A lecture by Jordan Bear, Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Toronto

This talk explores the role of photographic enlargements as evidence around the turn of the twentieth century.  In an era that was particularly ambivalent about the relationship between the camera and human vision, the enlargement served as a vehicle for some fundamental epistemological debates.  By exploring one watershed criminal trial, whose outcome turned precisely on the reliability of a photographic enlargement, this presentation argues that this technique provides a vital, and little-studied, lens through which to examine the uneasy relationship among photography, vision, and evidence at this crucial juncture in the medium’s history.