In the midnineteenth century the invention of photography appeared to offer the promise of automatically providing a truthful visual record It was seen not only as the culmination of Western visual representation but quite simply the camera functioning in much the same way as the human eye was regarded as a machine which could provide a fixed image And this image was considered to be a very close approximation to that which we actually see The chemical fixing of the image enabled the capture of what might be considered a natural phenomenon the camera image At the same time the photographic image was held to be an achievement of sophisticated culture and produced the type of image that artists had struggled throughout the centuries to acquire the manual visual and conceptual skills to create