"Photography has often been criticized for exchanging resemblance for identicalness. In 1841, Rodolphe Topffer was already complaining that the daguerreotype offered "the image of the visible instead of a sign of the invisible." For the picture to be identical would mean that the object had no significance beyond itself. Identicalness, Topffer said, is the indirect and therefore verifiable product of the daguerreotype process, whereas resemblance is the freely expressive sign of something other than the image. Truthfulness, then, is to be found not in the identical picture but in the picture which gives a resemblance. This traditional distinction shows the dilemma of photography, which was not permitted to depict what it could depict, but was unable to depict what people demanded of it."
- Hubertus von Amelunxen, excerpt from A New History of Photography.
"We continue to make a link between the image and the real, the actual 'has been there' of the body in front of the camera. But a doubt, a concern, a fear has crept into our understanding of these images. And this fear intrudes on our self-evident notion of representation and recollection. Therein lies the fascination of the photographic medium, that which is so captivating about it, which distinguishes it from all other reproduction media. The suspicion that 'perhaps it was not there."
-Hubertus von Amelunxen, Photography After Photography, The Terror of the Body in Digital Space
"The preposition after refers both to the temporal and spatial difference in photographic representation, and thus to the space and time of the referential which is so fundamental to the photographic image. The historically established belief in the authenticity of the photographic image has its roots in the assumption that a physical-chemical apparatus can (re)produce the displaced analogue image of an optically perceivable phenomenon. We believe in photography just as we believe in our shadow. From the inventor of the negative process, William Henry Fox Talbot, to the 'revolution in seeing', an agenda formulated in the first third of this century, the basis for the social, artistic and theoretical treatment of photography has always been an implicit linking of the technically generated photographic image to a referential outside that image.
Whether as a 'faithful imitation', an anamorphous, distorted 're-creation' or as a subjective design, right up until the 70s the photographic image had still to withstand comparison with an 'ideal' (German: vor-bildliche, pre-image) reality of which it was held to be the artistic but binding indexical representation. Photography was understood in its relationship to the co-ordinates of space and time in which it originated and which left their mark on it. That is to say, it was understood to the extent that it was able to correspond to, or contradict our traditional view of things. Photography is the image of our history. It has been regarded by some as a source of historical records, by others as the ruin of a historical continuum. It took the progressive digitisation of the pictorial and lexical worlds, both grounded in analogy, to show us just how far we had evolved down the road towards becoming 'homo photographicus'."
-Hubertus von Amelunxen, Photography After Photography, The Terror of the Body in Digital Space
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