| Sumario: | Part of a special issue on collective memory and collective identity. The appearance of digital photography in the late 20th century poses a significant challenge to the most powerful idea attached to photography, that it is a kind of memory and hence the source of reliable historical data. Due to its ability to generate images and imagery from within itself, digital photography undermines the confidence that its images are actual memories. It is necessary to reexamine key sources of the idea of photography as memory and as history. In this context of this major cultural idea at work in the construction of specific cultural memories, the traditional idea of photography as light writing can be seen as playing a profound and decisive role in how the U.S. Civil War, for example, has been remembered and understood.
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