I sometimes think the day will come when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been someone who lived as a human being and about whom much will have been written in the popular press: images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica cloth, but fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god, wearing spectacles.

— from the Journal of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1861