ABSTRACT
In 1844 William Henry Fox Talbot enthusiastically promoted the usefulness of the photograph as document. Inside his book The Pencil of Nature he accompanied a picture of his own Articles of China (ornate vases, bowls, figurines, and cups and saucers lined up in rows on shelves) with the statement that the photograph would provide legal evidence of his possession of these objects should they be stolen (Sekula 1989: 344-345). The descriptive simplicity of Talbot’s image, each object ordered and presented frontally to the camera then recorded in some detail by the resulting photograph, makes it the perfect example of a photographic document (this desire to catalogue also recalls the legacy of photography’s Enlightenment-era origins; see Chapter 2 and Roberts 2004b). Throughout its uses in this context, photography is seen to provide evidence of what was in front of the camera lens. Central to this are the terms ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’.With photographic objectivity it is ‘the objects’ in front of the camera that are regarded as producing the photograph.With photographic subjectivity it is the photographer behind the camera – known as ‘the subject’ (not to be confused with the picture’s subject matter) – who is regarded as the producer of the photograph. I return to these ideas and apply them to images throughout the chapter.As we shall see, the distinction between the terms is often open to question.
