Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects

Abstract

In the digital age, photography confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. While technology has allowed amateurs and experts alike to create high-quality photographs in the blink of an eye, new electronic formats have severed the original photochemical link between image and subject. At the same time, cinematic, staged, or digitally enhanced styles of art have stretched the concept of photography and raised questions about its truth value as a documentary medium. By examining this idea of photography as articulated in literature, film, and the graphic novel, this book demonstrates how photography secures identity for figures with an otherwise unstable sense of self. Lisa Saltzman argues that in many modern works, the photograph asserts itself as a guarantor of identity, whether genuine or fabricated.