Overview

In the digital age, photography confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. While technology has allowed amateurs and experts alike to create high-quality photographs in the blink of an eye, new electronic formats have severed the original photochemical link between image and subject. At the same time, recent cinematic photography has stretched the concept of photography and raised questions about its truth value as a documentary medium. Despite this situation, photography remains a stubbornly substantive form of evidence: referenced by artists, filmmakers, and writers as a powerful emblem of truth, photography has found its home in other media at precisely the moment of its own material demise. By examining this idea of photography as articulated in literature, film, and the graphic novel, Daguerreotypes demonstrates how photography secures identity for figures with an otherwise unstable sense of self. Lisa Saltzman argues that in many modern works, the photograph asserts itself as a guarantor of identity, whether genuine or fabricated. From Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—we find traces of photography’s “fugitive subjects” throughout contemporary culture. Ultimately, Daguerreotypes reveals how the photograph, at once personal memento and material witness, has inspired a range of modern artistic and critical practices.

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Reviews

Daguerreotypes is a superbly insightful investigation that stands on the cutting edge of photography studies. By discussing photography's referentiality as a 'vestigial idea' put to work in text, drawing, and video, these pages are free to explore novel concerns with the medium overlooked in our traditional focus on documentary. Saltzman's case studies correspondingly enunciate an alternative history and critique of photography defined not by truth, reason, and perfect identity with reality, but rather narrative, emotion, fantasy, and fiction. This inventive approach offers a significant contribution to discussions of the medium. --Andres Zervigon, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Author Information

Lisa Saltzman is professor and chair of history of art at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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