Touching Images: Photography, medical imaging and the incarnation of light

Abstract

The late twentieth century development in digital imaging technologies has led to claims that we are in the midst of both a transformation of representation and a reconfiguration of vision. This essay considers the ways in which photography's structural reliance on light has shaped our understanding of representation, and the ways in which that understanding might be extended and reshaped through the digital imaging technologies of ultrasound, MRI and CT. Operating through a sonic and haptic mediation of the body, these imaging technologies cannot be contained within the realm of light, vision and visible reality. As such, they bring into play an alternative reading of the ways in which reality may be imaged — an alternative which calls upon touch as much as sight in determining the referentiality and indexicality of an image and its relationship to the real. The indexicality of photography is premised on light's “magical transfer” of the real into representation. Harboured within this understanding of the photograph's relation to the referent is a desire for a material, haptic contact with that reality. Is light the only possible agent of the “magical transfer” between reality and representation? Or can indexicality and referentiality be refounded within a tactile relation, based not on light's transcendent illumination, but on the physical contact between the world and its image?