Speculative Taxidermy

116DIORAMAS

between the mediation imposed by the traditional means of representa-
tion, such as sculpture and painting, and the desire to recreate nature in
the most faithful possible way deeply characterized the Victorian inter-
est in visual consumption. The inclusion of what today would be referred
to as “found objects” caused controversy. Critics accused Daguerre of using
aids that were illegitimate for a painter; the artist responded that his “only
aim was to produce the most complete illusion.”^21 Daguerre’s justification
for combining art and nature, the tension between which had substan-
tially defined the cabinets of curiosities, eventually became the accepted
norm in natural history dioramas. But nonetheless, it precluded this
genre from ever being accepted as a legitimate art form in its own right,
despite the undisputed level of artistic skill necessary to bring to life elu-
sive visions of wildlife.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ETHICAL-EPISTEMIC

MECHANICAL OBJECTIVITY

Nicéphore Niépce successfully developed the first photograph, titled View
from the Window at Le Gras, in 1826. The small, grainy image was a far
cry from the sharper daguerreotypes that began to circulate ten years
later. With the rise of its reproductive accuracy, the new medium was rap-
idly assimilated by scientific disciplines of the early modern age as the
epistemological tool of preference.^22 Simultaneously, photography capti-
vated a growing section of the public, for whom the value of mechanized
achievements embodied the essence of progress and truth.^23 Momentum
enabled photography to cause a deep rupture within the histories of vi-
sual representation that had previously entrusted painting and illustra-
tion with the task of preserving nature. Although many critics of the
time, like Baudelaire, loathed photography, Foucault’s retrospective
consideration understood the popularity gained by the medium in the
nineteenth century as a liberation of the image, distinguished by “a new
freedom of transposition, displacement and transformation.”^24 In other
words, photography rescued the image from the exclusivist economies of
social power and wealth that characterized painting, thus constructing