TheParoleof the Primitives

Abstract

Understanding very old photographs, as we know, poses a particular problem of interpretation, which is all the more difficult when we go back to the origins of photography to a time when the first ‘photographists’ still had a very innocent attitude towards the medium and used it with an almost naive confidence. We do not usually reflect on this difficulty of reading photographs, yet we do concede that the internal logic and necessity of many images of the years 1840–60 escape us; and more often than not we draw a modest veil over the poverty of our modern knowledge of such hazy notions as ‘creation’, ‘art’, and ‘personal expression’, notions that merely return the discussion to concepts with no currency in present day criticism.

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