The Ghost of Theory: what does it mean “seeing-through” photographs?

Abstract

I intend to examine the problem of photographic “transparency”, in the context of customary ways in photography theories of stating the aspect of “indexicality” for its images: the latter being defined as a meaning modality rooted in the assumption about pure “natural causality of natural worlds”, I characterize such ideas as a persisting conceptual phantasmagoria of these theories. For this purpose, I illustrate strategies for exorcising these theoretical spectra, through correlations between photographic significance and instances of conceptual mediation of perceptual experience — with special focus on the notion of fictional imagination, in the modalities of seeing characterizing the experience of the image (and the photographic one, in particular), by authors like Kendall Walton.