Photography, History, (Dis) belief

Challenging the common assumption that photography is entirely different from other visual media and possesses a historically unchangeable ontological "nature," this article investigates media competition and changing media characteristics. During the Crimean War (18541856), for example, slow photographic emulsions were still unable to record unstaged scenes, permitting the eyewitness sketches of reporters for the illustrated weeklies to lay claim to greater authenticity. The same is true of academic painting. The professionalization of historiography and warfare itself transformed history painting into a project of factual, scientific correctness, one further strengthened by the organization of French painting as a state-supported, professional pursuit governed by the imperative of maximum optical accuracy on canvas. In sum, historical narration, textual or pictorial, serves the transmission of social values; but values are a matter of mythology, rather than fact, explaining the constitution of modern history as a mythological grand recu parading in objective disguise.