At its most accomplished, photographic portraiture approaches the eloquence of oil painting in portraying human character, but when we allow snapshots or mediocre photographic portraits to represent us, we find they not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity. Catch a person in an awkward moment, in a pose or expression that none of his friends would recognize, and this one mendacious photograph may well outlive all corrective testimony; people will study it for clues to the subject's character long after the death of the last person who could have told them how untrue it is.
When only one photograph survives, its authority is unimpeachable, and we are in the position of jurors who have to decide a case based on one witness's unchallenged testimony. Within my own attic archives, I can think of a picture that, if it were the only surviving photograph of me, might provoke some descendant to write: "She was a pinched, humorless woman, evidently incapable of enjoying any worldly pleasures. It is tempting to think that the beauty celebrated in the photographs she took was a means of externalizing the rapture and wonder she obviously could not feel within herself.
Sally Mann,
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 308
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