IREADING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans Alan TrachtenbergPrologue Whatever new object we see, we perceive to be only s new version of our familiar experience, and we set about translating it at once into out parallel facts, We have thereby our vocabulary. —Raurn Wauoo Exess “aw and Critic” (1850), on the elements of photography, James E. F McClees, a Philadelphia daguerreowypist, deplored the “endless variety ‘hames” by which the medium had come to be known: “Daguerreotype, graph, Ambrotype, Hyalotype, ete, ete, ote” All vere useful terms, ignating particular variations inthe basic process of xing the image ‘on the ground glass of a camera obscura—the process discovered ‘eparately by Niepce and Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox {Talbot in England, and revealed to the world in 183g. But the Babel ‘names confused things, and MeClees was not alone in feeling that ‘the sooner the art becomes divested of the quiickery of terms the better” Like others, he wished to settle the matter of a generic name wice of "photography"—the term had been in limited use since 18g9— of etymological cofrectness, for was not the medium a way of witing hgh! {elect deeper attempts at comprehension. From is birth the medium ‘had aroused contradictory responses, Pictures seemed both resssuringly sniliar and disconcertingly new, recognizable as ptures, but with a4 READING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS metal plate of the “daguerreotype” thought they were monochrome from view the other side of the equation: photography's radical differ ence from handmade:pictutes. Daguerre’s magnifying glass disclosed “nore than the astonishing truth that the machine-made image does not