Approximation aims for an impossible exactitude,
but this may not be such a bad thing—we cannot
reach the ideal, but we may come ever closer. This
was the guiding notion of the group formed in the
1930s and known as f/64, from the smallest aperture
of the standard camera, yielding maximum depth of
field and sharpness of image. The members of this
group—notably Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunning-
ham, and Edward Weston—formulated almost asce-
tic standards for the practice of photography,
according to which every image had to be a contact
print on glossy black-and-white paper, showing no
trace of handwork or avoidance of reality in choice
of subject, on pain of being considered ‘‘impure.’’
But at about the same time other photographers, like
Alfred Stieglitz and Walker Evans, were developing
the flip side of Kierkegaard’s opposition.
‘‘Exactitude is not truth’’—this was the epigraph
of a book Evans was to publish later; what truth
was for him at the time is to be gathered, according
to Jerry L. Thompson, from something he says
about Euge`ne Atget—namely that it is a ‘‘projec-
tion of [the photographer’s] person.’’ ‘‘He projects
himself by selecting and seizing a view,’’ continues
Thompson; ‘‘...for Evans, the truth was his take,
what he made of what he saw.’’ Similarly, for Stie-
glitz, ‘‘the larger truth...is the picture’s fidelity, its
correspondence, to [his] experience of life as it was
felt at the moment of the picture’s making. ’’ ‘‘The
truth for Stieglitz was his emotional state, his
response, how he felt’’ (Thompson, 35, 38). These
are two varieties of subjective experience: grasping,
feeling, or in Kierkegaard’s terms appropriating,
both standing in contrast to the drive to objectivity
that approximates a truth given from without.
Even taking the contribution of the subject into
account there may remain something about the
object not grasped by the notion of correspondence.
One complication arises from the fact that while
most photographs are photographsofsomething
(or someone) in the world, the photograph is also
in its own right ‘‘a thing in the world.’’ Jean-Paul
Sartre, in his bookThe Psychology of Imagination
(in homage to which work Roland Barthes wrote
his essay on photography, Camera Lucida), re-
marks on the physical presence of the photographic
image itself: ‘‘As a perception, the photograph is
but a paper rectangle of a special quality and
color....’’ If it is a photograph of a man on a pedes-
tal, I contribute an intentionality to it; if of my
friend Peter, another level of intentionality is added.
We can imagine three successive stages of apprehen-
sion: photo, photo of a man standing on a pedestal,
photo of Peter. But it may also happen that the threestages occur so close to each other as to make but one; it
can happen that the photo does not function as an object
but presents itself immediately as an image
(Sartre 1948, 24)
This last condition is quite usual: the viewer
(who is spared the work of developing, printing,
mounting, and framing) hardly ever dwells on the
photograph as physical object—it is nearly always
seen directly as image.
But the image may have unexpected power—it
can evoke, or provoke, or move to tears. This power
is not something that is true of it in the simple sense
of correspondence to a real state of affairs, it is
something that is manifested in the encounter
between the viewer who sees (or looks) and the
person or object seen. Thompson finds an exemp-
lary case of this in Walker Evans’s well-known
portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs inLet Us Now
Praise Famous Men: ‘‘The picture’s exceptional,
amazing feature is that, instead of a subject looking
at and understanding an object, it presents to us one
subject looking at a second subject, who for her part
looks back’’ (Thompson 2003, 43).
Barthes’s book, already referred to, is an
extended meditation on this kind of encounter. He
distinguishes between the general field of a photo-
graph that directs our interest to it in the first
place—itsstudium—and just this ‘‘looking back’’
that skewers our attention, as it were, which he
calls itspunctum. In the very moving second part
of the book he describes his discovery of an early
photograph of his recently deceased mother in
which he found ‘‘the truth of the face I had
loved’’—a face he had never seen, since his mother
was five when the photograph was taken, but which
captured for him what he had failed to find in all the
other ‘‘ordinary’’ photographs among which he had
been searching.
What Barthes calls the ‘‘secondpunctum’’ is pre-
cisely the photograph’s necessary fixation of past
time, its evocation of death. With great poignancy
(a word etymologically related to ‘‘punctum’’) he
describes the feelings old photographs arouse in
him when he realizes that the people represented
are now dead—a feeling we can share when we
look at his own picture on the back of his book
(his last, and one which reads, in hindsight, like a
farewell message; after the death of his mother, he
says, he had only to wait for his own death, which
followed quickly). ‘‘The Photograph then becomes...
a new form of hallucination: false on the level of
perception, true on the level of time’’ (Barthes 1981,
115): false because the thing represented is not there,
true because it has been there.PHOTOGRAPHIC ‘‘TRUTH’’