Introduction

Colas on the Rocks Robert Skelton INTRODUCTION RogerHall 1989marked the sesquicentennial of the development of photography as an art and a science. It seemed appropriate to mark the occasion by assembling a series of essays on photography's impact on America. Technically, the definition of a photograph is relatively easy: it is a chemically-fixedimage, maintaining a pattern of light filtered through a lens, capturing a defined space over a finite of time. But that's something like saying Shakespeare is a pattern of ink on paper. Photographs, in fact, since their invention more than a century-and-ahalf ago, have defied all simple definition. That is very odd when you consider what an enormous impact they have had. The art or science of photography in its short existence may just have explained, portrayed, informed, confused and deluded us more than any other popular medium. American photos and images particularly surround us, and through television, magazines and newspapers constitute what for many people is their everyday view of much of the external world. But photography reflects both reality and a kind of unreality; it is our ego and in a way our alter-ego. Or as Susan Sontag put it in her justly celebrated account On Photography, "A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." In the four papers that follow,the authors track such footprints, and in so doing provide a few differing definitions and uses for photography. Patrick Maynard's long and scholarly essay, by reflecting on this occasion, offers us both a useful retrospect and a powerful prospect regarding the continuing evolution of what started with the aptly-named cameraobscuraso long ago. Jeffery Donaldson's essay has two central interests, one having to do with the nature of early photography and its importance in American thought, and the other with Richard Howard's ekphrastic poem cycle "Homage to Nadar" in which the details of Nadar's portraits are so construed as to reflect further on the images we create and on what they make of us. James Dougherty's article on the work of the Danish-American Jacob Riis shows how Riis's sharp documentary style purposefully "opened up a world that required of its viewers a moral response," a response that causedthem to question their own comfortably-defined morality and, at the same time, to redefine the comfortable definitions that photography had conveyed. Christopher Coates's essay on Wright Morris is not, as he puts it, "as irretrievably theoretical as it sounds"; it is a fine treatment of Morris's three photo-texts--The Home Place, The Inhabitants and God's Country--and explores the problematic juxtaposition of photographic image and written text that Morris manipulates. ...