What, in truth, is Photography? Notes after Kracauer

Abstract

1. With photography there always seems to be a problem. It is as though photography is condemned to efface the truth. Be it the truth of time or the truth of memory— in the beginning of course it was the reality of things—photography is deemed to stand in stark opposition to another and more insistent sense of the real. While it will be necessary to take up the question of that to which photography has been opposed, it is best to proceed cautiously, since there is another question, or at least what has to be allowed is the possibility of a different set of concerns that join photography and truth. The question would be the following: What is the truth of photography? Another more productive way of posing the question would be to ask: What, in truth, is photography? The repositioning of the question of photography stages a move from a concern with the truth content of the photographic image to one delimited by the existence of the photographic image. Once the latter is central, what then matters are the qualities that work to define photography itself. What this involves is a repositioning that