DIORAMAS117new modes of visual consumption based on the widespread circulation
of relatively affordable reproductions.
This certainly is one of the ways in which photography constructed a
new realism that transcended the realism of classical sculpture and paint-
ing. Photography’s ability to freeze time and immobilize the transience
of beauty while bypassing the mediation of the artist was bewildering—
the photographic lens seemingly appropriated sections of the world, com-
plete with the irrelevant minutiae that the strict aesthetic rules of classi-
cal painting loathed.^25
As photographic images began to rival illustrations, the disciplinary
demand for ethical-epistemic mechanical objectivity in scientific enquiry
also grew.^26 Mechanical objectivity expressly connoted photography’s
ability to minimize the intervention and interpretation of the artist-
author, promising to faithfully process nature—to extrapolate natural
objects from the materiality of the world and to immortalize them on a
sheet of paper in every minute detail. The belief that photography could
transparently capture the natural world from an extensively objective
standpoint became solidly rooted in the epistemic discourses of the early
modern age.^27 Thus, the photographic image quickly imposed itself as a
naturalized, truthful, and mechanized model of human perception; it es-
tablished iconographical standardizations through which new animal
visibilities could be constructed. The mechanical eye, it was believed, saw
more and far better than the human one, thus seeming to fulfill the desire
for empiric objectivity that so prominently shaped scientific discourses and
practices of illustration through the classical age. In this way, photography
provided science with an epistemological tool that produced flattened and
manageable copies of animal bodies. And in so doing, it surpassed natural
history illustration in material clarity, accuracy, and alleged evidential ve-
ridicality. Like natural history illustration before it, photography furthered
the practice of transcribing animals into discourses through a new and so-
phisticated limiting and filtering process capitalizing on a seemingly accu-
rate retinal reproduction of surfaces.
The relationship between seeing and saying was therefore once again
reconfigured, not solely by disciplinary discourses but by the complicity
of discourses and the material specificities of the new epistemic spatializa-
tions and practices through which knowledge had come to be produced