ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, when I was beginning graduate school, I heard a rather unconvincing lecture by a guest speaker, and as I was leaving the hall I met my advisor, who whispered that the talk we had just heard reconfirmed his belief in advice he had been given as a student: if you want to prove something it's usually best not to show any pictures. The remark was amusing and appropriate — our lecturer's problem had certainly been that his illustrations did not support his statements — and it stuck in my mind. It was not until years later that I began to be aware that in it there is a presupposition about photography that is false: the idea that while words may be misleading, deliberately or not, photographs offer an objective standard, a reliable corrective to inaccuracy, against which to judge them. But the fact is that photographs are not nearly so objective as is frequently assumed. It has long struck me as odd that while art historians know they would not all describe a work of art the same way, and that their individual points of view would necessarily determine the character of their descriptions, many think that all photographs of the same work will demonstrate the same things, and that everybody who points a camera at a sculpture or a building will take basically the same picture. This is a very odd attitude, and in view of the amount of time they spend looking at photographs, art historians ought to know better.
