I

On the reverse of a photograph bearing the caption ‘Miss Ellen Terry as “Lady Macbeth”’ is an elaborate cartouche bearing the photographer's name. Within it appears a drawing of two female figures in profile, one bearing a lamp, the other with an elaborate headdress above a garment that hints of Botticelli's Primavera. It is captioned ‘Ars et veritas’ – art and truth. In the duality that this establishes, the image stands as an emblem of the way in which Victorian photography was conceived at the time, and of the difficulties that the form poses for later viewers.

In the public imagination, photography stands as a simple record of external actuality; the phrase ‘photographic realism’ is a conceptual, as well as a linguistic, cliché. But the photograph always constructs as much as it records. Tourists travel hundreds of miles to see a specific location, and then ask strangers to capture them on film standing in front of it, recording not their own experience or viewpoint, nor even that of a stranger, but one constructed for the image itself. Academics are corralled into groups at the end of conferences to produce a photograph that ostensibly records the event but in actuality records only the moment that is arranged simply to be photographed. The painstaking landscape compositions of Ansell Adams and the rapid snapshots of a hiker in the Lake District, as far apart in aesthetic value as are the locations with which they interact, are both products of an exchange between observer, object and mechanism. All may be seen either as falsifications or as configurations, but the mere question reflects a truth that the idea of the photograph often obscures: that it is a willed construction with an identity of its own, not a simple, unmediated record of place and time. These complexities are insistent, and the meditations about them by Sontag, Barthes and others are merely extensions of the qualities that are innate, and innately fascinating, to the medium.