For over one hundred and fifty years practitioners, critics, and historians have continuously challenged and added dimensions to the meaning and uses of photography. Yet there has been little challenge to its highly disturbing linguistic conventions. By uncritically accepting and using these conventions, those involved in the culture of photography have failed to recognize that language is not a passive but an active construction of meaning and value. The violent terminology embedded in the practice and culture of photography betrays a disturbing ideology, full of myths and limited conceptions about the medium. These notions are as powerful today as they were in 1859 when physician, poet, and humorist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth." (Contains 1 figure and 45 notes.)