For decades, people have made certain assumptions about photographs, the primary one being that they are truthful in depicting reality. While this is true in many cases, it is not always so. This book traces the rise of photography’s perceived veracity. It shows why a combination of pre-knowledge of early developments in imagery, a persistent marketing campaign espousing the accuracy of photographs and a perception by users that what they got from their photographs was an accurate depiction acted to create the belief in the photograph’s veracity. The book uses philosophy, physiology, psychology and photography to tell this story and concludes by describing a system of identification that could be used to separate images that are not always what they seem. The turbulence caused to photography with the introduction of digital imaging is described and is the impetus for the beginning of the discussion about where photography sits today amongst other images.

For decades, people have made certain assumptions about photographs, the primary one being that they are truthful in depicting reality. While this is true in many cases, it is not always so. This book traces the rise of photographys perceived veracity. It shows why a combination of pre-knowledge of early developments in imagery, a persistent marketing campaign espousing the accuracy of photographs and a perception by users that what they got from their photographs was an accurate depiction acted to create the belief in the photographs veracity. The book uses philosophy, physiology, psychology and photography to tell this story and concludes by describing a system of identification that could be used to separate images that are not always what they seem. The turbulence caused to photography with the introduction of digital imaging is described and is the impetus for the beginning of the discussion about where photography sits today amongst other images.

Essays on photography and the medium's history and evolving identity. In Each Wild Idea, Geoffrey Batchen explores a wide range of photographic subjects, from the timing of the medium's invention to the various implications of cyberculture. Along the way, he reflects on contemporary art photography, the role of the vernacular in photography's history, and the Australianness of Australian photography. The essays all focus on a consideration of specific photographs—from a humble combination of baby photos and bronzed booties to a masterwork by Alfred Stieglitz. Although Batchen views each photograph within the context of broader social and political forces, he also engages its own distinctive formal attributes. In short, he sees photography as something that is simultaneously material and cultural. In an effort to evoke the lived experience of history, he frequently relies on sheer description as the mode of analysis, insisting that we look right at—rather than beyond—the photograph being discussed. A constant theme throughout the book is the question of photography's past, present, and future identity.

No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.

The publicity given to the recent attacks on Psychic Photography has been out of all proportion to their scientific value as evidence. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle returned to Great Britain, after his successful tour in America, the controversy was in full swing. With characteristic promptitude he immediately decided to meet these negative attacks by a positive counter-attack, and this volume is the outcome of that decision. We have used the term Spirit Photography on the title-page as being the popular name by which these phenomena are known. This does not imply that either Sir Arthur or I imagine that everything supernormal must be of spirit origin. There is, undoubtedly, a broad borderland where these photographic effects may be produced from forces contained within ourselves. This merges into those higher phenomena of which many cases are here described. Those desiring fuller information on this subject are referred to Photo graphing the Invisible, by James Coates.