ABSTRACT
This chapter looks over the longer arc of the medium's history to investigate a number of the ever-changing arrays of metaphors and analogies that made this basis intelligible. It suggests that the historically specific nature of these analogies and their ever-changing terms reveal that there is no ontology of the photograph. What might remain difficult for early 21st-century consumers and makers of photography to recognize is how this metaphor of the sun picture generated a concept of the medium's ontology that now seems awkward or incomplete. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, famously described the photograph as "a mirror with a memory" in 1859, having in mind the silvery polished surface of the daguerreotype. The advent of such things as the x-ray accelerated this trend, such that the invisible slice of time gave way to a haunting world lying beneath the surface of appearances to which photography and vision customarily attended.
