Photographers, writers, and audiences have struggled to understand and characterize the unique properties of the photographic medium since the earliest days of its existence. Out of this long struggle to understand, a new kind of critical literature emerged, one dedicated to examining what it means to make a photograph. From the outset, photographers and their most perceptive critics understood that this new form of picture-making had the potential to unsettle the established standards of art and scientific knowledge. As a result, photographers, critics, and social observers have often written memorably not only about individual photographers and specific images, but about the medium itself.

The impulse to write not just about individual photographs but about photography has given rise to some of the most beautiful and poetic literature on art. These writers have often used metaphors to liken photography to preexisting concepts in order to render the strangeness of the medium familiar, and vice versa. This exhibition examines photographs from the Carter’s collection through a series of historically important metaphors: the pencil of nature, the handmaiden of the arts and sciences, the universal currency, the optical unconscious, the story, mirrors and windows, and the secret about a secret. Their original contexts range from Britain in the 1830s to America in the 1970s, but in many ways each metaphor transcends place and location and gives contemporary viewers a unique perspective of the history of photography.