As we enter the twenty-first century, the photographed, digitally produced, and globally disseminated printed image impinges upon us with growing insistence from all directions, inflecting and normalizing certain views and desires while foreclosing and obscuring others. Never before has it been so cheap or easy to purchase, use, and then toss away a camera, so commonsensical to expect the everyday images that crowd one's day to “cover the globe,” or so unsettling to see the specter of total visibility and surveillance granted such legitimacy. Yet in an age in which the Internet is celebrated by many with messianic fervor, when modernity's fascination with speed enjoys a new apotheosis, and when the perceived shrinking of the globe crystallizes in the quaint vision of a “village” ready-made for a millennial “Family of Mankind” album, the photograph in all its two-dimensional stillness seems to beckon from a more quiet and disappearing world. Increasingly in this great blizzard of speed, technology, and global communication, all photographs appear to emit a sepia-toned glow. This may be one reason why the study of photographs and photography has become especially attractive in the last decade among those scholars especially attuned to their social and historical dimensions, notably anthropologists, historians, literary and art critics.