Print seems a less treacherous form. of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. Line What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are (5) handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings, while photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire as 'evidence'. The camera record incriminates, providing modern states with a tool of surveillance and control of increasingly mobile population, and at the same time justifies, by (10) presenting purportedly incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph-any photograph-seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. A painting or a prose description can never be (15) other than a narrowly selective interpretation, while in contrast a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. Despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth, for even when photographers are most concerned with (20) mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as (25) paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise, for indeed this very passivity-and ubiquity-of the photographic record is photography's 'message', its aggressive impulse. (30) Like most fashion and animal photography, images which idealize are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness, like class pictures, still lives of the bleaker sort, and mug shots. There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera, a fact that became evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, when technology first gave rise to a (35) view of the world as a set of potential photographs. From its inception, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects, while painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into (40) images. In the passage, the author is primarily concerned with