Found Quote From This Moment

"Photography has often been criticized for exchanging resemblance for identicalness. In 1841, Rodolphe Topffer was already complaining that the daguerreotype offered "the image of the visible instead of a sign of the invisible." For the picture to be identical would mean that the object had no significance beyond itself. Identicalness, Topffer said, is the indirect and therefore verifiable product of the daguerreotype process, whereas resemblance is the freely expressive sign of something other than the image. Truthfulness, then, is to be found not in the identical picture but in the picture which gives a resemblance. This traditional distinction shows the dilemma of photography, which was not permitted to depict what it could depict, but was unable to depict what people demanded of it."

- Hubertus von Amelunxen, excerpt from A New History of Photography.