 When reading photographic text, I typically follow three lines of inquiry. The first question, of course, is what is it? For there is not one photography, but there are many photographers. It is important, I think, to have students acknowledge or to understand the great variety of different formats, techniques, approaches. So it's very important to look very closely at what it is. In this case, it being a full plate daguerreotype from 1853. A second question would be, how has the photographer figured his or her subject? Indeed, what is the relationship between the photographer and the subject? What decisions has the photographer made in creating this image? And a third series of questions that I would ask of a picture like this would be, how is this photograph being used? What is the context in which this image is being seen? Photographs are not made in a vacuum. There are reasons for taking pictures like this. And I think that it's important as... And this is what makes me excited as a historian to try to unearth what this picture is about, why it was created, how it was used, how this subject that was depicted here was understood. If we go inside the picture itself, you'll notice how a group of these tourists have been lined up on the very brink of the American Falls. One of the things that strikes me as particularly curious is the fact that all of these characters have their backs to us. They're not facing the camera, as we might typically do if we were standing at a tourist landmark today. One all of a sudden asks, are these people even aware that they're being photographed? Has the photographer somehow surreptitiously taken their photograph? And as a historian, I don't have the answer for that question. But what I do know, of course, is that there is a long visual tradition of posing figures in front of sublime landscapes that goes back to 18th century English landscape aesthetics. One of the things, of course, is the great number of these pictures that are absolutely identical to one another, except for the very fact that there are different configurations of characters here at the brink of the falls. Obviously, you begin to understand that this particular image is not unique. It's part of a well-constructed formula that the photographer has set out.