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consistent focus across the depth of fi eld. Such equiva-
lence across picture planes made the photographed
subject appear more two-dimensional. To some, this
looked inartistic and untrue to natural human vision,
an argument partly inspired by contemporaneous cri-
tiques of Pre- Raphaelite painting as having forsaken
volumetric devices such as atmospheric perspective,
resulting in fl attened pictorial planes. But the issue was
an older one; one-point perspective presupposed static,
monocular vision, and seventeenth century French
discussions on geometrical optics noted its inadequacy
in representing a mobile eye. In the early 1890s, these
arguments were updated with the advent of properly
instantaneous photographs, when the multi-second ex-
posure times and expressive diffusion of Julia Margaret
Cameron’s portraits were discussed in terms of a more
truthful duration of time representing the real experi-
ence of seeing a human face, rather than a frozen, static
image produced in a split-second, faster than—and thus
inaccessible to—normal human perception.
There were many ways of defi ning truth in vision;
as physiological sensation, as a combination of sensa-
tion and mental synthesis, as observation enhanced by
experience, not to mention the multiplicities of artistic
truth. Critics of naturalistic painting and photography
assumed that visual sensation—unaffected by the eye’s
mobility, by habit, convention, and experience—pre-
cluded the mind’s participation. Without consciousness,
sight was a simple refl ex, shared by those of widely
differing intellectual and imaginative capabilities. If
photography was proposed as an imaginative art, then
it too depended on mediated perception. In 1860, the art
critic P. G. Hamerton explained the difference between
artistic and photographic sight in just these terms: “What
we artists see is a vision of Nature through the lenses
that she has given us, our own human eyes brightened
or dimmed [...] with human joys and sorrows [... we
do] not see her at second hand by the intervention of a
glass lens and a mahogany camera” (Hamerton 1860,
128). The vagaries of individual perception did not
bolster the notion of some ultimate truth to nature.
Instead, they suggested that representation could be
diverse because the seeing that it communicated was
also varied, partial, and even idiosyncratic. Such ideasD’Olivier, Louis Camile. Nude
Study.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles © The J. Paul Getty
Museum.