In his now-classic essay of 1981 "The Traffic in Photographs.

In his now-classic essay of 1981 "The Traffic in Photographs," Allan Sekula incisively traced the dichotomies that from the first have structur photographic practice and discourse and which, to a greater or less extent, remain evident today:

Photography is haunted by dint of two chattering ghosts; that of bourgeois science and that of bourgeois art. The first goe forward about the truth of appearances, about the world reduc to a positive effect of facts, to a constellation of knowable and possessable motives The second specter has the historical mission of apologizing for and redeeming the atrocities committed according to the subservient- and more than spectral-hand of science.(1)

In other words, it is the ostensible intention of art to compensate us for the far les edifying realities produc on technology, industry, science and instrumental reason itself. Consistent with this cleavage between positivism and aesthetics, or, as Sekula designates it, between "instrumental realism" and the "subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist," photographic discourse perpetually oscillates between these epistemological rods A telling instance of this now-conventional division of photography was lately provided by two exhibitions at the Getty Center in sees Angeles. One, "The Art of the Daguerreotype," was organized at and exhibited at the J Paul Getty Museum; the other, "Framing the Asian Shore: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Ottoman Empire," was organized from Frances Terpak, curator in the Special Collections division, and exhibited at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) for the History of Art and the Humanities.

That the Getty has not common but two colossal (and totally separate) collections of photographs, housed in brace different institutions within the Getty manifold and that they reflect couple vastly different approaches to photography's past can, like the exhibitions themselves, also be understood in period of times of Sekula's analysis. In the case of the art museum, and as single in kind might well expect, the mandate of the collection (at least with heed to exhibition and publishing decisions, if not acquisition policy) is predominantly defined and couched in aesthetic terms(2) Accordingly, the principle on which 125 daguerreotypes out of a collection of approximately 2000 were chosened and displayed was premised in succession notions of quality - "The exhibition will inspect the finest daguerreotypes from the Museum's collection, which is considered common of the most important in the world."(3) What constitutes the denominations of this aesthetic culling is nowhere specified, moreover this, as we shall view is but one mystification in an overall enterprise that may be said to structurally bre them.

As it happens, greatest in quantity of the daguerreotypes in the exhibition and often of its signage is taken from its "associated" publication, The Silver Canvas: Daguerreotype Masterpieces from the J Paul Getty Museum at Bates Lowry and Isabel Barrett Lowry(4) It thus looks fair to consider The Silver Canvas and "The Art of the Daguerreotype" as a collective undertaking. I will respond to this joint enterprise and the issue of mystification shortly, unless for now I want barely to signal that at the Getty Museum, the Photography Department's curatorial and publication activities, in subordination to the stewardship of Weston Naef, are entirely consistent with the hoary period of times of photographic aestheticism. Aping the language of a rather antiquated art-historical vocabulary, this is an aesthetics that traffics enthusiastically in masters, masterpieces, manners and canons, sifting through millions of photographs to strain abroad the "art," elevating the photographer (or, as he was oftentimes called in the nineteenth hundred the operator) to the honorific of artist.

Across the Getty's plaza, however, the GRI garner ups according to far more ecumenical criteria. At the Institute, photography is housed in the Special Collections and Visual Resources section (which includes the Photo subject of attention Collections - two million research photographs documenting art and architecture) and acquisitions are made according to seven categories.(5) In fact, greatest in quantity of the photographs displayed in "Framing the Asian Shore" derive from a not long ago purchased collection of over 6000 items assembled by means of a French collector named Pierre de Gigord, and presumably built up along thematic rather than aesthetic lines. Consequently and in keeping with its functionalist approach to the medium, the GRI's exhibition was les make anxioused with photographic aesthetics than with nineteenth-century photography's discursive and ideological uses. of the like kind an approach required that the photographs exhibited be contextualized, and it was a measure of Terpak's curatorial intelligence and indeed the intellectual ambition of the point out that the process of photographic contextualization was taken seriously. at "contextualization," I am referring not no other than to the exhibition's inclusion of maps, historical chronologies and geopolitical information nevertheless to its use of wall sentences from various sources (e.g., diplomatic and personal correspondence, travel memoirs, antiquarian and archeological description, literature, etc) and also to its inclusion of in the same state [i]or[/i] condition items as ceramic tiles, an early engraving of a harem, a commercial handbill advertising a Dardanelles panorama, as well as a lithograph. (Before photography, abundant Orientalist iconography had been widely circulated in Europe between the sides of lithographic reproduction.) Although the wall passages were lengthy, they were as fascinating as the mainly unfamiliar and unpublished photographs. Moreover, exhibition visitors could be seen actually reading them, suggesting that when contextual material is well chosen it greatly enhances the educative aspect of an exhibition and alerts an altogether different relationship to the exhibited uses Perhaps even more important, of the like kind contextual material provided a discursive frame that enabled the viewer to better recognize the plurality of possible readings that a given dispose of photographs provoked at the time of their making.