By supplying an overabundance of information, photography confuses and problematizes its message; it creates what author Roland Barthes calls a “reality effect”, a semblance of realism bound to detail

If you don’t do stupid things while you’re young, you’ll have nothing to smile about when you’re old.

But the very literalness of photographs produces an uncontrollable manipulation of meanings in even the most banal images

In nineteenth-century parlance, two technical words gained a certain currency to describe how “reality” was construed: the word daguerreotype was distinguished from the word stereotype.
Stereotypes were originally molds for creating multiple copies of printing type; the word, therefore, came to connote generalized replication.
The daguerreo- type, on the other hand, was characterized by miniaturization, infinitesimal preci- sion, and detail.