"Photography is haunted by two chattering ghosts: that of bourgeois science and that of bourgeois art. The first goes on about the truth of appearances about the world reduced to a positive ensemble of facts to a constellation of knowable and possessable objects. The second specter has the historicl mission of apologizing for and redeeming the atrocities committed by the subservient - and more than spectral - hand of science. This second specter offers us a reconstructed subject in the luminous person of the artist. Thus, from 1839 onward, affirmative commentaries on photography have engaged in a comic, shuffling dance between technological determinism and auteurism, between faith and the objective powers of the machine and the belief in the subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist."