The disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken, the inevitable even
when inadvertent authority of the camera’s results, suggest a very tenuous
relation to knowing. No one would dispute that photography gave a tremendous
boost to the cognitive claims of sight, because—through close-up and remote
sensing—it so greatly enlarged the realm of the visible. But about the ways in
which any subject within the range of unaided vision is further known through a
photograph or the extent to which, in order to get a good photograph, people
need to know anything about what they are photographing, there is no agreement.
Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a
lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence, or as a
pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter
