The Short Story and Photography, 1880's-1980's

For over a hundred years stories about photographs and photography have reflected the profound uncertainties and inconclusive endings of the modern world. For many writers, photography, supposedly the most realistic of the arts, turns out to be the most ambiguous. As Jane Rabb observes in her introduction, a number of the stories in this collection involve mysteries, perhaps because photography has a capacity for both documentary reality and moral and psychological ambiguity.