Unruly Representation: Materiality, indexicality and agency of the photographic trace

Abstract

This article examines photographic representation as a material and indexical trace caused by photons reflected and/or emitted from the photographed objects. It argues that the contested idea of indexicality remains relevant to the photograph despite the digitalization of the photographic process. It also suggests that the trace works as an affordance which renders ambiguous the photographic representation as re-presentation. The material trace provides an anchorage point for the presence of the photographed objects. However, the very same presence destabilizes the photograph’s function as a representation and renders its status controversial. Therefore, the photograph both is and is not a representation. As a much-celebrated guarantee of photographic truth, the trace works, in fact, as an element of perpetual epistemological controversy and also as an affordance for philosophical, ontological and poetic analysis.

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