(no subject)
Full article
For Holmes, the photograph serves as a reminder to ourselves of who we are and how we are perceived. He might have been commenting on photographic portraits in particular, photography, in general, but his meaning is clear.
“It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture…”
It is interesting to note that Holmes does not say that photography has dispelled our most fleeting illusions, or revealed the reality behind them. Only that it preserves them as if in aspic or a piece of taxidermy. In Holmes’s era, photography was thought to capture reality. We know that photographs do not capture reality, but they can capture our evasions and self-deceptions. Now, more than 150 years after Holmes wrote this essay, we have an opportunity to reflect on the past and to ask that same fleeting question that intrigued Holmes: “what manner of man he was…”
For Holmes, the photograph serves as a reminder to ourselves of who we are and how we are perceived. He might have been commenting on photographic portraits in particular, photography, in general, but his meaning is clear.
“It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture…”
It is interesting to note that Holmes does not say that photography has dispelled our most fleeting illusions, or revealed the reality behind them. Only that it preserves them as if in aspic or a piece of taxidermy. In Holmes’s era, photography was thought to capture reality. We know that photographs do not capture reality, but they can capture our evasions and self-deceptions. Now, more than 150 years after Holmes wrote this essay, we have an opportunity to reflect on the past and to ask that same fleeting question that intrigued Holmes: “what manner of man he was…”