Basic Definitions and Ideas about Photography and Indexicality

I'm reading essays by Rosalind Krauss about the indexicality of photographs.
Here is just some quotations and a few of my comments. I based my use of "index" and "icon" originally on C. S. Pierce.
Charles Sanders Pierce

"By index I mean that type of sign which arises as the physical manifestation of a cause, of which traces, imprints, and clues are examples".-- Krauss

Aristotle uses this relatrionhship to classify "artistic" (as in artificial) and "inartistic" (physical) proofs in forensic logic.

"C. S. Peirce distinguishes photographs from icons even though icons (signs which establish meaning through the effect of resemblance) form a class to which we would suppose photographs to belong. ‘Photographs,’ Pierce says, ‘especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the object they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs [indices], those by physical connection”.-- Krauss

"Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object. Its separation from true icons is felt through the absoluteness of this physical genesis, one that seem [sic] to short-circuit or disallow those processes of schematization or symbolic intervention that operate within the graphic representations of most paintings."--Krauss

Barthes: "What this [photographic] message specifies,” he writes "is, in effect, that the relation of signified and signifier is quasi-tautological. Undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene (cropping, reduction, flattening), but this passage is not a transformation (as an encoding must be). Here there is a loss of equivalency (proper to true sign systems) and the imposition of a quasi-identity. Put another way, the sign of this message is no longer drawn from an institutional reserve; it is not coded. And one is dealing here with the paradox of a message without a code”. Krauss quoting Barthes

I'm thinking that for me, the transformation that takes place when I paint from a photograph is what Barthes here is calling "encoding".

"It is in the order of the natural world that imprints on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print. This quality of transfer or trace give to the photograph its documentary status, its undeniable veracity. But at the same time this veracity is beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the necessary property of language. The connective tissue binding the objects contained by the photograph is that of the world itself, rather than that of a cultural system."--Krauss

Of course this is not the whole case when it comes to photo-collage or photoshopped images. Those are on a spectrum of indexicality, but also encoded. I think it is in that space or slippage between indexical reality and arbitrary symbol that I am trying to work.

Alex's note from old blog This is a good idea Paula. So simple and easily accessed. As your fellow student I will begin the contributions by suggesting a book on Bacon that Georgie has. There is quite a good essay in there in which Bacon's use of the photograph as index is described and also ascribed to Duchamp. For myself I am really curious to get into it as a photographer and a semiotician. On the one side, I am more skeptical of the pure indexical status given to the photograph as if it points to an object, subject or event in the world to everyone equally. I think the indexical relationship of a photograph to its 'object' is a very different thing for someone who has actual experience of that particular object than it is for someone who only knows it through the photograph (for the latter there is already a process of generalization, universalization, etc at work). On the other hand, as a semiotician, I am fascinated with the idea of the photograph as a sign that seems to be independent of the arbitrary relation of the signifier to the signified and the conventional relationship between the two. I'm fascinated by it but also don't trust it. Perhaps in that lies my fascination. If this is indeed its status, it would explain the essential muteness of all photography - its like the cat that was given the power to speak and used his new voice to refuse to tell us what he was thinking. February 16, 2009