Abstract

The appearance of digital photography in the late twentieth century raised a significant challenge to the most powerful idea attached to photography in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, that it was a kind of memory and hence the source of reliable historical data. Traditional or analogue photographs were assumed to be reliable records of the past simply by virtue of being photographs, the products of a physical process governed by laws of optics and chemistry. The photograph was taken on the word of science and on faith as a reflex of a determinate process. With its ability to generate images and imagery from within itself, the programs it draws upon, digital photography erodes confidence that its images are actual memories. A new condition of post-photography seems already in place. It is an opportune moment to reexamine key sources of the idea of photography as memory and as history. As an example of this major cultural idea at work in the construction of specific cultural memories, the traditional idea of photography as "light writing" can be seen as playing a profound and decisive role in how the American Civil War has been remembered and understood. Those memories have been fundamental to conceptions of nation and nationality in the U. S., and should be taken into serious account in any critique of memories steeped in photographic versions of the past.