Photographic ‘‘truth’’ has historically had a pecu-
liar and sometimes controversial standing in relation
to one of its very common uses, that is, towards
political ends, and especially war photography. Dur-
ing the Civil War Mathew Brady was said inThe
New York Timesto have brought home to its read-
ers ‘‘the terrible reality and earnestness of war.’’ ‘‘If
he has not brought bodies and laid them in our
door-yards and along our streets, he has done some-
thing very like it’’ (Newhall 1982, 91). The difficulty,
as John Berger has pointed out, is that since that
time, and especially in recent years, we have become
inured to such images. They trouble us briefly but
then they become commonplace: ‘‘the picture
becomes evidence of the general human condition.
It accuses nobody and everybody.’’ There was a
time, says Berger, when ‘‘the great witnessing mas-
ters of the medium like Paul Strand and Walker
Evans’’ liberated photography from ‘‘the limitations
of fine art’’ and put it at the service of democracy—
but ‘‘the very ‘truthfulness’ of the new medium
encouraged its deliberate use [by the Nazis, for
example] as a means of propaganda’’ (Berger 48).
Inscribing Evans, with his subjective passion, as
a ‘‘great witnessing master’’ underlines the danger
of simple oppositions between subjective and ob-
jective. Ansel Adams was an objectivist of the f/64
school, but in the end, as Susan Sontag reminds us,
a great photograph was for him a ‘‘full expression
of what one feels about what is being photo-
graphed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a
true expression of what one feels about life in its
entirety’’ (Sontag 1977, 118). Photography so con-
ceived would not seem to lend itself readily to
propagandistic use. And we may not wish to be
drawn into the political arena—we may not feel
that fine art represented a limitation from which
photography needed to be freed, even for Berger’s
‘‘brief moment’’ before propaganda took over. ‘‘It
is still to this historical moment,’’ says Berger,
‘‘that Photography owes its ethical reputation as
Truth’’ (Berger 1980, 54). We might ask in closing,
what about its aesthetic reputation? The question
opens up a whole new domain of inquiry. But if
aesthetic truth is passed over in this summary dis-
cussion, that is because its problems are for the
most part not specific to photography.
PeterCaws
Seealso:Adams, Ansel; Barthes, Roland; Berger,
John; Crime Photography; Ethics and Photography;
Evans, Walker; Group f/64; Image Theory: Ideology;
Newhall, Beaumont; Portraiture; Propaganda; Repre-
sentation; Sontag, Susan; Stieglitz, Alfred; War
PhotographyFurther Reading
Barthes, Roland.La chambre claire: notes sur la photogra-
phie. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980; asCamera Lucida.
Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1981.
Berger, John.About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books,
1980.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941.
Mitchell, William J.The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in
the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1992.
Newhall, Beaumont.The History of Photography from 1839
to the Present. Fifth ed. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1982.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.The Psychology of Imagination. Transla-
tor anonymous. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
Sontag, Susan.On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977.
Thompson, Jerry L.Truth and Photography: Notes on Look-
ing and Photographing. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003.PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
A dialogue between photography and painting has
been ongoing since the invention of photography.
Sometimes the relationship has been conflicted:
French painter Paul Delaroche purportedly ex-
claimed after the invention of the daguerreotype
was announced in 1839, ‘‘From today, painting is
dead!’’ Anxiety about whether photography would
usurp functions of painting was warranted in some
instances, as the declining ranks of portrait painters
could attest. Others in the fine arts saw potentialPHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING