The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of ""the real"" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars-from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats-known as Shohyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify ""photography"" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical,