Realistic painting and linear perspective^§MS2.2b anticipated photography in the “camera obscura” method of transferring light from a scene onto a screen in order to calculate relative sizes and positions that would represent depth two-dimensionally. The innovations of Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and Henry Fox Talbot in the 1820s and 1830s apply chemistry to the surface of the screen in order to record and preserve an image beyond its moment. The chemistry of the photograph, says Roland Barthes, means that “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.”¹⁵⁹ But the invention of the underlying mechanics and culture of perspective-based visualization was Alberti’s, or before that, Alhacen’s camera obscura.^§MS2.2.1a

To transpose a three-dimensional world of bodies, objects, and spaces onto a two-dimensional plane, the affordances of photography are in some fundamental respects the same as realistic painting; in other, finely nuanced respects, they are quite different.^§MS2.2.2a

The things that are the same first: the camera is just as one-eyed as the painter, compared to the three-dimensional world as seen in binocular vision. Occasionally, stereoscopic images are created with two-lens cameras and binocular viewers, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. The camera also conventionally transposes self and other at standing head height, with a vanishing point at the horizon, though in the era of planes, spacecraft and drones, we have also learned to see images in variations of plan perspective.

Lenses correct for “barrel distortion,” or the curved appearances of things like buildings that we know are straight even if we don’t really see them as straight – or some lenses do, while others, such as “fish eye” lenses, see a spherical world that is closer to vision, though photographs taken with these tend to offend our conventional expectation of the image. In photography also, as in painting, we try to balance the intensity of reflected light that in three-dimensional reality has more contrast – by getting the sun behind us, or using artificial lighting or a flash.

Then there is the frame: the conventionally square or rectangular edges which establish a plane for the image ahead of where the eye would be, an out-of-body abstraction. A frame is like a window, standing away from the viewer, restricting their field of vision. The literal frame of the painting is taken metaphorically into photography, where it becomes an act of meaning: framing.

And like painting, photography freezes event into a moment, in which entities are manifest but action needs to be inferred, what is happening in time. The moment of the image can implicate possible action before and after, and no more than that. Entities are visible; action demands more effort on the part of the viewer.

“Images,” says Vilém Flusser, “are not ‘denotative’ (unambiguous) complexes of symbols (like numbers for example) but ‘connotative’ (ambiguous) complexes of symbols: They provide space for interpretation.”¹⁶⁰ Most in need of interpretation in a still photograph is action over time.

A photograph is “a moment taken from a continuum,” says John Berger. “What it shows invokes what is not shown.”¹⁶¹ In vision of the pictured scene, moreover, there would have been glances in dynamic time, tracing action as much as entity. But in both painted and photographed image we gaze into a moment that has been frozen in time, and our saccades of glancing methodically compose space at the expense of time. Flusser again: “While wandering over the surface of an image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them.”¹⁶²

Then there are the same transpositions in photography as realistic painting – both artist and photographer feign disappearance in the interest of naturalism. But we also know that they have put us in the picture. Our selves are their other. Their other we make our selves. “The camera never lies,” we say wryly, because we know it always does. Such is the culture of modernity: feigned objectivism, hidden subjectivism, and manipulative transposition of self and other.

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¹⁵⁹ Roland Barthes, 1980 [2010], Camera Lucinda: Reflections on Photography, translated by R. Howard, New York, NY: Hill and Wang, p. 80.

¹⁶⁰ Vilém Flusser, 1983 [2000], Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London, UK: Reaktion Books, p. 8.

¹⁶¹ John Berger, 1967 [2013], Understanding the Photograph, London, UK: Penguin, p. 20.

¹⁶² Vilém Flusser, 1983 [2000], Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London, UK: Reaktion Books, pp. 8–9.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 228–230. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

John Berger’s "Understanding the Photograph" §MS2.2.2a