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Yavuz
Kutay Yavuz

Lale Babaoğlu Balkış

January 3, 2018

HIST 205

Photography: Reality or Fiction, History or Art?

The spectacle is not a collection of images but

a social relation among people, mediated by images.1

Today, we do not have any doubt that images have an important, even vital place in

our lives: They are what we constantly see when we regard the news, what we view as

historical documents, what we come across as advertisements in our city centers and what we

use to recall our family histories and memories. They are also what we use to show ourselves

and our lives. By using images we -so to speak- create our own ‘image.’ This new era has

raised questions about whether images represent reality or are they subjective. In today’s

postmodern age we are more critical towards images than in any other time. But was this

always like that?

Looking onto the origins of photography and its impacts on the fresh modern world

we encounter a quite different phenomenon. Throughout decades the belief that photographs

represented reality as it is has changed and the perception of photography has shifted from an

objective to a subjective point. Today all the questions about the reality of images remain,

even in an increasing trend.

This paper aims to take a critical stance against definite approaches towards

photography and analyze it in both terms, starting from its beginnings and taking a glance at

the ‘shift’ in the 20th century.

1
Guy Debord, The society of the spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12.
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Invention of ‘Réalité:’ The Origins of Photography

Photography owes its existence to a simple physical phenomenon that is referred to as

camera obscura. Its first known mention is by Mozi in the 5th century BCE, saying the light

reverses in creating the image thanks to the aperture.2 Its popularity in usage increased in the

years of the Renaissance which regarded perspective as a way to realistic representation.3 It

was used by artists to paint the image of a real scene by following the reflection.4

The invention of photography which is based on the knowledge of camera obscura

had a boosting impact on realism and positivism. The first ‘photographers’ were inventors

and it is not hard to guess that they thought of themselves as scientists rather than artists. Not

much after Nicéphore Niépce’s first ever photograph, his fellow Louis Daguerre addressed

the public about his new invention called the Daguerreotype. Citing the needlessness of

drawing or skill, Daguerre ends his announcement with following words, indicating the

importance of this technique in making the mimesis of the nature:

“Finally: The DAGUERREOTYPE is not an instrument to be used to draw nature, but

a chemical and physical process which gives her the ability to reproduce herself.”5

The impact of the daguerreotype was so obvious that Janin Ernst wrote about this

invention as a reason to ‘believe’ in Daguerre’s photographs for “no human hand could draw

as the sun draws.”6

Another contemporary of Daguerre, the British scientist and inventor William Henry

Fox Talbot also gives a similar explanation to the process of photography:

2
Mozi, Book 10: Exposition of Canon II (5th century BCE), translated by Ian Jonston in The Mozi: A
Complete Translation (Honk Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010), 489.
3
Scott McQuire, Visions of modernity: representation, memory, time and space in the age of the camera
(London: Sage, 1998), 20-21.
4
Graham Clarke, The photograph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12.
5
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, “Daguerréotype,” translated by Beaumont Newhall in Helmut
Gernsheim, and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre (1787-1851): The World's
First Photographer (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1956), 78.
6
Janin, “Le Daguerreotype,” 146, quoted in Steffen Siegel, “Daguerre and his first critics,” in Photography
and Doubt, edited by Sabine T. Kriebel, and Andrés Mario Zervigón (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017),
35.
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Contemplating the beautiful picture which the solar microscope produces, the thought
struck me whether it might not be possible to cause that image to impress itself upon
the paper, and thus to let Nature substitute her own imitable pencil, for the imperfect
tedious and almost hopeless attempt of copying a subject so intricate?7

As both of the doctrinal texts suggest, it is clear that neither Daguerre, nor Talbot saw

photography as a medium of artistic expression but rather they addressed it as a process that

nature copies itself. Talbot even published his photographs in a book called The Pencil of

Nature8, again demonstrating his idea that photography lacks the agency of an individual and

what we see in the photographs are nature untouched.

This idea continued in the rest of the 19th century, a time when photography was a

‘new language of truth’9 and was seen as the ‘ultimate confirmation of the positivist

universe.’10 The quest was an objectivity with the aid of a machine that was fast and

irreproachable in contrast to the human.11

Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple, including the first human in a photograph.12

7
William Henry Fox Talbot, "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing," The London and Edinburgh
Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, vol. XIV, March 1839, reprinted in Goldberg, Vicki,
ed., Photography into Print (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 43.
8
Graham Clarke, The photograph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17.
9
Scott McQuire, Visions of modernity: representation, memory, time and space in the age of the camera
(London: Sage, 1998), 31.
10
McQuire, Visions of modernity, 33.
11
McQuire, Visions of modernity, 34-35.
12
Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, 1839, in 100 Photographs | The Most Influential Images of All
Time, accessed January 2, 2018,
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Photography as news, document and propaganda

The realistic approach to photography had certainly put its mark in the 19th and the

first-half of the 20th centuries. With the rise of print media, photographs became one of the

main mediums that the public learned about the events in the world and memorized historical

moments. The first time six photographs were used in L’Illustration, journalist Adolphe

Joanne stated that these photographs were used as ‘evidence’ and asked “Would a denial of

the daguerreotype not be a denial of light itself?”13

For nearly a century onwards the idea was not seriously challenged and viewing a

photograph of an event was counted as equal to viewing the real event.14 This belief in the

reality of photography was what made the boom in the usage of photographs in print media:

Throughout the century, the first pages of many newspapers had increasingly become

illustrated. The accelerating propaganda was also what this belief and intense usage of

images had caused.

One looking to Hitler’s photograph in Paris taken by his personal photographer would

not doubt that it was real but the way it is taken: Hitler’s decisive walk with his soldiers and

the Eiffel Tower in the background, certainly gives us a message. In fact, the monopoly of

photographic propaganda by the Nazis became so popular that an article in the New York

newspaper PM called “Nazis Attack Russia With Gun and Camera” showed a Nazi soldier

with a camera near his machine gun, with the caption “Nazi photographers are still scooping

the Russians, because they have a big organization and a radio in Berlin to flash

their copy to the world.”15

http://100photos.time.com/photos/louis-daguerre-boulevard-du-temple.
13
Adolphe Joanne, “La Californie: San Francisco et Sacramento,” L’Illustration, August 31, 1850, 135,
quoted in Thierry Gervais, “Reaching beyond the index,” in Photography and Doubt, edited by Sabine T.
Kriebel, and Andrés Mario Zervigón (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 81.
14
Thierry Gervais, “Reaching beyond the index,” in Photography and Doubt, edited by Sabine T. Kriebel,
and Andrés Mario Zervigón (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 81.
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While the non-realistic approaches to photography like Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism

had started long before in 1900s16, the destructivity of the two world wars and the

contribution of photography to this clash of ideologies had made a shift in the approach

towards photography as new movements like the Subjective Photography began to appear.

But it is noteworthy that despite the critical approaches of today, certain historical moments

like the nuclear bombing in Nagasaki, the rise of the Soviet flag over the Reicshtag or Neil

Armstrong in the moon have been placed in our collective memory and this is the power of

photography as a medium of documenting historical events, whether propaganda or not.

The moment when the Soviet flag had risen is used by today’s
many leftists when narrating the glorious victory against fascism.17

Photography as art

The question of whether photography is an art was first pointed out by Marius De

Zayas in 1913.18 What Jeff Wall would call in the 1960s as the “introversion, or

subjectivization” of documentary photography was a sign of the turn in the decades after the

15
“Nazis Attack Russia With Gun and Camera,” PM, Sunday, June 29, 1941, 6, in Jason E. Hill, “The camera
work of the PM sketch report,” in Photography and Doubt, edited by Sabine T. Kriebel, and Andrés Mario
Zervigón (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 114.
16
Graham Clarke, The photograph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 187.
17
Yevgeny Khaldei, Raising a Flag over the Reichstag, 1945, in 100 Photographs | The Most Influential
Images of All Time, accessed January 2, 2018, http://100photos.time.com/photos/yevgeny-khaldei-
raising-flag-over-reichstag.
18
Clarke, The photograph, 167.
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wars.19 As the more biased side of photography was being emphasized, new theorizations

emerged.

Otto Steinert’s Subjektive Fotographie did foresee, in 1951, today’s views on

photography. It emphasized a more individual view on photography where human agency

was in the foreground and the ‘selection’ of the individual photographers separated them

from photojournalists and documentary photographers.20 According to John Roberts, the age

of realism and modernism in photography was between 1920s and 1980s21 and with the

digitalization in photography and the increasing capability of reproduction, “the photography

could no longer claim to be a light trace of the material world.”22

Camera lucida, the famous work of Roland Barthes could be called as a bible for

today’s photography. His idea on the photograph depicts the level of subjectivity:

The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on
the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak,
a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it
has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.23

All these changes in the attitude towards the ‘realness’ of photographs are certainly a

part of the larger paradigm shift which we call postmodernism, in which relativism and post-

truth are acknowledged.

Conclusion

19
Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” quoted in
Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1995), 253, quoted in Blake Stimson, “A Photograph Is Never Alone,” in The meaning of
photography, edited by Robin Earle Kelsey, and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, 2008), 111.
20
Aperture 1, no. 4 (1953): 40.
21
John Roberts, “On the Ruins of Photographic Culture,” in The meaning of photography, edited by Robin
Earle Kelsey, and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), 166.
22
Roberts, “On the Ruins,” 163.
23
Roland Barthes, Camera lucida: reflections on photography (New York: Vintage, 1993), 115.
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By its nature, photography has been a different medium in art, hard to define. Its roots

in a physical experience, its introduction with positivism and technology, its generation by

individuals and its vulnerability towards manipulation in the digital age all contribute to this

confusion in definition. Regarding the shift in the approach from a more objective to a

subjective photography, we may count photography as a means for different purposes,

somewhat real but dependent on an individual’s eye.

Being both an art and a recording technique, photography stands in between

objectivity and subjectivity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boğaziçi University Library:

Barthes, Roland. Camera lucida: reflections on photography. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Clarke, Graham. The photograph. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Debord, Guy. The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Kelsey, Robin Earle., and Blake Stimson. The meaning of photography. Williamstown, MA:

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008.

Kriebel, Sabine Tania, and Andrés Mario Zervigón. Photography and doubt. Abingdon,
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Oxon: Routledge, 2017.

McQuire, Scott. Visions of modernity: representation, memory, time and space in the age of

the camera. London: Sage, 1998.

Other sources:

"100 Photographs | The Most Influential Images of All Time." Time. Accessed January 02,

2018. http://100photos.time.com/.

Aperture 1, no. 4 (1953): 39-40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44404804.

Gernsheim, Helmut, and Alison Gernsheim. L. J. M. Daguerre (1787-1851): The World's

First Photographer. Clevelend: The World Publishing Company, 1956.

Johnston, Ian. The Mozi: A Complete Translation. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,

2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pb61v3.

The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, vol. XIV,

March 1839. Reprinted in Goldberg, Vicki, ed., Photography into Print. New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1981.