Daguerreotypes

These days one can hardly say anything about art without confronting the freighted status of the photograph. Many critics have written about the idea of "photography by other means” or "art after photography.” And many famous artists--among them Gerhard Richter, Gillian Wearing and Thomas Struth--have stretched the idea of the truth-value of the photograph by claiming to make actual photographs in other materials, such as paint or video. Saltzman is interested in how photography has functioned to secure identity in the modern period and the implications of that history for us today. While Saltzman’s purpose is to look at contemporary adaptations of photography, the story she tells begins even earlier than the invention of the photograph. It starts with the story of Martin Guerre (née Daguerre) and the idea of what the image may have held as a guarantor of identity in the early modern period. In this way Saltzman establishes a broad, deep historical frame before delving into the art of the present. Each chapter covers a different medium ranging from video, graphic novels, and literature to film. Along the way, she takes on figures of unstable identity--"fugitive subjects”--to wit, the mysterious Martin Guerre, Blade Runners, replicants, Henriette Barthes, and W.G. Sebald’s characters. She also confronts a range of contemporary critics, artists, and knotty debates about veracity, uncertainty and identity that began to circulate in the nineteenth century with the invention of photography.