Pencil of Nature: Thoreau's Photographic Register

Abstract

It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography . . . I say: no, it was the chemists. For the noeme That-has-been was only possible on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it pos sible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radia tions which ultimately touch me, who am here . . . like the delayed rays of a star. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography