ABSTRACT
Photography, in American poet Edgar Allan Poe’s estimation, provides “an absolute truth” and a “perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.” Guided by such nineteenth-century perceptions, images produced by photographic procedures have long operated socially and legally as agents of documentation and verifiability – on passports and drivers’ licenses, in print journalism and courtrooms. Yet since its inception, photography has also functioned as a medium of manipulation, capable of staging fantasies, embellishing half truths, and asserting outright lies. When photography’s invention was announced to the world in the form of the daguerreotype, it was heralded as a means of reproduction “so exact and rapid” that it constituted “perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.”1 Yet the weaknesses of the process were evident – notably, its tendency to blur or expunge objects in motion and therefore the need to carefully stage objects and figures before the camera’s lens. At the same time that Daguerre’s discovery was widely celebrated, the chagrined inventor Hippolyte Bayard used photography (his overlooked direct positive method) to stage and document his own fallacious suicide. His pictorial statement flaunted what Daguerre’s plates repressed, namely photography’s duplicity – at once an evidentiary tool and a medium for performative dissimulation, both an earnest witness and a wily trickster.
