camera obscura had served to project and neatly
circumscribe a slice of the visible world onto a flat
surface, which could then be traced and developed
into a painting. It was not until the photograph,
however, that the vectors of perspective could be
invoked independently of the human hand.
Especially considering the role of proto-photo-
graphic apparatuses in the development of perspec-
tive, photography’s detached viewpoint seemed to
constitute an extension and refinement of perspec-
tival painting. If the ‘‘window’’ had served as the
paradigm of perspectival vision, then the camera
lens would seem to literalize such a concept in prac-
tice. Some contemporary art historians, however,
have argued that photographs seem to reproduce
normal vision only because cameras have been
designed in accordance with the conventions of
linear perspective developed since the fifteenth cen-
tury. Scott McQuire writes,
If the camera seemed miraculous in the nineteenth cen-
tury, if its images were so quickly able to saturate con-
sciousness and common sense as an unrivalled means of
manufacturing lifelike resemblances, this acclaim was
crucially underpinned by the dominance that geometric
perspective had already achieved in visual representation.
(McQuire 1998, 18)
Indeed, the camera seemed to mechanize precisely
the objective, rationalized, and scientific reproduction
of reality to which perspectival systems had aspired.
Yet the idea of absolute commensurability between
photographic representation and actual vision is
quite fraught. First, despite their vast influence on
conceptions of realism throughout the centuries,
Alberti’s claims for a correspondence between per-
spectival and optical perception have been criticized
for various reasons—not least in the sense that no
system, however scientifically grounded, can isolate,
‘‘objectify,’’ or reproduce the physiological act of
seeing. Second, the photographic camera differs
from the eye in important ways. The human retina
is designed differently from the lens; we see with two
eyes rather than one; and rarely does an individual
view a scene without moving, however slightly or
slowly. Third, despite claims for an ‘‘ontological’’
relationship between photography and the visible
world, the photographic image is always and only a
picture: an indexical record of an arbitrary viewpoint.
The relationships between perspective and see-
ing, and between vision and ‘‘rationalized’’ depic-
tion, have proved some of the most polemical
topics not only in the history of painting and
photography, but also in the disciplines of philoso-
phy and history. Throughout the development of
the modern world after the Renaissance, perspec-
tive systems came to be seen not merely as drawing
techniques, but as microcosms of the Enlighten-
ment world view. The concepts of a transcendental
‘‘point of view’’ or an idealized viewing subject, for
example, became linked to philosophical questions
about the nature of perception and truth. In a
marriage of perspectival order and rationalist
thought, the human being came to be seen as the
center of knowledge and perception. As the tenets
of Enlightenment philosophy have come under
attack in recent Postmodern discourse, so too has
the associated concept of perspective. Yet chal-
lenges to an absolute perspective are not simply a
phenomenon of Postmodern philosophy. Rather,
they have definitive roots within early twentieth-
century painting and photography.
The invention of photography did not, as is gen-
erally assumed, immediately displace the vocation of
‘‘realistic’’ painting. Rather, several nineteenth-cen-
tury artists—Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres among them—proclaimed the
potential value of photographs for providing a pre-
existing model for the depiction of space. Nonethe-
less, in the wake of photography’s popularization,
the longstanding relationship between painting and
realism never recovered its original, undisputed reci-
procity. Paul Ce ́zanne’s subversion of a unified per-
spective in painting, subsequently adopted and
radicalized by the Cubists, definitively breached the
idea of the canvas as a transparent ‘‘window.’’
Unhinged from any pretense to reflect reality, mod-
ernist painting could leave the task of mimesis to
photography. Consequently, avant-garde photogra-
phers felt that if their medium was to prove itself a
plastic art, it would have to shrug off its aura of
unified space and time. Traditional perspective,
then, became the very thing to be avoided in photo-
graphic art.
In particular, photo-collage served as an eminent
pictorial trope adapted from Cubism, capable of
tearing snippets of imagery from their normal con-
texts, generating an air of fantastic credibility. The
incongruous scales, proportions, and subjects as-
sembled in Dada and Russian avant-garde collages,
for example, stridently laid claim to photography as a
potentially ‘‘transrational’’ or ‘‘irrational’’ medium.
In defiance of photography’s prevailing reputation as
the bearer of visual fact, collage could conjure up the
idiom of fantasy—and the prerequisite for such an
idiom was the rejection of the known dimensions of
the material world. Alternatively, Futurist ‘‘Photody-
namists’’ aspired to capture both movement and time
through distortions of light; Surrealist photographers
presented subjects as if passed through the strata of
the unconscious. Eventually, the displacements andPERSPECTIVE