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NANCY ARMSTRONG, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Harvard University Press, 2002 (paper) pp. Vii + 338. ISBN 0-333-59776-5. £12.50.
Recalling the perennial question raised among others by John Berger as to whether photography Ms more essentially concerned with time than space' Stephen Bann has written that 'the crucial relevance of photography to historical representation lies in the fact that it gradually converts the otherness of space [. . .] into an otherness of time, which is guaranteed by the indexical nature - the close contact of the photographic process'(77ie Clothing of Clio, CUP 1984). Such a reordering of time and space occurred from the inception of the medium. From the late 1830s early daguerreotypes captured a distinct quality of duration in those instances of spatial ghosting whereby the long exposure time of the process meant that the physical passage of a figure through space was captured in successive traces on the photographic plate. In the 1840s the work of Scottish photographers Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson provided some of the first instances of informal portraiture that were celebrated in Walter Benjamin's seminal 'Small History of Photography'. Benjamin was particularly drawn to their ability to distil lime and to suggest an eloquent subsistence of the future in the past that was, at the moment of taking the photograph, present. Moving into the 1850s and 60s stereoscopy, and then combination printing, each...