Carnal Knowledge

TL;DR: Photography gave modernity touch, and the shift to electronic media threatens this embodied vision. Photographs are primarily indexical signs, guaranteeing presence and establishing a relationship between subject and viewer.

Abstract: Let's begin with a basic proposition: what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). And let's test it against another: this embodied type of vision is what is at stake in the current shift from photographic to electronic media. As everyone knows, photography has long been privileged within modern culture because, unlike other systems of representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by it. Photographs are primarily designated as indexical signs, as images “really affected” by the objects to which they refer. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes speaks of the “stigmatum” of the “having-been-there” of the thing photographed, as if the photograph has been physically bruised by a subject whose image now offers a kind of braille for the eyes. The peculiarity of its production is, Barthes says, what enables the photograph to fetishistically guarantee something's erstwhile presence in space and time. But it also helps establish a special relationship between photography's subject and ourselves. “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here. … A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”1