Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (includi…

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in whi…

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more…

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic an…

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.

This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. ... I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until a…