1. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. ix.
2. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 1983), p. 34.
3. Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 12, 15.
4. The truth of these claims to the universality of photography is assumed even when its import is disputed. Susan Sontag, for instance, writes, ‘The dual powers of photography — to generate documents and to create works of visual art — have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. Lately, the most common exaggeration is one that regards these powers as opposites.’ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 76.
5. Kendall L. Walton, ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism’, Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984), 246–77, called the camera ‘a machine for seeing’. Implicitly, I argue against Walton as well as against Flusser and Edwards because Walton also discounts photography as a social practice.