ABSTRACT
Baudelaire's theory of the imagination, articulated and for which the Salon is considered particularly revealing, is the reason for modernity's absence. Baudelaire's indignation, his accusations of heresy and sun-worship and his assimilation of photography and pornography are all aspects of photography's supposed primitivism, which in turn springs from its dependence on presence. In this respect photography is like sculpture, which received a comparable condemnation in the Salon de 1846 as an art des Caraibes, appropriate only for persons unable to infer a third dimension when presented with a two-dimensional image. With the Salon de 1859, Baudelaire has thus reached an impasse in his thinking about beauty. There is thus within the guiding concept of the Salon de 1859 an impossibility, or rather the impulse continually to pursue an elusive object: the perfectly imaginative utterance, one that has never been said before, the oxymoron of a new word.
