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Photography and the cinema ... satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. The photographic image is the object itself.-ANDRt BAZIN, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.-EDWARD STEICHEN, "Ye Fakers" Photographs and pictures of other kinds have various strengths and weaknesses. But photography is commonly thought to excel in one dimension especially, that of realism. Andre Bazin and many others consider photographs to be extraordinarily realistic, realistic in a way or to an extent which is beyond the reach of paintings, drawings, and other "handmade" pictures. This attitude is encouraged by a rich assortment of familiar observations. Photographs of a crime are more likely to be admitted as evidence Work on this paper was aided by fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Stanford Humanities Center. I wish to thank audiences at a number of universities for helpful criticisms of earlier versions. Those whose observations had particular influence on the shape of the result include