera obscura. She discovers how to fix the images permanently when she accidentally spills salt water on a piece of paper previously exposed in the camera obscura. There have been many similar quaint accounts. In L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, photography historians Helmut and Alison Gernsheim debunk some of the myths related to the Frenchman's discovery. One of them goes like this:

[...] Daguerre, resting in a darkened room, observed a ray of sunlight coming through a chink in the shutters and projecting the image of a tree on to a painting he was working on. The following morning, astonished to find faint traces of the image still on the painting, Daguerre tried to repeat the phenomenon, but in vain. He then attempted it in the camera obscura, and remembering at last that he had mixed iodine in his colours, undertook a long series of experiments on the light-sensitivity of iodine, which led him to photography (Gernsheim and Gernsheim, 1968: 48).

As the Gernsheims observe, "this picturesque myth [...] is too fantastic to merit a detailed confutation" (Gernsheim and Gernsheim, 1968: 48). Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that these sorts of accounts are still very popular.
On the other hand, some theorists and historians, such as Heinrich Schwarz, have argued that technical innovations are the result of social pressure: "The year of Daguerre's invention, as in every important invention, meant nothing but the moment when the acquired knowledge had become so convincing and the need of realizing this invention so pressing that it could no longer be delayed by any difficulties or obstacles" (in Mitchell, 1992: 18-9). For critic Martha Rosler, "technology is following a cultural imperative rather than vice versa" (Rosler, 1996: 39). In Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Geoffrey Batchen investigates photography's timing and place of appearance examining the works of some artists and scientists who "felt the hitherto strange and unfamiliar desire to have images formed by light spontaneously fix themselves," long before Daguerre and Talbot announced their discoveries in 1839 (Batchen, 1997: 38). Many other critics have similarly tried to appreciate this will, and many single out a novel, written in 1760 by French writer Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche (1729-1774), entitled Giphantie. Beaumont Newhall even includes the important passages of the story, which offer an uncanny prediction of photography, in his collection of essays Photography: Essays and Images under the title "Photography Predicted." In this imaginary tale, de la Roche depicts a strange land where the "transient images" of nature are "fixed" by the action of light:

Thou knowest that the rays of light, reflected from different bodies, make a picture and paint the bodies upon all polished surfaces, on the retina of the eye, for instance, on water, on glass. The elementary spirits have studies to fix these transient images: they have composed a subtile (sic) manner, very viscous, and proper to harden and dry, by the help of which a picture is made in the twinkle of an eye [...] The first effect of the canvas is that of a mirrour [...] But what the glass cannot do, the canvas, by means of the viscous matter, retains the images. The mirrour shows the object exactly; but keeps none; our canvases show them with the same exactness, and retains them all. This impression of the images is made the first instant they are received on the canvas, which is immediately carried into some dark place; an hour after, the subtile matter dries, and you have a picture so much the more valuable, as it cannot be imitated by art nor damaged by time [...] The justeness of the design, the truth of the expression, the gradation of the shades [...] draws upon our canvases images which deceive the eye and make reason to doubt, whether what are called real objects, are not phantoms which impose upon the sight, the hearing, the feeling, and all the sense at once (in Newhall, 1760: 13-4).

The author never found out how prophetic his tale would appear a few decades after his death.
Naomi Rosenblum, in A World History of Photography argues that the camera's images appeared and remained viable because they filled cultural and sociological needs that were not being met by other means of representation such as illustration or paintings. As she puts it: "By the time it was announced in 1839, Western industrialized society was ready for photography" (Rosenblum, 1981: 15). One could argue that the will for always more accurate representation is part of people's desire to see and depict: from cave-drawing to the Camera Obscura, from still to moving images, from silent to talking movies, from black and white to color, and then from technologies such as IMAX to 3-D virtual reality, it seems that men and women are constantly looking for more "realist" and compelling representations of the real world (to the point where the representations are more real than the real, as Jean Baudrillard would argue). We have to remember that for many philosophers, from Plato to Blake, mankind lacked the ability to perceive things directly. As Plato hints in his well known "Myth of the Cave" (Book VII of The Republic), men are misled by their senses and consequently are unable to face the Truth: "And if the [prisoner/man] is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?" The apparition of photography reveals a desire to escape the limitations of subjectivity in order to perceive reality "as it really is." As Noël Burch puts it, discussing the origins of cinema in an essay entitled "Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein:"

The 19th century witnessed a series of stages in the thrusting progress of a vast aspiration which emerges as the quintessence of the bourgeois ideology of representation. From Daguerre's Diorama to Edison's first Kinetophonograph, each state of the pre-history of the cinema was intended by its initiators - and seen by its publicists - as representatives of their class, as another step towards the "re-creation" of reality, towards a "perfect illusion" of the perceptual world (in Jay, 1995: 346).

Bernard Marbot, curator in charge of Early Photography in the Department of Prints and Photography at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, emphasises this point in his essay "Towards the Discovery (Before 1839)." As he observes, the rise of the French bourgeoisie after 1789 and the progress of science favored a growing interest in objective and scientific rationalism which created a need for "a mode of representation which could swiftly, accurately and comprehensively render visible and measurable even such bodies and phenomena as were invisible by reason of their substance, dimensions or inaccessibility" (Marbot, 1986: 15). According to Marbot, this explains photography's place of invention: "Now, at the end of the eighteenth century, the scene was set for photography to enter upon the role it was to play from 1839 onwards; the prologue came from the countries most advanced economically and politically: France and Britain." For Marbot, society was not ready for photography hitherto even though all the processes had been known for quite some time. As he claims:

If photography did not see the light of day in the eighteenth century, it was not because the various pieces of the puzzle were too widely dispersed among artists and scholars, mathematicians and chemists, nor was it that the imagination capable of bringing the existing technical knowledge to fruition was lacking. The fact was, rather, that society was not ready for it (Marbot, 1986: 15).

Finally, in the introduction of his interesting account of the development of visual media technology, Technologies of Seeing, Brian Winston writes that "technologists are working to an agenda determined by society" (Winston, 1996: 6). According to him, this explains the phenomenon of simultaneous "inventions." Even though Winston cites the telephone as an example of simultaneous discoveries, one cannot help thinking of Daguerre and Talbot, who, as we have seen, announced their processes to fix permanently the images formed by light almost exactly at the same time.

Modernism and Photography

Whatever the reasons behind the appearance of photography in our lives might be, no one can deny that chemical photography happened to be invented "in a period which liked to think of itself as the age of absolute knowledge, a century of modernist belief in science, the century of Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy" (Didi-Huberman, 1986: 71). And as a matter of fact, many theorists did not fail to mention and comment on the connection between both. John Berger and Jean Mohr, for instance, write in Another Way of Telling: "The camera was invented in 1839. Auguste Comte was just finishing his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Positivism and the camera and sociology grew up together" (Berger and Mohr, 1982: 99). Edward W. Said shares Berger's view, but also mentions the classic realistic novel as coeval in photography's origins (Said, 1983: 157).

It has been widely acknowledged that some aspects of modernity have played a primary role in shaping photography as an objective representative medium. For nineteenth century people, and, once again, especially for the bourgeoisie, the most valued representations were the ones realistic and objective in nature. Therefore, the apparently impartial eye of the camera happened to be the perfect instrument to achieve the naturalistic documentation characteristic of the Victorian era (Price, 1997: 67). Many early commentators of photography enthusiastically welcomed the invention and subscribed to the belief that photography was a medium of truth and accuracy, a guarantee of authenticity. For American author Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, the instrument itself must be regarded as a triumph of modern science. As he writes in an essay entitled "The Daguerreotype" ­ published in the Alexander's Weekly Messenger just months after Daguerre's process was formally announced in France ­ the early form of photography might be "the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science" (Poe, 1840: HREF). In this article, Poe does not limit his enthusiasm to his declaration that "the Daguerreotype plate is infinitely (we use the term advisedly) is infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands," but also summarizes the early understanding of photography, praising "the supremeness of [the process'] perfection" (Poe, 1840: HREF).

The ability to freeze or fix the fleeting images of the camera obscura allowed scientists to inspect and study the represented content, meeting the needs of a period of unprecedented scientific and industrial changes. Astronomer Janssen hints at the use of photographs as a potential tool for scientific neutrality when he observes that "the photographic plate is the true retina of the scientist" (in Didi-Huberman, 1986: 71). Moreover, as Brian Winston points out in Technologies of Seeing, photography was introduced to the public as a tool of science and those who used the camera were considered "non tanquam pictor, sed tanquam mathematicus," not so much painters as mathematicians (Watson, 1996: 40). It is important to note here that some of the first accounts of the medium greatly stressed its scientific component, thus conditioning the public that the camera, as a scientific instrument never lies (Winston, 1995: 130). For example, in "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing," Talbot hints at the scientific potential of the photographic medium when he writes that "this remarkable phenomenon, of whatever value it may turn out in its application to the arts, will at least be accepted as a new proof of the value of the inductive methods of modern science" (in Newhall, 1980: 25).
Regarding this aspect of photography as a modernist medium that allows the eye to extend its vision, the work of British artist and inventor Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) is interesting to examine. Muybridge used the camera to capture animals and human athletes in motion and published his photographs in 1887 under the complex title Animal Locomotion: an Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. One of the most well known series of Muybridge's experiments is "Horse in motion" (see figure 5). This photographic sequence reveals the varieties of truth the camera can see and which the eye is incapable of distinguishing. His work was highly praised and artists as well as scientists appreciate its potential significance.
As a result of all these factors, the camera became a guarantee of scientific truth. As Brian Winston remarks in Claiming the Real, "the long history of pictorial representation as a mode of scientific evidence" coupled with the "tendency of modern science to produce data via instruments [...] analogous to the camera" supports the status of the camera as a scientific instrument (Winston, 1995: 127). To sum it up, the fact that photography was born in a modern era and that consequently it was developed as a modernist medium, has been essential to the propagation of the myth that the camera cannot lie [11] .

"The Pencil of Nature"

Unlike other means of representation which are distrusted because they are products of their author's intentions, photographs are regarded as trustworthy on account of the role of nature in their creation. For many observers, once the photographer has completed his guidance, the process is plainly and simply chemical and automatic. It is the technology itself that many consider the guarantee of an accurate transcription of reality.
If one examines the way photography has been described over the decades, one will realize that for many commentators the power of authentication conveyed by the photograph relies on its "natural" process. It is interesting to note, for instance, that the three recognized "fathers" of photography, though using different formulations, have commented on their discovery in very similar manners. Niépce, Daguerre and Talbot have all thought of photography as a kind of partnership with nature, a means which allows a natural force, light, to speak for itself, contrary to other means of representation which screen its message through personal interpretation. The words used to name the process are revelatory of this attitude. Niépce, for instance, referred to his first images on paper as "heliographs" (sun drawing or sun written as we have seen earlier), while Talbot used the term "photogenic" drawings (light produced). In addition, etymologically, "photograph" derives from two Greek words, "phos" (light) and "graphie" (writing or drawing), that together mean "writing with light" or "light written."
This metaphoric instrumentality is also clearly illustrated by the title Talbot chose for his book: The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), known as the first photographically illustrated publication, featuring plates of architecture, still-lifes and work of arts. In a text announcing its publication, Talbot writes: "Naturally, the book's illustrations are themselves the images as they were created by the effects of light and not engraving based on them... The illustrations in the work announced here were created with extreme care and solely with optical and chemical processes... and the views depicted contain nothing other than the pure and unaltered brush stroke of nature" (in Rötzer, 1996: 15, emphasis mine).
In 1838, Daguerre circulated a notice meant to attract potential investors in which he describes his daguerreotype as being 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" (in Gernsheim, 1968: 81). In his address to the French Upper Chamber, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac described enthusiastically the qualities of Daguerre's invention, stressing out likewise: "The daguerreotype represents inanimate nature with a degree of perfection unattainable by the ordinary processes of drawing and painting - a perfection equal to that of Nature herself" (in Gernsheim, 1982: 45).
In "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing," another compelling metaphor, Talbot writes enthusiastically about the "boundless powers of natural chemistry" and in a section entitled "On the Art of Fixing a Shadow," he notes the "marvelous" character of the phenomenon, as he puts it, its "natural magic" (in Newhall, 1980: 24-5).
As Mary Price words it in her book The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space, photography could be regarded for Talbot's contemporaries as "an instrument of light directly inscribing itself on the receptive paper" (Price, 1994: 7). The fact that photographs are nothing more than the result of an optical image of light coming from the subject itself, gives them an authenticity or feeling of reality not found in painting or other hand-done productions (Warren, 1993: 217). In his article on the Daguerreotype, Poe, after mentioning the chemistry involved in the process, suggests the impartial and natural aspect of the process simply writing that "the action of the light does the rest" (Poe, 1840: HREF).
More contemporary critics have also extensively commented on the optical/chemical aspect of photography. In a 1974 essay entitled "On the Nature of Photography" for instance, self-described "media analyst" Rudolf Arnheim defines "the fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium" as being that "the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light" (Arnheim, 1974: 155). For the German modern theorist, this procedure implies that " a photograph has an authenticity from which painting is barred by birth" (Arnheim, 1974: 154). John Berger formulates the same idea in his book Another Way of Telling, when he claims that photography's "primary materials are light and time" (Berger, 1982: 85) and that photography "cannot lie because it prints directly" (Berger, 1982: 96). Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, who both consider the arguments for and against photographic truth in respectively, On Photography and Camera Lucida, conclude that photography is more real than other media of representation since it operates in a mechanical way. As Sontag explains, a photograph is "a registering of an emanation," "a material vestige of its subject" because it is formed by capturing light waves (Sontag, 1973: 154). Finally, William J. Mitchell claims in The Reconfigured Eye that if one resumes photography to its core aspect, technically photographs can be viewed as a mere "fossilized light," created by a chemical and mechanical process that captures a direct physical imprint of reality (Mitchell, 1992: 24).

"You push the button, we do the rest" or the automatic quality of photography

Another aspect of photography which validates its supposed integrity is based on the mechanical properties of the camera. Indeed, part of the credibility of the photograph rest on the knowledge of the mechanical, apparently objective, mode of operation of the camera [12] . Victorians, for instance, regarded photography as the product of a "regularized and predictable process" and for that reason considered it a "truthful" medium (Willis, 1990: 201). Nevertheless, this sentiment is perhaps best illustrated by Kodak's well-known advertising slogan: "You push the button, we do the rest." This slogan epitomizes the mechanical aspect of the process, suggesting that the act of taking a photograph involves nothing more than pushing a button and that no additional intervention is required.
This is one of the reasons why, unlike other signs that are rendered in paint or prose, photographs appear to convey reality without the mediation of an artist or interpreter: photography differentiates itself from other forms of representation because it (supposedly) does not rely on human intervention. In his 1967 essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," André Bazin compares photography to painting and writes about both the automatic quality of the camera and the absence of man's intervention:

Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective nature of photography. For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a non living agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. (Bazin, 1967: 13, my emphasis).

Bazin is not the only twentieth-century commentator to pursue this theme. In his essay "On the Nature of Photography," Rudolf Arnheim also writes about the triumph of mechanical reproduction over subjectivity and stresses the importance of the "mechanical" origins of photography. Other critics have produced very similar statements. American philosopher Stanley Cavell, for instance, echoes Bazin's formulation almost word by word, when he writes the following in The World Viewed (New York, 1971): "Photography overcame subjectivity in a way underdreamed by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction" (in Snyder and Allen, 1975: 145). Moreover, Susan Sontag summarizes perfectly the belief many early photographers had in the photographic image to be objective and untainted. Indeed, as she remarks, early photographers believed in the automatic nature of the recording process and tended to treat the camera as a "copy machine," and thought of themselves as "non interfering observers," "scribes more than poets" (Sontag, 1973: 88).

"The noeme" or the referential quality of photography

Moreover, as it is argued by David Tomas, "special position of photography in our culture is predicated on a unique form of contiguous, causal link that unites the photography with its referent" (Tomas 1988: 148). Put simply: a photograph is always a photograph of something, a physical presence, the referent. As a result, photographs are believed to be more realistic than other representations of reality based on observation, such as drawing or painting, since these latter do not necessarily imply a referent (Price and Wells, 1997: 42). Roland Barthes writes extensively about the referential characteristic of the medium in his 1961 essay "The Photographic Message" and in his last book devoted entirely to photography, Camera Lucida. In "The Photographic Message," he observes that the photograph transmits "the scene itself, the literal reality" and even though "the image is not the reality" since the photograph is reduced and one-dimensional, it is nonetheless the "perfect analogon" of the object or person represented, the referent (Barthes, 1977: 17). In Camera Lucida, the author develops his definition and writes:

I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. (Barthes, 1981 : 76).

For Barthes, the referent is fundamental to photography; it is the "founding order of Photography" (Barthes, 1981: 77). Unlike other means of representation, photography cannot be achieved through memory: the referent has to be there when the photograph is taken, it has to be "absolutely, irrefutably present" (Barthes, 1981: 77). For Barthes, the constraint of the referent is specific to photography and he refers to it as its noeme. Another photography theorist who stresses the referential properties of the photographic medium is Susan Sontag. In her book On Photography, she writes: "A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist, which is like what's in the picture" (Sontag, 1973: 5). In a more metaphorical way she reiterates her idea of the referent later on in her book, writing the following: "A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask" (Sontag, 1973: 154).
As we shall see later, the theory of a fundamental existence of a referent, even though only partially true in the world of analog photography, might be the most radically challenged foundation of photographic truth in the digital world.

The tradition of documentary photography

All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives throughout the world. — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984.

Another reason for the unconditional modernist belief in the impartial eye of the camera is based on the long tradition of genres of straight, realistic or documentary photography. If I am well aware that these genres have specific styles, forms, practices and history, for the purpose of simplicity and clarity, I shall consider a loose, elementary definition: photographs which meet the minimal condition of documentary are those who provide the viewer with "an account of events that have their own existence outside the frame of the photograph or the confines of the studio walls" (Price, 1997: 101); photographs that are free of retouching and manipulation. Documentary photography gives information about the subject, object or event photographed in a supposedly objective manner. The will to record and document the everyday world began when some "socially conscious" reporters realized the potential of the camera as a witness. Since that time, photographs were considered to transform into undeniable "facts" what they were portraying and many photographers thought their work might help bring awareness of what was going on in society. John Berger describes the early photojournalists' aspirations in Another Way of Telling: "The idealistic early press photographers-in the twenties and thirties of this century-believed that their mission was to bring home the truth to the world" (Berger, 1982: 97). In the documentary tradition photographers are witnesses and the photograph is a testimony of empirical truth. As Mitchell notes "The tools of traditional photography were well suited to Strand's and Weston's high-modernist intentions - their quest for a kind of objective truth assured by a quasi-scientific procedure and closed, finished perfection" (Mitchell, 1992: 8).
Danish-born photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis (1849-1914) appears to be at the origin of American social documentary (Stange, 1989: 1). Riis used photography to draw attention to the conditions under which the poor in America, especially the immigrants, were living. In his best-known first book, How the Other Half Lives (1890), a collection of photographs, he exposed the appalling conditions of the time. His work caused a considerable stir and secured a number of reforms from Theodore Roosevelt who was reportedly moved by Riis' work (Leggat, 1997: HREF). Another photographer whose work had a definite political nature and revealed the misery of his time was sociologist Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940). In the early 1910s, he worked as an official photographer for the National Labor Committee and exposed the horrors of child labor. "I wanted to show things that had to be corrected," Hine once declared. In the 1930s, his work finally bore fruit when child labor became controlled in the United States (Leggat, 1997: HREF).
It is at the same epoch (1935-1943), that the American government, understanding the power of photographs, implemented the Farm Security Administration (FSA) Project. Headed by Roy E. Striker, the Project aimed to document rural poverty while appealing to the sensibilities of middle-class urbanites. Photographers such as Hine, but also Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, along with many others, worked for the federal government in order to record pictorially the hard time the American nation, especially rural areas, was going through. The project produced some of the most enduring images of the Great Depression. At the time, the photographs, publicly displayed in an exhibition called "How American People Live," had a profound impact on contemporary viewers. Today, the FSA photographs are still considered as the primary basis for our understanding of this era. In addition, these images have shaped a standard for documentary photography with their simple, direct recording of an epoch.
As a result of documentary photography, the medium established itself as a witness and claimed to be a true and disinterested picture of the world. Even early frauds could not completely challenge the confidence people had in the camera. In the early 1870s for instance, Dr. Barnardo, a London missionary, produced "before and after" photographs of orphans in his care in order to show the productive work of his charitable institution. However, Dr. Barnardo was charged for deceiving the public based on the fact that the images were not authentic. This incident put into light some of the practices in the social uses of documentary photography which were casually "manipulated" in such terms for purposes of rhetoric (Rosenblum, 1981: 352). John Berger believes that the reason why the positivist view has remained dominant, despite its inadequacies, is because there are no other views possible "unless one comes to terms with the revelational nature of appearances" (Berger, 1982: 119). As Florian Rötzer claims: "Photographers have always known that direct photography is subjective and staged. At the same time, there has been an unspoken (?) agreement between the photographer and his audience to accept the myth of photographic truth" (Rötzer, 1996: 13).

The "Artificial Eye" or The Analogy of the Eye

Finally, photographs held a special position for many men and women of the nineteenth century for the very simple reason that they corresponded to what they could see: photographs appeared as a truthful replication of human sight. As Mary Warner Marien expresses it in Photography and its Critics: "the photograph suggested infallible representation because of its parallel to sight. The exactitude of the Daguerrean image, which people studied under a magnifying glass, was a source of awe" (Marien, 1997: 40). Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, who was amongst the very first commentators of the new medium, saw photography as the "sworn witness" of the appearance of things (Eastlake, 1857: 94). As a matter of fact, most people at the time accepted that the medium rendered a complete and faithful image of its subjects and viewed photographs as an absolute material accuracy (Price and Wells, 1997: 21). The analogy of the camera to the eye has been stressed by its very inventors from the very beginnings of the medium. Niépce, for example, refers to his camera as an "artificial eye" in two separate letters to his brother Claude, on March 12 and May 5, 1816 (in Batchen, 1997: 81). Talbot uses a similar metaphor in The Pencil of Nature writing about the "eye of the camera" (in Batchen, 1997: 81). Moreover, in a statement to the Académie des Sciences organized on January 7, 1839, physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot praised Daguerre for putting at the disposal of scientists an "artificial retina" (in Gernsheim, 1968: 84). Snyder and Walsh refer to this aspect of photography as the "'visual' model." As they remark in their essay "Photography, Vision, and Representation," this "visual model stresses the supposed similarity between the camera and the eye as optical systems, and posits that a photograph shows us (or ought to show us) 'what we would have seen if we had been there ourselves'" (Snyder and Walsh, 1975: 149). As a result, camera has often been used metaphorically by writers to suggest neutral recording. One of the most famous examples can be found in Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories, when he writes: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking" (in Mitchell, 1992: 29).

Photography as an Instrument of Power

Entering the crematorium, Tomas did not understand what was happening: the hall was lit up like a film studio. Looking around in bewilderment, he noticed cameras set up in three places. No, it was not television; it was the police. They were filming the funeral to study who had attended it. — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984.

Finally, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, some postmodern critics have suggested that the belief in the veracity of the photographic image has been primarily sustained by the authority of society's institutions. They argue that these institutions, most notably law and medicine, have developed practices of observation, recording and surveillance through photography. In an interview conducted in 1987, John Tagg, who has written extensively on the uses of photography within power relations, claimed that the value of photography as evidence: "was something that was institutionally and historically produced" (Lukitsh, 1987: 232). Furthermore, in the introduction to his essays The Burden of Representation, Tagg writes that the fact "a photograph can come to stand as evidence [...] rests not on a natural or existential fact, but on a social, semiotic process" (Tagg, 1988: 4).
Many commentators regard the 1871 Commune, an episode of France's period of the Second Empire (1852-1870), as the first forensic use of the camera. According to Gen Doy, who provides an insightful look at this event in her essay "The Camera against the Paris Commune," the concept of "objectivity" was constructed at that time (Doy, 1979: 21). However, it is interesting to note that then the technology did not allow action photographs [13] and as a result, all the pictures were actually staged and posed with willing participants, proud to be immortalized for posterity by the camera. Nevertheless, these pictures were used for very different ends: They were used to identify the Communards (Doy, 1979: 25).
Since this first episode, the camera has been used continuously by governments as an instrument of surveillance and repression. In Susan Sontag's words:

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations (Sontag, 1973: 5).

Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera has suggested extremely well the ambiguity of the camera as a tool to record, but also as a tool to identify in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In this novel he tells the story of Theresa, a young photographer who uses her camera to capture on film the invasion of the Russians during the Spring of Prague (1968) and describes how her photographs were then used by the Communist government to identify and oppress its contestants. In the following passage of the book, Kundera depicts this ambivalence of the camera, how images that were supposed to denounce a particular event got twisted to become accusatory evidences:

The boy's father said, "This photograph was the only 'corpus delicti.' He denied it all until they showed it to him."
He took a clipping out of his wallet. "It came out in the Times in the autumn of 1968."
It was the picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background. "Collaborator Punished" read the caption.
Tereza let our her breath. No, it wasn't one of hers. Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naive they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police (Kundera, 1984: 141-2).

By establishing and constructing the value of the photograph as a trustable and honest representation of something which happened or was, institutions have provided themselves with substantial opportunities to propagate their doctrines. Therefore, it is not surprising that governments and other persuasive fields have used photographs to promote their ideologies. With photography these institutions happened to create a medium for propaganda far more powerful than words.
As we have seen, photography has benefitted from the time of its discovery of a great faith. Many early commentators described the photographic process as a neutral one, and subscribed to the belief that photography was a medium of truth and unassailable accuracy. Even today, the precision with which photographic images reproduces reality has not been equaled by any other medium. Therefore, it is not surprising that theorists continue to praise the objectivity of the medium. In 1985, for instance Annette Kuhn was still writing that "one of the defining features of photography as against certain other forms of visual representation [is] its capacity to appear truthful" and that "photography seems to record, rather than interpret, the piece of world in front of the camera" (Kuhn, 1985: 26). Even postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, known for his cold pessimism, formulates photography in a similar way: "I must capture this object at the moment of its appearance, before it takes on a meaning. And the lens... (l'objectif) places you in direct transition with the object" (in Bramly, 1993: 81). Nicholas Zurbrugg, who convinced Baudrillard to put some of his photographs in a collection of essays he was publishing, believes that "Baudrillard's photographic interest is a clear sign that he is not as pessimistic as he might seem." As he puts it, "If you were really a philosopher saying everything's finished, you'd be giving up. You'd just be moaning" (Leith, 1998: 16).
Nevertheless, as we shall see in the next chapter, the truth effect of photography has been challenged throughout its history.

Chapter two »

Notes

5. In addition, it is interesting to examine some of the words which have been used to describe photographic objectivity or realism, as these words reveal a set of synonyms and metaphors suggesting a will for truthfulness. When the daguerreotype was invented, for instance, Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to it as a "mirror with a memory" (in Mitchell, 1992: 80), a wording Newhall later used as a title for a chapter of his book The History of Photograph (Newhall, 1982: 27). Moreover, it had been widely claimed that the medium holds qualities of "objectivity," "transparency," "honesty," "purity," "immediacy," etc. Critic Clement Greenberg, for example, writes that "Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums" (in Marien, 1997:4). [back]

6. Because photographs are generally regarded as truthworthy, most states allow their uses as evidence. As Walter Benjamin judiciously observed: "The scene of a crime [...] is [...] photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence" (Benjamin: 1936: 226). [back]

7. See for example Alison and Helmut Gernsheim's classic, The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914 (1969), Josef Maria Eder's 1945 History of Photography, Naomi Rosenblum's A World History of Photography (1981), Beaumont Newhall's The History of Photography (1982), and John Szarkowski's Photography Until Now (1989). For a collection of the fundamental early essays on the medium, I direct the reader to Photography: Essays & Images (1980) edited by Beaumont Newhall and the equally impressive Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from 1850s to the Present edited by Liz Heron and Val Williams (1996). [back]

8. A kind of illusions theater in which the scenery took over from the actor which was very popular at the time. [back]

9. In his 1840 essay "The Daguerreotype," Edgar Allan Poe begins by noting the proper spelling of the word: "This word is properly spelt Daguerréotype, [...] the French usage requires an accent on the second e, in the formation of the compound term." In this paper, the common English spelling, which omits the accent, is used. [back]

10. Talbot's process is also known as the negative/positive process or the salt print process. It is important to differentiate the calotype from the salted paper print. The former is the negative paper process while the latter is the positive produce from it. It is their combination that is known as the negative/positive process. [back]

11. For an in depth analysis of photographic history as a modernist myth, I direct the reader to the second chapter of Mary Warner Marien's Photography and its Critics. [back]

12. It is worth mentioning that the idea that photography is essentially objective is, to some extent, reflected in French and Italian photographic terminology as the words for "lens" are respectively "objectif" and "obiettivo." [back]

13. Mostly due to long exposure times and to the use of wet plates which necessitated careful preservation and development (Doy, 1979: 23). [back]