Salman Rushdie, in his novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” (1999), described what we see in a photograph as “a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second.”In the early days of photography, those moral decisions took longer to process. When Mathew Brady, the Civil War-era photographer, took a portrait, the shutter remained open for 10 to 15 seconds or more, long enough for a bit of wind, or the hint of a smile, to ruin everything. His subjects often had their heads stabilized by an unseen vise.
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