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4 INTRODUCTION
for interpretation. A great idea, says Whitehead, "is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specialization."2
The following historical survey, then, is to provide the substantive conceptions on which the subsequent systematic considerations proper will depend.
HISTORICAL SURVEY EarJy views and trends
With the arrival of daguerreotypy, discerning people were highly aware of what they felt to be the new medium's specific properties, which they unanimously identified as the camera's unique ability to record as well as reveal visible, or potentially visible, physical reality. There was general agreement that photography reproduces nature with a fidelity "equal to nature itself." 3 In supporting the bill for the purchase of Daguerre's invention by the French government, Arago and Gay-Lussac reveled in the "mathematical exactness" 4 and "unimaginable precision"5 of every detail rendered by the camera; and they predicted that the medium would benefit both science and art. Paris correspondents of New York newspapers and periodicals chimed in, full of praise for the unheard-of accuracy with which daguerreotypies copied "stones under the water at the edge of the stream,"6 or a "withered leaf lying on a projecting cornice." 7 And no less a voice than Ruskin's was added to the chorus of enthusiasm over the "sensational realism" of small plates with views of Venice; it is, said he, "as if a magician had reduced the reality to be carried away into an enchanted land." 8 In their ardor these nineteenth-century realists were emphasizing an essential point— that the photographer must indeed reproduce, somehow, the objects before his lens; that he definitely lacks the artist's freedom to dispose of existing shapes and spatial interrelationships for the sake of his inner vision.
Recognition of the camera's recording faculty went together with an acute awareness of its revealing power. Gay-Lussac insisted that no detail, "even if imperceptible," can escape "the eye and the brush of this new painter."9 And as early as 1839 a New York Star reporter admiringly remarked that, when viewed under a magnifying glass, photographs show minutiae which the naked eye would never have discovered.10 The American writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes was among the first to capitalize on the camera's scientific potentialities. In the early 'sixties he found that the movements of walking people, as disclosed by instantaneous photographs, differed greatly from what the artists imagined they were,