I've never thought of it before. That a high romantic literary culture would have been opposed to the emergence of a visual culture that was informed by photography and its concern with the real. I had always thought of photography in terms of its relationship to painting and it developing into a visual culture (cinema, television, digital reproduction and manipulation) that became the modern mode of representation.
This book review (via wood s lot) suggests the need to consider photography in relation to ra romantic literary culture. I had completely forgotten Baudelaire's protestations that photography leaves no room for the imagination. The romantics we continually condemned the images that began to form the visualscape around them.