Photography’s relationship to its subject has often been explained through the metaphor of skin. Skin demarcates the borders where our body meets the external world, thus serving the purpose of visual identification, on the one hand, and functioning as a façade for disguise and self-expression on the other. Photography, owing to the widespread belief in its accuracy, is commonly associated with the ability to apprehend things and people, and classify them into specimens and types. It is in this context that one of the early inventors of the stereoscope, Oliver Wendell Holmes, proposed in 1859 to flay every surface of the world with the aid of the camera, just as men would hunt cattle for their beautiful skins in South America.1
This understanding of photography, however, comes with the caveat that its supposed truthfulness can only be skin deep. In other words, skin is also a veil on which...
University of California Press