“Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects— unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies —an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after the Civil War, and conquered Europe only after World War II, although its values had gained a foot hold among the well-off as early as the 1850s when, according to the splenetic description of Baudelaire, ‘our squalid society’ became narcissistically entranced by Daguerre’s ‘cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history.’” 2222 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), 54.