SOURCE: James, Clive. “The Gentle Slope of Castalia.” New York Review of Books 27, no. 20 (18 December 1980): 22.

In the following excerpt, James uses sarcasm to refute many of the proposed theories about photography in Diana & Nikon.

The very first book illustrated with photographs, William Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844), carried as an epigraph a quotation from Virgil. Talbot, who was a learned classicist as well as a chemist clever enough to invent photography, enlisted Virgil's aid in declaring how sweet it was to cross a mountain ridge unblemished by the wheel-ruts of previous visitors, and thence descend the gentle slope to Castalia—a rural paradise complete with well-tended olive groves. The gentle slope turned out to be a precipice and Castalia is buried miles deep under photographs. A subsidiary avalanche, composed of books about photographs, is even now descending. In this brief survey I have selected with some rigor...