Wait, before we leave that, you also make the wonderful point talking about photography is that it does for society what the mirror did for individuals in the 15th century. So the society begins to get a first and unmediated look at itself. I think this is self-reflections, one of

the big stories of the last thousand years. One of those stories which is not often told in these terms, and you mention the mirror there. I don't think we've really come to terms yet with the historical importance of the mirror and how much it changed ourselves. This is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently. I did a keynote lecture at the University of Southampton recently on the development of the sense of self and based around the mirror in the Middle Ages. Because if people don't have a sense of self, they can't correspond with patterns of how self's are meant to behave. There's some world bi-psychologist in the 1970 which has been proven over and over again to have validity in that the more of a sense of self an individual has, the more they can be made to conform to certain patterns or encourage to operate in certain ways. They can be disciplined much more easily, etc. And you can see this as part of the civilizing process as Norbert Elias called it. So the sense of self growing over the Middle Ages correlates with the declining violence in society. Now if you take this through to the modern age and the society's own sense of itself, and I would say culminating in 1968 with our first picture of Earth from outer space, this long story of mankind coming to know itself, to follow the Apollonian dictate, then I think we see huge changes and a civilizing effect on the whole of society.