In Memoriam Paul Alpers

Paul Alpers, a founding member of the Representations editorial board and a broadly influential scholar who changed how a generation of readers thought about pastoral poetry, passed away on May 19, 2013. In his honor, Representations 124 features a collective remembrance by four of the original members of the editorial board and reprints Alpers’s fine translation of Virgil’s Eclogue V.

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Recently Discovered Daguerreotype Sheds Light on Resemblance in Photography

Resemblance did not come naturally to photography. Soon after it became a public medium in 1839, photography’s ability to produce resemblant images—and therefore portraits—was widely challenged. Proponents of photography quickly responded to those challenges by developing more complex concepts of the new medium. Jan Von Brevern, in his “Resemblance After Photography” (Number 123, Summer 2013), argues that photography played an important part in evolving debates on resemblance. vonBrevernFig6

Charles Nègre, self-portrait in a miroir de sorcière, c. 1845-50 (details). Copyright Sammlung Herzog, Basel, Switzerland.