reasons that theorists such as Baudrillard have
strong post-structuralist sympathies.
Recent Developments
While current photographic theory remains wedded
to the academic context, recent trends move away
from an understanding of image-meaning in terms of
theories about language-meaning. Kendall Walton
and Patrick Maynard, for example, regard photo-
graphs as props that function to cause viewers to
imagine seeing the objects represented in them. For
Maynard, photographs are potent amplifiers of our
powers of imaginary seeing, a fact which helps
account for their widespread use in journalism,
advertising, pornography, etc. Such an approach
differs from language-based approaches insofar as
there is no need for the viewer to learn conventions
regarding reference relations or roles in language
games in order to understand at least the literal
meaning of images. Additionally, such theorists
embrace the traditional view that photographs,
unlike handmade images, maintain an objective rela-
tionship with their subject matter. Investigation into
the interplay between these two roles—that of occa-
sioning imagination and that of objectively record-
ing—suggests future theoretical developments that
are more in line with the Eastlake-Strand discourse
discussed above than with the non-objective, lan-
guage-based discourse that has hitherto been the
mainstay of the academic period.
ScottWalden
See Also: Appropriation; Arbus, Diane; Barthes,
Roland; Composition; Conceptual Photography;
Constructed Reality; Deconstruction; Documentary
Photography; Evans, Walker; Farm Security Ad-
ministration; Feminist Photography; Frank, Robert;
Group f/64; Hine, Lewis; Impressionism; Linked
Ring; Man Ray; Modernism; Museum of Modern
Art; Photo-Secession; Pictorialism; Postmodernism;
Prince, Richard; Riis, Jacob; Sander, August;
Semiotics; Sherman, Cindy; Solomon-Godeau, Abi-
gail; Stieglitz, Alfred; Strand, Paul; Stryker, Roy;
Surrealism; Visual Anthropology; Weston, Edward;
White, MinorFurther Reading
Barthes, Roland.Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and
Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday
Press, 1988.
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.Neo-Avantgarde and the Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from
1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Collier, John Jr., and Malcolm Collier.Visual Anthropol-
ogy: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
Eisinger, Joel.Trace and Transformation: American Criti-
cism of Photography in the Modernist Period. Albuquer-
que: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Goldberg, Vicki, ed.Photography in Print: Writings from
1816 to the Present. New York: Touchstone, Simon and
Schuster, 1981.
Grundberg, Andy.The Crisis of the Real: Writings on
Photography Since 1974. New York: Aperture, 1999.
Kendall, Walton. ‘‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of
Photographic Realism.’’Critical Inquiry11 (December
1984).
Maynard, Patrick.The Engine of Visualization: Thinking
Through Photography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997.
de Saussure, Ferdinand.Course in General Linguistics.La
Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1986.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock:
Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Prac-
tices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Trachtenberg, Alan.Classic Essays on Photography. New
Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1990.PHOTOGRAPHIC ‘‘TRUTH’’
‘‘The camera cannot lie’’: this old cliche ́ asserts
photography’s prima facieclaim to ‘‘truth.’’ Like
most cliche ́s it has a point. According to one standard
analytic view, the ‘‘correspondence theory of truth,’’
a proposition is true if its content corresponds to an
actual state of affairs, and such a correspondence is
easy to establish in many cases of photographic
representation. Photographs can have propositional
content: they can be ‘‘read’’ as informing us about the
world, and in the absence of manipulation, either of
the things or events photographed or of the resulting
image, they are often rightly taken as veridical.PHOTOGRAPHIC ‘‘TRUTH’’