Whitman's use of photography throughout his career plays a key role in the conception of his work's autobiographical nature. Focusing on and around his prose autobiography Specimen Days (1882), this essay argues that Whitman incorporates photography (in both image and word) to produce a faithful version of his autobiography, but at the same time, that Whitman writes with an understanding of the dynamic play of the process of photographic representation that serves to question the accuracy and completion presumed in photographs. In Specimen Days , Whitman thus uses photography against its own positivist grain, provoking the recognition of the relationship between the positive identity represented and the means of its representation.