Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death

In point of fact, the daguerreotype was not quite capable of achieving such an equation. It was not until William Henry Fox Talbot, an English mathematician and linguist, invented the process of preparing a negative from which any number of positives could be made that the mass printing and publication of photographs became possible. The name "photography" was given to this process by the famous astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel. It is an odd name since it literally means "writing with light". Perhaps Herschel meant the name to be taken ironically, since it must have been clear from the beginning that photography and writing (in fact, language in any form) do not inhabit the same universe of discourse.

Nonetheless, ever since the process was named it has been the custom to speak of photography as a "language". The metaphor is risky because it tends to obscure the fundamental differences between the two modes of conversation. To begin with, photography is a language that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of images is limited to concrete representation. Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea. By itself, a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract. It does not speak of "man", only of a man; not of "tree", only of a tree. You cannot produce a photograph of "nature", any more than a photograph of "the sea". You can only photograph a particular fragment of the here-and-now -- a cliff of a certain terrain, in a certain condition of light; a wave at a moment in time, from a particular point of view. And just as "nature" and "the sea" cannot be photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honour, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures. For "showing of" and "talking about" are two very different kinds of processes. "Pictures," Gavriel Salomon has written, "need to be recognized, words need to be understood." By this he means that the photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea. For even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act of thinking -- of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an imaginary category. There is no such thing in nature as "man" or "tree". The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible.