Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT141 S1 P2 Q13 Explanation

Julia Margaret Cameron

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsInferenceHumanities

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Passage

From a critical discussion of the work of Victorian photographer Cameron.

What Cameron called her “fancy-subject” pictures—photographs in which two or more costumed sitters enacted, under Cameron’s direction, scenes from the Bible, mythology, Shakespeare, or Tennyson—bear unmistakable traces of the often comical conditions under which they were taken. In many respects they have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s extravagantly awful The Two Ways of Life—rather than among its most vital images.

It is precisely the camera’s realism—its stubborn obsession with the surface of things—that has given Cameron’s theatricality and artificiality its atmosphere of truth. It is the truth of the sitting, rather than the fiction which all the dressing up was in aid of, that wafts out of these wonderful and strange, not-quite-in-focus only Lear or Medea. Still photographs of theatrical scenes can never escape being pictures of actors.

What gives Cameron’s pictures of actors their special quality—their status as treasures of photography of an unfathomably peculiar sort—is their singular combination of amateurism and artistry. In The Passing of Arthur, for example, the mast and oar of the makeshift boat representing a royal barge are obviously broomsticks and the water is puts one in mind of good amateur theatricals one has seen, and recalls with shameless delight.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
13.

The passage provides the most support for inferring that in

Answer choices

  1. Too Strong: little interest28% picked this

    there was little interest in photographs documenting

    This is a big generalization, and we never really heard any general statements about art audiences in Cameron's time. Sure, Cameron's art project doesn't involve documenting contemporary life; it involves re-enacting famous scenes. But we have no license to assume that her art reflects the general tastes of audiences of her era or that they "had little interest" in seeing photos depicting normal life.

  2. Too Strong: mainly6% picked this

    photography was practiced mainly by wealthy

    We don't have any way to generalize about who did photography in Cameron's era, whether they were mainly wealthy or middle class or poor, whether they were mainly amateurs or hobbyists or professionals.

  3. Out of Scope: stills of actors8% picked this

    publicity stills of actors were coming

    This is talking about "headshots". The passage never mentions the idea that the acting industry was starting to use "headshots" to help with casting or publicity.

  4. Too Strong: no professional models8% picked this

    there were no professional artist's

    Given that we never heard any generalization about Cameron's era, we certainly don't have support for this extreme claim that there were ZERO professional artist's models. The fact that Cameron didn't use professional models doesn't reveal that none existed in her era. It could reveal simply that she couldn't afford professional models or that she preferred to work with people she knew.

  5. Correct50% picked this

    the time required to take a picture

    Why this is right

    This is conveyed by the 2nd paragraph (and has some appealing common sense truth, from our outside knowledge of what old-time photography used to be like). The 2nd paragraph talks about the models for Cameron's scenes - trying desperately hard to sit still - the way each sitter endures his or her ordeal is the collective action. The 1st paragraph also alluded to babies with blurry faces because they moved. Nowadays, a picture takes a split second to take. You wouldn't have to try desperately hard to sit still or endure the ordeal of "the sitting". So compared to what we think about when we think about posing for a picture, the time it took in Cameron's era was substantial. It's because the people had to try to sit still for a while that her pictures have blurred or unhappy faces.

    Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

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