"The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte Bayard's Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man"

Throughout the research process, I have become fascinated with the early examples of manipulated photography. The fact that photos were being manipulated since the inception of the photographic process shows that digital manipulation is just another way of denying the myth of photographic truth. An image created by Hippolyte Bayard is yet another example of an early photography that renounces the myth of photographic truth. Although the image was not changed or manipulated in the darkroom, the subject matter of the image serves to deny the idea of photographic truth. Bayard is taking advantage of the viewers assumption that photographs are a truthful documentation of reality.

In an article entitled, "The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte Bayard's Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man," author Michael Sapir discusses a photograph by Hippolyte Bayard that questions authenticity and the idea of photographic truth. Sapir writes about the prevalence of the notion of photographic truth at the time:

The public reception of photography following its official announcement on August 19, 1839 was guided by the prevailing nineteenth-century ideology of positivistic realism and its on-going quest for mimetic truth. Martin Jay, in Downcast Eyes, writes about this "commonplace . . . assumption of photography's fidelity to the truth of visual
experience."

Therefore, in Bayard's 1840 photograph entitled, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, the photographer depicts himself as the victim of a suicide, which according to Sapir was,
"provoked by the failure of the French authorities to recognize his own discovery of the photographic process as equal to Daguerre's pioneering work." Bayard even created a suicide not that was written on the back of the photograph. With this photograph, Bayard is not only expressing his metaphorical death, but he is also objecting to the idea of photographic truth. In a sense, by acting as both the artist/photographer as well as the subject, effectively validating his own death, Bayard is taking this denial of truth even further.