[1] See Robert Pear, "U.S. Downs 2 Libyan Fighters, Citing Their `Hostile Intent'; Chemical Plant Link Denied," The New York Times, Thursday, January 5, 1989, A1; and Richard Halloran, "U.S. Says Tape Shows Missiles on a Libyan Jet," The New York Times, Friday, January 6,1989, A1, A10. Halloran commented, "The quality of the tape was poor and what is said to be missiles appears as a darkened blur." An Agence-France Presse photograph showing Ambassador Walters exhibiting a very indistinct, but carefully labeled still at the United Nations was widely published on Saturday, January 7. The wrangle about this photographic evidence is reported in William G. Blair, "U.N. Hears Defense in Downing of Jets," The New York Times, Saturday, January 7, 1989,4; and "Soviets Say U.S. Lacks Proof of Libyan Arms Plant," Chicago Tribune, Saturday, January 7, 1989,3.

[2] This sort of political drama had been enacted before. During the Cuban missile crisis the US ambassador to the UN, Adlai E. Stevenson, produced aerial photographs to document the claim that the Russians had installed offensive missile bases in Cuba, and the Soviet ambassador Valerian A. Zorin declared that they were faked.

[3] For perspectives on this issue, see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); Margaret A. Hagen, Varieties ot Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); David Novitz, Pictures and Their Use in Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977); Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[4] For a brief, clear introduction to correspondence and coherence theories of truth, see W. V. Quine, "Truth," in Quiddities (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 212-16. Those committed to the correspondence theory will claim that "grass is green" is true if and only if grass is green, and may want to extend this line of argument to photographs of green grass.

[5] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977). For criticism of this view, see Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring 1980): 499-526.

[6] Significantly for the theme of this book, the authenticity of the Holy Shroud has been hotly disputed. Perhaps it is the world's first fake photograph.

[7] John Berger, "Understanding a Photograph," in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980),291-94.

[8] Aaron Scharf, "The Representation of Movement in Photography and Art," in Art and Photography (New York: Penguin, 1986).

[9] This is conveniently reprinted in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 19-27.

[10] Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), French Literary Theory Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),11-17.

[11] See Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a "True" Image (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

[12] Thus Rosalind E. Krauss rehearses the standard cliche that a photograph is "an imprint or transfer off the real" and dutifully mentions fingerprints and the Shroud of Turin, but provides a less expected twist by connecting photography and writing via Andre Breton's remark that "automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the 19th century, is a true photography of thought" ("The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986],87-118).

[13] Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Others have produced similar formulations. Lewis Mumford, for example, wrote in Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1934) that "photography differs from the other graphic arts in that the process is determined at every state by the external conditions that present themselves." Stanley Cavell has observed in The World Viewed (New York, 1971): "So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation.... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of 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." Rudolf Arnheim has spoken of "the fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium: the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light" and suggested that, as a result of this peculiarity, "we are on vacation from artifice" when we look at photographs ("On the Nature of Photography," Critical Inquiry 1 [1974]: 149-61). There are not too many more ways to say it! For an argument that the "automatic" character of photography has been exaggerated, see Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, "Photography, Vision, and Representation," Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1975).

[14] Christopher Isherwood, "A Berlin Diary," in The Berlin Stories (New York: New Directions, 1963).

[15] Roger Scruton, "The Eye of the Camera," in The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1983). On intentionality and representation, see also Richard Wollheim, "On Drawing an Object," in On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974),3-30; and "What the Spectator Sees," in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (eds.), Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 101-50.

[16] John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959),103. The supermarket tabloid Weekly World News has no such scruples. It has published (March 24,1992), with an accompanying photograph, an article entitled "Baby Born with Angel Wings: He Really IS a Gift from Heaven Says Joyful Mom."

[17] Lewis Hine, "Social Photography," in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 111.

[18] For a discussion of the role of the camera obscura in drawing and painting, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Alpers comments, on critical attitudes to use of the camera obscura, "Art is assumed to be that which is not due to an instrument but to the free choices of a human maker." See also Jonathan Crary, "The Camera Obscura and its Subject," in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 24-66.

[19] A similar analysis can be made of constructed perspective renderings. Before the Renaissance there were drawings and paintings in roughly correct perspective, but there were no complete, well-defined perspective-construction algorithms, so the results of attempts to depict architectural space were unpredictable. The Renaissance perspective theorists succeeded in establishing such algorithms. If a perspective construction algorithm is rigorously applied by a draftsperson to geometric data (measurements from a survey of a building, say), the results are highly predictable. However, architectural drafters have often taken liberties in order to "improve" the appearance of a perspective drawing, and these may be difficult to detect. Computer generation of a perspective image from geometric data is an entirely algorithmic process, and we can trust the objectivity of the results.

[20] Perhaps the most algorithmic form of photograph is one produced by a mechanism that has nobody looking through the viewfinder when the button is pushed; for example, an unmanned spacecraft that takes pictures at preprogrammed moments. It is certainly within the current capability of artificial-intelligence technology to go a step further and produce a photographer-robot that could independently decide, according to programmed criteria, to make an exposure whenever something "interesting" appeared within the viewfinder frame. At this point, photography is only very indirectly related to human intention.

[21] Another line of attack is to concede that the standard algorithm was followed but to claim that the event itself was staged--that the photographer acted in a "directorial" rather than "straight" mode. I shall be only peripherally concerned with the dispute that has raged between proponents of these two modes. For an introductory discussion, see A. D. Coleman, "The Directorial Mode: Notes toward a Definition," Art Forum (September 1976).

[22] See Eastman Kodak Company, Clinical Photography and Basic Police Photography (Rochester, NY, 1974).

[23] This task is analogous to that of a literary scholar who undertakes to demonstrate that a text cannot be genuine. See Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), on the interplay between textual forgery and the development of techniques of textual authentication.

[24] For discussions of impossible objects, see L. S. Penrose and R. Penrose, "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Illusion," British Journal of Psychology 49:31 (1958); D. A. Huffman, "Impossible Objects as Nonsense Sentences," Machine Intelligence 6 (1971): 295-23; and Marianne L. Teuber, "Sources of Ambiguity in the Prints of Maurits C. Escher," Scientific American 231:1 (1974).

[25] For a detailed discussion of the standard approach to computer interpretation of line drawings as three-dimensional scenes, see D. Waltz, "Understanding Line Drawings of Scenes with Shadows," in P. H. Winston (ed.), The Psychology of Computer Vision (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975),19-91. On the use of intensity information in scene-interpretation procedures, see Berthold K. P. Horn, "Understanding Image Intensities," in Martin A. Fischler and Oscar Firschein (eds.), Readings in Computer Vision: Issues, Problems, Principles, and Paradigms (Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1987),45-60.

[26] This point might be connected to Michael Riffaterre's thesis, developed in Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), that the ring of truth in successful fiction depends on richly tautological representation within the text rather than on exterior referentiality.

[27] See for example Norman Bryson's analysis of the difference between Vermeer's The Artist in His Studio and a photographic transcription in Vision and Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 111-17.

[28] In similar fashion, we can cross-check narratives. There is a well-known inconsistency to be discovered in Robinson Crusoe, for example. Defoe has Crusoe swim naked to the wreck, then fill his pockets with things found there.

[29] The importance of cast shadows in establishing credibility was demonstrated by the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Drawn cartoon characters were inserted into photographed scenes with no attempt to produce an illusion of continuity. Indeed, the difference between cartoon and live characters was part of the point and was graphically emphasized. But live and cartoon characters were made to seem as if they occupied the same pictorial space by casting convincing shadows from the drawn characters onto photographed surfaces.

[30] Edouard Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergère is a wellknown example of a picture in which a prominent reflection is clearly not consistent with our spatial interpretation of the scene. The reflection of the woman's back in the mirror behind the bar cannot be consistent with the viewer's location directly in front of her. This produces a discomfiting effect of spatial ambiguity. Conversely, in the film Terminator 2: JudgmentDay, a computer-synthesized metallic cyborg inserted into photographed scenes was made to seem convincingly solid and real by the reflection of surrounding scenery in its shiny body. See Peter Sorensen, "Terminator 2: A Film Effects Revolution," Computer Graphics World 14:10 (October 1991): 56-62.

[31] A basic discussion is provided in G. A. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967 [1946]). For a more recent view see Carlo Ginzburg, "Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian," Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 7992. Ginzburg attacks the view that a historical document is like a naively understood photograph--"a transparent medium . . . an open window that gives us direct access to reality."

[32] A more extreme case of this sort of deception is that of the fifteenth-century Nuremberg Chronicle, which was illustrated with a large number of woodcuts of personages and places. Images from the same block are used in different places with different captions: one view is used to illustrate eleven different towns. See William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969), 38.

[33] William D. Montalbano, "From the Ice Comes a Mystery," Los Angeles Times, Monday, October 21, 1991, A1, A12.

[34] Paul Wallich, "Polar Heat: The Argument Continues over an Explorer's Good Name," Scientific American 262:3 (March 1990): 22-24.

[35] Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 209-12. See also Richard Whelan, Robert Capa (New York: Knopf, 1985), 95-100.

[36] Frederic Ray, "The Case of the Rearranged Corpse," Civil War Times (October 1961).

[37] See Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories and the American Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). There was, indeed, a dramatic flag-raising on the summit of Suribachi a few hours after the Marines invaded Iwo Jima. But Rosenthal's photograph is of a staged event, with a different flag, which took place hours later.

[38] "Viet War Photo Is Challenged," Washington Post, January 19, 1986.

[39] Similar questions are sometimes raised about literary works, and the charge of fraud may be made if claims about authorship and date do not seem to correspond to the facts. A celebrated recent instance was the 1981 publication in Harper's Magazine of a piece that the historian Peter Gay presented as a translation of a newly discovered contemporary review of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Gay later said that it was a spoof, but Freudians who had been taken in angrily denounced it as a fraud. The argument between Gay and his detractors turned on the questions of what claims about provenance had explicitly and implicitly been made, whether these had been made with lighthearted or deceptive intent, and whether those deceived had been insufficiently alert to the cues that normally allow us to distinguish fiction from evidence.

[40] For a fuller account of this episode, see Clifford Krauss, "A Photo Said to Show 3 Lost Fliers Jogs Congress on Vietnam Missing," The New York Times, Wednesday, July 24, 1991, International Section, A6.

[41] Andrew Rosenthal, "Pentagon Casts Doubt on Photo," The New York Times, Friday, July 26, 1991.

[42] Ibid.

[43] "MIAs Photo Was From Magazine, US Says," Boston Globe, August 9, 1991, 70.

[44] Barbara Crossette, "New Interest in Missing Servicemen May Imperil Move Toward Hanoi Ties," The New York Times, Monday, January 6, 1992, A3; Barbara Crossette, "U.S. Cites New Data on Picture," The New York Times, Sunday, July 19, 1992, A12.

[45] Benjamin C. Bradlee, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Presidential Statements," Guardian Weekly, December 1, 1991, 21.

[46] The print that I have on the wall before me as I write is a dramatic example. It depicts the Elephant Stables at Vijayanagara, India. The large-format glass-plate negative was exposed by the British photographer Alex Greenlaw in 1856. The print was made, using modern techniques that were not available to Greenlaw, by the Australian photographer John Gollings in 1982. Similar issues are raised by casts made after the death of a sculptor. See Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Originality of the AvantGarde," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 151-70.

[47] This is connected to the question of what we are to make of hearsay verbal reports of reports. You can look at hearsay as an indirect (and therefore probably untrustworthy) report of the original incident, or you can look at it as a direct report of what a witness said--a report of a speech act. Similarly, you can look at a photograph of a photograph as an indirect image of the original three-dimensional scene or as a direct image of a two-dimensional graphic artifact. This becomes particularly clear when the photographed photograph contains halftone dots or other graphic elements that were not in the original scene.

[48] Charles Hagen, "The Debate Over Photo Negatives Fires Up Again," The New York Times, Tuesday, March 3, 1992, C13, C16.

[49] Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). For an alternative view, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Works," in Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 33-105.

[50] Consider, for example, William Blake's watercolored relief etching The Ancient of Days in the British Museum and his The Ancient of Days in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Although the two are very similar, and have the same title, they differ in numerous subtle ways. They are different works with elements in common, not different instances of the same work.

[51] Some modernist photographers, however, have emphasized standardized, precisely controlled printing processes, so that results are highly predictable and one print is almost indistinguishable from another. Ansel Adams, in particular, explicitly compared negatives to musical scores and prints to performances of them.

[52] Closure eventually occurs when a tradition dies. The Homeric epics must have evolved through many versions as they were retold, but we now regard them as closed, finished works.

[53] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1955). For a more recent treatment of the theme, see David Harvey, "The Work of Art in an Age of Electronic Reproduction and Image Banks," in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

[54] Not only does DNA carry hereditary information, it apparently does so in digital form--allowing replication without degradation.

[55] Many theorists of the postmodern would, no doubt, assimilate this point to a general argument that subjects are constructed by symbol systems and that photographic, print, film, video, and digital images now do much of the work of construction. See for example Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). The role of digital information is explicitly addressed in Mark Poster, The Mode of Intormation: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). On the idea of cyberspace electronic "virtual reality," see William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); and Michael Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991).

[56] For general discussion of copyright protection for works in electronic form, see US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Intellectual Property Rights in an Age of Electronics and Information (Washington, DC, 1986).

[57] On the issues raised by colorization, see "Moral Right Protections in the Colorization of Black and White Motion Pictures: A Black and White Issue," Hofstra Law Review 16 (1988): 503; "Motion Picture Colorization, Authenticity, and the Exclusive Moral Right," New York University Law Review 64 (1989): 628; and Stuart Klawans, "Colorization: Rose-Tinted Spectacles," in Mark Crispin Miller (ed.), Seeing Through Movies (New York: Pantheon, 1990).

[58] Quoted by Deborah Starr Seibel in "Splitting Image," Chicago Tribune, Monday, December 30,1991, Section 5,1-3.

[59] See Richard Jay Solomon, "Vanishing Intellectual Boundaries: Virtual Networking and the Loss of Sovereignty and Control," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 495 (January 1988): 40.

[60] Rights of photographic subjects are discussed extensively in Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jack Ruby (eds.), Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

[61] Anne W. Branscomb, "Common Law for the Electronic Frontier," Scientific American 265:3 (September 1991): 154-58.

[62] John Szarkowski provided the canonical formulation of this point in The Photographer's Eye (1966): "The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process--a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made . . . but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken."

[63] Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859). Reprinted in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography. For commentary see Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). The metaphor of photographic images as wealth is also used, with an ironic twist, in Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers: two peasants, induced to join an army by the prospect of looting, end up with a suitcase full of picture postcards.

[64] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).

[65] See The New York Times, March 2, 1988, A12. The idea of this sort of comprehensive photographic documentation is an old one. In 1899 The British Journal of Photography called for formation of an archive "containing a record as complete as it can be made . . . of the present state of the world" (vol. 36, p. 688).