I promise that this is not going to become a forum for re-posting articles from The Online Photographer, but I thought this article and Mike Johnson’s response might interest the historians in my audience, as it is a photographic puzzle that really gets to the heart of the way that pre-conceptions, agendas, and lack of expertise can seriously impair our understanding of a historical source.

For the record, I am not particularly convinced by the ‘ON’ then ‘OFF’ argument, if for no better reason than that the former just ‘looks wrong,’ and I think I hold with those who suspect arrangement. The motivation of a person that stays hours at a place to produce an image less-illustrative of the point they were apparently trying to make is not clear to me either, so I think the psychology of the man does enter into it.