title: The Concise Focal Encyclopedia of Photography: From the First Photo on Paper to the Digital Revolution
author: Michael R. Peres
description: Chairman of the Biomedical Photographic Communications department at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences.
zlib_text: **Preface**
  
  Philosophers cultivate the virtue of cool detachment, but philosophers of art
  must make a special effort to keep their aesthetic passions in check.
  Neutrality clears space for multiple perspectives and frank confrontations,
  but it can be fragile. Slight errors in emphasis, hasty generalizations, too
  obvious assumptions, and slips of imagination can mislead catastrophically. We
  must therefore curb our enthusiasms. Yet, I confess I have a soft spot for
  photography.
  
  My first book, _Understanding Pictures_ , took on drawing and photography as
  our two principal modes of imaging, and I thought an article that I
  subsequently wrote about the aesthetics of photography would be my final say
  on the topic.1 Then came the passion. Over the past 10 years, I looked at a
  lot of photography as a private citizen rather than as a professional
  philosopher, in a city with an intense photography scene. Readers of early
  drafts of my book on computer art urged me to say something about digital a