Over the last century and a half an intriguing and inspiring body of photographica has grown up around traditional photography with its actual historic connections in real time. This is a wonderful study extending from the very beginnings of the silver image to the present, which connection unhappily is being lost to a new synthetic and technological imagery having no authentic connection to real time or history.

This distinction is something of photography's greatness. Though the relation between authentic photographic imagery and seeing is unsettled, equally the nature of authentic photography itself, the captured connections of historic style, fashion, and authentic time here wheel about each other in seamless reality.

Through the years Photographica has been a challenge to all visual thinking and art. Sometimes my own imagery was directly motivated as a personal comment upon such a visual "collective consciousness," sometimes images, sometimes words reactively followed that became jotted down in my Artnotes. So, along with my personal imagery presented on this site, I've culled a few related essays from Artnotes that question the nature of authentic photographic vision and seeing.   To Essays.