Photography I / The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory
Practice question · Fill in the blanks

Complete the account of the invention and its theory.

John Herschel identified hyposulphite of soda as a fixer in 1819 and gave the language the terms negative and ______. Bayard's protest picture of 1840 shows him as a ______ man. Barthes separated the general cultural interest of a picture, the studium, from the wounding accidental detail, the ______. Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction dissolves the work's ______.

Word bank: positive · drowned · punctum · aura · latent · index

Hints
  1. The second blank names how Bayard staged his own death.
  2. The last blank is what Benjamin says reproduction destroys.
Show the answer

John Herschel identified hyposulphite of soda as a fixer in 1819 and gave the language the terms negative and positive. Bayard's protest picture of 1840 shows him as a drowned man. Barthes separated the general cultural interest of a picture, the studium, from the wounding accidental detail, the punctum. Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction dissolves the work's aura.

Why

Bayard in the second blank is the hinge between the two halves of the lesson. His picture is a technical demonstration, a political complaint and a fiction at once, made in 1840, which is to say that photography was being used to stage an untruth within eighteen months of being announced.

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