The photographic camera is in many ways the ideal apparatus of Modernism. In considering the genealogy of photography, Geoffrey Batchen wonders why a discourse articulating the desire and possibility of ‘fixing the images they saw in their the camera obscuras’¹ only emerged after the 1790s.

He finds his answer in Foucault. Citing The Order of Things, he explains:

Foucault claims that his own historical enquiry “has revealed two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture: the first inaugurates the Classical age (roughly half-way through the seventeenth century) and the second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of the modern age.” … the emergence of the desire to photograph neatly coincided with the second of these supposed discontinuities.²

The desire to photograph coincides with a ‘transformation of worldview [my italics]’³ that ushered in new forms of scientific discourse and in which ‘the presumed differences between nature and its representation, fixity and transience, time and space, observer and observed are simultaneously called into question’⁴. It is this set of differences that inform how both Barthes and Benjamin theorise photography.

Further aspects of modernism implicate photography: The camera coincides with industrialisation. One might argue that the industrial age required an industrially produced apparatus as its means of self-documentation just as the information age now requires widely available networked computing.

Photography is the instrument of industrialisation as well one of its product. The fashion industry emerges when mass-production of clothing becomes possible, and it requires a relatively fast means to create and reproduce images, and an emerging pictorial mass-media to promulgate each new season of clothing. As Kierkergaard observed:

With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken – formally it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same – so that we shall only need one portrait.⁵

The masses and mass-produced images came together: They were able to be photographed, to own photographs, and were soon to be able to take photographs themselves. The flâneur, and the photographer share in common a desire for the documentarist’s self-erasure before their subjects and, such as with Sander, a desire to document various forms of social ‘otherness’.⁶ The contemporary successor to the flâneur, the tourist, is of course never without his or her camera. Compared to painting, photography is a relatively passive means of producing an image by using an apparatus that works by consuming light (taking photos): it is a metaphor, means, object and instrument of an emergent consumerism.

For Barthes and Benjamin, the key interest in photography lies in photographs themselves and their relation to notions of representation. For Barthes, ‘it is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself’⁷. The photographic image carries, for him, a ‘special status’: ‘It is a message without a code’’⁸ that lacks the stylistic ‘connotations’ of any other form of realist representation. To Barthes, some remnant of ‘the real’ remains with its photographic representation.

For Benjamin, whilst photography has many useful inherent characteristics, the photograph is always a degenerate form in relation to both art and nature, since it is able to capture their likenesses but without conveying their ‘aura’. He states this in relation to photographs of art in A Small History of Photography and in relation to nature/reality in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In this way they continue the discourse that Batchen claims was instigated at around the same time as photography.

To postmodernism, notions of ‘the real’ and ‘aura’ are intensely problematic, since they carry with them connotations of ‘the real’, ‘essence’ and ‘origin’ that postmodernism sets out to deconstruct. Rather than set out the oppositions between modernism and postmodernism, with the attendant methodological contradictions that relate to establishing binary oppositions within postmodernism, this essay will set out four ways which would suggest that Barthes’ and Benjamin’s analysis of photography is not true today, if indeed it was ever entirely valid. The central issue is that both Barthes and Benjamin assume that photography is necessarily representational of an objective reality:

1. Photography serves to construct identities and narratives as well as apparently objectively to capture of images and moments. This notion will be considered with specific reference to fashion photography.
2. Digital photographic manipulation and its precursors in methods of photographic retouching call into question photography’s assumed status as record, testimony, and memory.
3. Photography’s relationship to art is not restricted to the debate over the status of photographs of art versus some photographs’ status as art, but is more complex when one considers ‘post-photographic art’⁹ (i.e. forms of art in other media that critically engage with photography).
4. Following Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, to examine the significance of the channel of photographic distribution in determining the provenance, intention, status, and claim to truth of any given photographic image. This will discussion will centre on the recent photographs depicting torture of Iraqi prisoners by British Soldiers and the controversy concerning their authenticity.

But first the following section of this essay will elaborate further on both Barthes’ and Benjamin’s analysis of photography in order to establish a point of departure for these subsequent discussions.

Benjamin, Barthes, Photography

For Benjamin, the photograph is essentially a derivative form. It is always a copy of an objective reality or art object. The photograph lacks the ‘aura’ of the original. Tracing its genealogy from etching, engraving, woodcut, and lithography¹⁰ he identifies the key advantage of photography as being its ability to create ‘portable’ replicas that are more accessible to a greater number of people. It brings the images or art closer to people, putting:

put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself’.¹¹

It might be pointed out that the churches of Europe are littered with painted copies of famous religious paintings, and that indeed this is how painting continued to develop in the centuries up to the invention of photography. However, for Benjamin, the photograph is a peculiarly new challenge to the originality and authority of the work of art. The qualities of photography in relation to the original are, to him, a lack of the qualities that confer aesthetic and monetary value to the original. The photograph differs from the original in that it lacks ‘presence in time and space’ and ‘the quality of its presence is always deprecated’¹²

The photograph is a degenerate form partly because it is merely representational, and yet it is also a degenerate form of representation in that its status as ‘testimony’ is less than the historicity of an original work of art. The mere existence of a photographic copy of a work, if the copy becomes the means by which the original is primarily referred to, in fact serves to undermine the ‘authority’ of the original:

‘what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the [original] object.¹³

It is wrong, too, to speak of ‘the photograph’ since that carries with it an art-historical assumption of the uniqueness of a particular work. To Benjamin, the lack of an original and the proliferation of identical copies is part of the essence of photography. He argues that ‘it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence’¹⁴ and ‘authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production’ ¹⁵

Since Benjamin identifies ‘aura’ with ‘uniqueness’¹⁶ photography is inevitably a degenerate form. Benjamin essentially recapitulates Baudelaire’s view of photography as ‘handmaiden to the arts’:

‘Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty which is that of handmaid to the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created or supplemented literature’¹⁷

Yet just as Baudelaire was calling for a ‘return’ to the role of handmaid for photography, Benjamin too recognises that photography transforms and realigns artistic production. Sontag, Virilio, Barthes, Batchen and Benjamin all discuss the impact that photography had on the ‘industry’ of painting portrait miniatures. It both displaced the function of the portrait painter (many of the portraitists had the sense to adapt to the new technology) and made the possibility of owning one’s portrait more widely accessible. The domestication of images of art and nature was complemented by the mass-availability of family portraiture. For Benjamin, the ritual that once surrounded original images is also domesticated and condensed into the family portrait; reverence for images becomes closely associated with the valorization of images of one’s own family. At the same time as the masses were coming into greater prominence and visibility, the specifics of their experience of social ritual was becoming more private. The intensely private significance of the family photo (significant because it is private) is what informs Barthes method and conclusions in Camera Lucida.

For Benjamin, there is a complex ‘congruence’ between the rise of the masses and the advances in photography. The conditions for the ‘decay of aura’ that he identifies in photography ‘rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.’¹⁸

Flusser and Sontag both discuss the increasing ease of use and automacity of photographic technology, both in terms of the increasing speed of photographic paper and the greater simplicity of operation of photographic apparatus. Image-making is in the process of democratisation. In photography as in writing, as Benjamin observes, ‘the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character’¹⁹. This apparent revolution in the availability of the means of image production and image distribution serves not to ‘empower’ the masses but to devalue the image. As Cocteau remarks, ‘I’m giving up making films since technological progress means anyone can do it’²⁰

The technological progress of photographic apparatus creates for Benjamin a distinction between early photographs and later, better exposed and sharper, ones. The history of photography is not merely predicated on the lack of aura in relation to objective or artistic ‘reality’, but it is a continuous losing of ‘aura’ within the tradition of photography itself. Early, gloomy photos had a photographic aura that more modern pictures do not have, and which ‘photographers made it their business to simulate with all the arts of retouching… the aura which had been banished from the picture with the rout of darkness through faster lenses’²¹.

If there is an advantage to photography it is in its ability to show what painting and ordinary vision cannot. Benjamin marvels that

we have no idea what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps out. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret.²²

However, the discourse on photography is traditionally more ambivalent in its discussion of how the camera is able to slice up space and time. To Rodin, images that freeze a fraction of a second of movement are not true to either perception or experience:

It is art that tells the truth and photography that lies. For in reality time does not stand still, and if the artist manages to give the impression that a gesture is being executed over several seconds, their work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image in which time is abruptly suspended.²³

Photography’s mechanical accuracy undermines the possibility of an aesthetically authentic form of representation. Photography’s representationalism captures ‘reality’ to a fault.

Barthes maintains this complex ambivalence over the apparently straightforward representation of the ‘thing itself’ and a certain lack of representational ability of the photograph. To him, the unique quality of photography is that it is so representational that, unlike any other form, it excludes the connotation. It is a ‘message without a code’:

The photograph, professing to be a mechanical analogue of reality, its first order message in some sort completely fills its substance and leaves no place for the development of a second-order message. Of all the structures of information the photographic appears as the one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’ message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence.²⁴

Yet at the same time that photography is almost completely denotive, it fails to capture the essence of its subject. Writing about photographs of his mother, Barthes discusses the tensions and frustrations in encountering a photograph that can, at best, only convey ‘that’s almost the way she was’²⁵. Photography depends on an objective reality that it will attempt to represent (‘the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens without which there could be no photograph²⁶) yet photographs state more loudly that what they photograph ‘was there’ in reality than they are able to denote their specific subject:

from a phenomelogical viewpoint, in the photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation²⁷

Benjamin and Barthes establish a perspective on photography that disparages it as merely representational, and at the same time failing in its capacity to represent, of a ‘reality’ which encompasses what we understand to be the real world and also all other forms of creative expression. As Batchen summarises: ‘photography is (seen as) the indexical deposit of a real that it may mimic but of which it is never itself a part’²⁸

Baudrillard points out the error of this position when he turns his attention to the codes and connotations of realist representation themselves. Barthes overlooks the conventions of realism as they are coded by photography, since the history and practice of photography encodes along with its message a set of assumptions about representation:

Few photographs do not short-circuit the otherness of the object… by forcing a signification upon it, or, in other words, by mediating through it an idea of one sort or another – in particular the ideas of objective reality and testimony.²⁹

In conclusion, the discourse on photography is traditionally a cascade of disavowal based on photography’s representationalism. It always lacks originality. It is first of all a degenerate form since it can only represent that which is already ‘there’ in the world; yet it fails in capturing the ‘aura’ of the original object and may even reduce the authority of the original merely by existing as a photograph at all. Whilst on one hand photography is excessively representational, on the other it fails to capture an aesthetic realism precisely because of this excess. It atomises time and space in a way that is not realistic. ‘The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, opaque’³⁰. Lastly its status as testimony exceeds and obscures its own capacity to represent.

Photography and the construction of identity and narrative

Ansel Adams once said that ‘a photograph is not an accident – it is a concept’³¹. The disavowal of photography as merely representational and failing in its capacity to truly represent overlooks the constructedness of photographs. Where this is discussed, such as in Benjamin’s comments on the implausibility of a pillar placed on top of a carpet, it is usually once again to point out how photography is destined to always represent its own failings at realism.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the serious photograph and the snapshot is the time that it takes to produce. An entire industry was built up towards the end of the last century to make photography ever more ‘instant’ and ‘automatic’ (in fact ‘instamatic’). In this century, digital technology and camera phones extend the instant availability of the snapshot to its instant sharing and dissemination using the same devices that were used to capture the image. Serious photography, however, has always taken time. Early photographic papers were so slow that people had to be physically held in position by rods and vices for the duration of the exposure to prevent blurring. A photographic shoot for fashion or advertising can take many hours and hundreds of attempts before the right combination of lighting, pose and affect is achieved. Fashion magazines and newspapers employ night-shift staff to digitally retouch the photographs that have been taken before they are fit for print. The images that we usually take to be constitutive of image culture are the products of careful consideration, conceptualisation, and many hours of labour.

Photography serves to create personal identity, national identities and contemporary myths and narratives. In her essay on the work of Louise Dahle-Wolfe, Rebecca Arnold traces how ‘her photographs represent and help to shape feminine identities that evoke myths of America. The pull between visions of a vast Edenic landscape of opportunity and the cosmopolitan modernity of the city. ³²’. Fashion photography serves to constitute and reinforce, not merely to record, the American national identity: ‘For a national identity to be constructed in such a huge and diverse country as America, the spectator must have an investment of belief in the mythic imagery that surrounds her.³³

This effect of fashion and fashion photography described here is very different from Yohji Yamamoto’s interpretation of August Sander’s portraits. To him they are ‘real men and women wearing reality’ who ‘don’t consume clothing’ but instead ‘make life with this clothing’³⁴. The role of the fashion industry and fashion photography is now to construct myths of identity that provide a platform for the wearing of particular clothes.

The V&A exhibition Imperfect Beauty and its accompanying catalogue set out to demonstrate how ‘fashion image-makers began to construct narratives around characters that spoke of the aspirations and realities of contemporary youth culture.’³⁵ Fashion photography became a site for narrative construction and also for critical debate around conceptions of beauty (particularly the work of Corinne Day which is either interpreted as the uncritical logical excess attitudes to beauty in fashion models or a complex critique of such excesses).

In fashion photography, and in every other sphere where the creation of photographic images takes time and/or conceptualisation, photography became the both a way to create a fictitious narrative or the optimal way to gain authentic experience. To David Sims:

You can photograph a person, dress them, direct them to stand in a certain way or make them appear to exist in a certain environment. You can create a narrative. ³⁶

And to Nick Night:

“if I want to experience something, my way to do it is through photography”³⁷

Photography is here described as something which shapes, rather than records, reality and, in common with most traditional discourse concerning the arts, as something which through artifice is able to apprehend greater authenticity.

Digitisation, retouching, reality, testimony

Both Barthes and Benjamin make brief references to photographic retouching, yet with the exception of family snapshots almost all photographs that we see in magazines, in advertising, on television or in art galleries have been retouched to some degree. This calls into question any assumption of the ‘this has been’ of representation. The arrival of digital imaging means that the untrustworthiness of images has now formally entered public consciousness, yet this only serves to make possible a renewed interest in the history of photographic falsification:

The history of photography is already full of images that have been manipulated in some way or other. In fact, it could be argued that photography is nothing more than this history… Artifice of one kind or another is therefore an inescapable part of photographic life. Photographs are no more or less ‘true’ to the facts of the appearance of things in the real world than are digital images.³⁸

Photographs are unreliable testimony – to the beauty of super-models, to the existence of fairies, to the existence or otherwise of Stalin’s contemporaries. With the digital imaging capabilities of programs such as Adobe Photoshop and related technologies, there is no longer any need to posit a belief in an original ‘objective correlative’ which provides a point of departure for photography:

But are both ‘the human’ and ‘the photographic’ indeed still with us? Technology alone won’t determine photography’s future, but new technologies, as manifestations of our culture’s latest worldview, may at least give us some vital signs of its present state of health. Digitization, prosthetic and cosmetic surgery, cloning, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, virtual reality – each of these expanding fields of activity calls into question the presumed distinction between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, real and representation, truth and falsehood – all concepts on which the epistemology of the photographic has hitherto depended.³⁹

 

Benjamin declares ‘The world is beautiful – that is [photography’s] watchword’⁴⁰ yet today even those of us who are not genetically beautiful can choose whether to be made so before the photograph is taken through surgery or make-up, during the photograph by lighting and composition, or in pre-production when our images are scanned or imported into the computer and rebalanced, or in post-production when our wrinkles and blemishes can be erased and the outline of our bodies resculpted.

Post-photographic art

Barthes follows Benjamin in considering the relationship between photography and art as either ‘photography of art’ or ‘photography as art’, with the former being problematic with regard to the aura of the original and the latter being problematic with regard to the many other categories of photographic practice. Photography is assumed to be a secondary or derivative form when compared to the vital reality of the original. Little consideration is given to the response, by artists working in other media, to photography itself. Having rhetorically subordinated photography it becomes impossible for Barthes to consider allowing photography to become part of ‘reality’ and a proper subject to which other artists might respond.

Perhaps the most immediate example of post-photographic art is the photo-realism of artists such as Chuck Close.

Figure 1: Chuck Close, Big Self Portrait, 1968.

The term ‘photo-realism’ is ironic. It refers to the apparent realism of the images that are created but it also serves, through remediation, to make apparent the constructedness of photography. Photo-realism creates, in paint and acrylics, the exact simulacra of a photograph but in doing so it exposes photography’s lack of direct representationality. We become more conscious that our perception is always in colour whilst many photographs are in monochrome, and therefore more able to analyse the effect that choosing monochrome (once this was actually a choice) has on the resultant photographic image.

Much is made of the technical competence of photo-realist painters’ ability to paint ‘depth of field’ or photographs that are entirely out of focus or, conversely, to recreate the hyper-real detail of close-ups, fur or hair. These techniques again serve as a critique of the apparent representationality of photography since they foreground the choices that are available to the photographer and make more explicit the constraints and capabilities of the technical apparatus of the camera.

This investigation into how images are constructed now extends into the digital image in the work of artists such as Rachel Stevens who recreated Kodak⁴¹ a large, pixellated image of herself as a young girl made entirely from sugar cubes that had been soaked in coffee so that each one was a different shade of brown. This largely conceptual work reflected on the nature of digital images, the role of snapshot photography in her own family (the coffee is a reference to her father’s constant coffee-drinking when she was a child) and to the historicising effect of photography in creating an image that takes an original photograph from the 1970s and projects it into the future as a digital image and into the past as a brown and white image somewhat lacking in detail.

David Hockney is an artist who has consistently explored the nature of photography and image apparatus in both his art practice and theoretical works. His masterpiece, A Bigger Splash shows a splash of water on a perfect modernist surface that is only possible to imagine after the invention of photography.

Figure 2: David Hockney , A Bigger Splash, 1967

David Hockney’s exploration of the relationship between the camera and art history has led him to create montages of Polaroid images which appear at first to be a critical commentary on the nature of subjectivity in a similar manner to cubism. But they are also part of his investigation of the use of lenses and curved mirrors in painting even before the invention of the photograph. It is his thesis that 17th and 18th Century painters used curved mirrors to project images of their subjects onto the canvas which they then painted over, and he has found evidence of shifting points of focus and even depth of field in some pre-photographic paintings to support his thesis. His Polaroid works are therefore both a recapitulation of cubism and a critical continuation of a much longer tradition of the use of technical apparatus in the construction realist images.

The ability of fast shutter speeds and fast film to be able to capture otherwise unseen moments of everyday life is also referred to in Jennifer Bolande’s porcelain Milk Crown:

Figure 3: Jennifer Bolande, Milk Crown, 1987 - 1988

Jeff Koons has also created sculptures from photographs as part of his exploration of the relationship between pop-culture and image culture:

Figure 4: Jeff Koons, String of Puppies, 1988. Based on a photo postcard

Photography, and the technical apparatus and principles of photography, have a strong tradition within contemporary art practice that makes it inappropriate to continue to subordinate photography to either ‘reality’ or to ‘mainstream art’, since it can easily be shown that photography has a constitutive, as well as representational role, in each of these spheres.

The role of the channel: Torture in Iraq

Barthes claims that ‘if the photograph cannot be penetrated, it is because of its evidential power’⁴² and that photographs are able to encode two statements about what it depicts: ‘this will be and this has been’⁴³.

For Flusser, a failure of the discourse on photography has been its inability to theorise the ‘program’, coding and demands made by the channel of distribution that photographs are subject to. He suggests that most photography critics take for granted the categorisation of different modes of photography, that they in effect repeat the work of the channels by failing to critically examine which channel a particular image passes through and what assumptions are built into that image as a result. He describes channels as

There are channels for supposedly indicative photographs (e.g. scientific publications and reportage magazines), channels for supposedly imperative photographs (e.g. political and commercial advertising posters) and channels for supposedly artistic photographs (e.g. galleries and art journals)… the channels determine the significance of the photographs⁴⁴

On May 1, 2004, The Daily Mirror published photographs that they said showed an Iraqi prisoner being abused and tortured by British soldiers. These images, their interpretation and the reaction to them can only be understood if we take a critical account of the channels through which they were distributed and the conventions of these channels.

The four pictures that the Mirror initially published are reproduced below:

Figure 5: Daily Mirror 1 May 2004. Headline “Vile – but this is a British Soldier degrading an Iraqi”

These images were made public one day after images of American coalition forces torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners were made public, and one year after The Sun covered an exclusive story of British Servicemen torturing Iraqi prisoners⁴⁵

The public relations reaction to such a crisis can go one of two ways. One is to acknowledge and apologise for ⁴⁶the crime, to immediately seek some form of justice, and to put measures into place to prevent the same thing happening again. The other is to call into question the validity of the evidence and to announce an inquiry. The Americans appeared to take the former route; and the British took the latter.

Immediately The Times and The Sun, both owned by The Mirror Group’s rival News International, ran stories that suggested the British torture pictures were not to believed. As Barthes might say ‘this did not happen, this was not about to happen’. The evidence ranged from the credible (the gun was not of a type issued to combatants in Iraq) through the absurd (it was suggested that soldiers who might break the Geneva Convention would never tie up their shoelaces in an unapproved manner) to the incorrect (it was asserted that the hats worn in the picture were not worn by serving officers in Iraq). There was certainly rather ‘too much’ evidence provided as to why these images were not to believed, and this quantity is a direct result of the animosity between the two newspaper groups as well as the issues apparently at hand. It also reflected the editorial stance that each newspaper had taken with regard to the legitimacy of the war. In the debate that followed their publication, in general if one opposed the war one took the images to be genuine, and if one supported the war one took the view that the images were fake.

What was the intended channel for these photographs? Appearing in a newspaper suggested at first that they might be the work of a photojournalist, in the long tradition of exposing wartime atrocities that Susan Sontag discusses. However, it soon emerged that there was a culture among UK and US troops of exchanging images of torture and brutality⁴⁷. Further speculation suggested that, given that abuse was known to be going on and there were previous examples of it, the pictures may be reconstructions or re-enactments of actual torture that had taken place. This raised a new set of possibilities:

1. The images were genuine and were part of the tradition of photojournalism, and the channel concerned was the hoped-for channel of ethical journalism

2. The images were reconstructions of genuine abuse that were released the press as a means of highlighting the issue

3. The images were genuine, but were not originally intended for the journalism channel. They were not representing the abuse but were in fact part of a small ‘abuse industry’ – a form of abusive pornography based on sharing images of abuse with like-minded members of the armed forces. The images had been leaked to the press and the full story here is not just the abuse but also the story of the pictures and their circulation among soldiers. In Flusser’s terms, the program of the main channel (and not the inadvertent journalistic one) was to produce more and more images of torture and exploitation to feed its market. This would explain why the American abusers are shown grinning at the camera and making gestures that waver between being a thumbs-up sign and miming holding a rifle. They are pictures taken in the form of snapshots to be shared within their community – not images of abuse that have been covertly obtained by journalists or concerned non-abusers.

4. The images are not genuine, but were still indented for a ‘pornographic’ circulation with other pictures of abuse as part of the micro-industry that has grown up around these images within the armed forces.

A crucial question that was barely raised in all the coverage was that the photos were monochrome. The American abuse pictures were in colour, and both sets are assumed to have been taken with digital cameras. It takes a special effort to make a picture taken with a digital camera into a black and white image, and it is more likely, if film cameras were used, that colour film would be the norm. Newspapers now use colour images when they are available, so there is not benefit in producing monochrome images unless they were intended to insert themselves into the tradition of journalistic exposé by appealing to historical notions of photojournalism. Only an analysis of the images in relation to the ‘program’ of their channels makes it possible to analyse the images themselves. Far from being ‘messages without codes’, these photographs and all other photographs have meanings and representational status only because they are coded in specific ways by the channels through which they are disseminated.

Conclusion

Benjamin and Barthes, in common with a lot of critical and theoretical commentary, assume that photography is necessarily representational of a reality that is always anterior to it: Photography suffers by being a copy: it is always of something else, it always lacks the aura of originality, authenticity and authority, it is always devalued since every photograph is already a copy of itself or another photograph. In this way they repeat the ‘code’ of photography’s claim to representationality and also the codes of its channels of distribution even to the point of denying that photography is coded at all. Through the analysis of fashion photography, post-photographic art and the codes of distribution concerning supposedly journalistic images, and in the light of the codes of digital image production, it is possible to show that photography is constitutive of the reality that it appears merely to represent in terms of the construction of identity, myth, and narrative; that it is a source of creative inspiration and critical practice within contemporary art, and that the ‘program’ of the channel of distribution must be consciously analysed before any possibility of determining the meaning or significance of a photographic image can arise.

Notes

¹ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.183.

² Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.184.

³ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.185.

⁴ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.183.

⁵ cited by Susan Sontag in On Photography, Penguin, London, 1977, P. 207

⁶ See also Susan Sontag On Photography, Penguin, London, 1977, P. 55 & 57

⁷ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000, P.5

⁸ Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, London, 1977, P.17. The same point is also made in Camera Lucida

⁹ Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 2002, P.108 - 127

¹⁰ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹¹ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹² Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹³ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹⁴ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹⁵ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹⁶ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹⁷ cited by Liz Wells in Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London, 1997, P. 13

¹⁸ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

¹⁹ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

²⁰ Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994, P.51

²¹ Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography

²² Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography

²³ Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994, P.2

²⁴ Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, London, 1977, P.18

²⁵ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000, P.66

²⁶ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000, P.76

²⁷ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000, P.89

²⁸ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.197.

²⁹ Jean Baudrillard, Photographies 1985 - 1998, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1999, P. 148

³⁰ Susan Sontag On Photography, Penguin, London, 1977

³¹ Susan Sontag in On Photography, Penguin, London, 1977, P. 117

³² Rebecca Arnold, ‘Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s Fashion Photographs of the 1930s and 1940s’, Fashion Theory Vol 6 Issue 1, March 2002, P. 46

³³ Rebecca Arnold, ‘Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s Fashion Photographs of the 1930s and 1940s’, Fashion Theory Vol 6 Issue 1, March 2002, P. 48

³⁴ Wenders, Wim, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (DVD), Michigan, Anchor Bay, 1989

³⁵ Charlotte Cotton, Imperfect Beauty: the making of contemporary fashion photography, V&A, London, 2000, P. 6

³⁶ David Sims, Imperfect Beauty: the making of contemporary fashion photography, V&A, London, 2000, P.54

³⁷ Nick Knight, Imperfect Beauty: the making of contemporary fashion photography, V&A, London, 2000, P.14

³⁸ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.212

³⁹ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 1997, P.214

⁴⁰ Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

⁴¹ cited by Geoffrey Batchen in Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, MIT, Cambridge Mass, 2002, P.119

⁴² Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000, P.106

⁴³ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000, P.96

⁴⁴ Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion, London, 2000, P.55

⁴⁵ The Sun, 30 May 2003, “Squaddie held over ‘torture’ snaps of Iraqi PoW”.

⁴⁶ The Times, 3 May 2004, “Lack of blood, bruises, and dirt give hint that army ‘abuse’ pictures were staged”

⁴⁷ BBC News Online, 3 May 2004, “UK troops 'swapped abuse photos’”

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