Apotropaic texts on photography in the 19th century

The allegory of photography-still-life in the 20th century

© Ilkhi, 2014

Charles Baudelaire wrote these lines to his mother in 1864.

"[...] tous les photographes, même excellents, ont des manies ridicules: ils prennent pour une bone image ou toutes les verreus, toutes les rides, touts les défauts, toutes les trivialités du visage sont rendres très visibles, très exagérés; plus l'image est dure, plus ils sont contents [...]"

Peter Henry Emerson read a paper before the Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1893.

"True, it may be a beautiful reflection, but after all it is Nature's drawing, and not the man's. Still, such machine-drawn pictures may in certain cases satisfy or rather harmonize, with the photographer's ideal of beauty, or indeed with the master painter's, as does a beautiful natural landscape; and yet again the beautiful photograph is not art any more  than the natural scene of which it is a reflection."