On/For/Against the apparatus: the photographic arché revisited

• Main Author: Benjamim Picado
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de São Paulo 2011-12-01
• Series: Matrizes
• Subjects: fotografia; dispositivo; representação visual
• Online Access: http://www.revistas.usp.br/matrizes/article/view/38302

We intend to examine here some of the questions concerning the theoretical variants of discussions on photography: we are specially interested in those discursive trends that are still investing in the technical conditions of image’s origins and its relationships with the semiotical regimes of these visual icons. We refer to those theories by the title of “arguments on the apparatus”, recognizing them as an actual driving force in the general assumptions of about the meanings of visual forms in photographs: we still find them specially influential in the assumed semiotic status of indexicality, as an essential trait of photographic processes. As a corolary of such discourses, we find a commitement to ontological pressupositions about some intrinsic, originary nature of photography, identified with the role played by its technical apparata. We seek the matrix of such discourses, departing from the reading of two influential essays on the nature of photography, L’Acte Photographique, by Phillipe Dubois (1983) and L’Image Precaire, by Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1987).