How Does an Image Relate to What It Shows?—The Uses of Photography among the Badagas of South India

Abstract

“ How does a photograph relate to what it shows? ” This is a central conundrum of photography and is debated in academic journals as well as across the coffee-table. We find the two kinds of partial answer at the end-points of a long continuum. On the one side, the first approach, it is claimed that photography is like a fingerprint or a face mask, an unbiased copy of a (visual) impression, and what we see has actually happened. Thus two aircraft flew into the Twin Towers (in 2001), the cruiser Costa Concordia was shipwrecked (in 2012), and Donald Trump met Kim Jong Un (in 2018). On the other hand, a second approach rejects this view: photographs are not documents but commentaries; they do not reflect but construct the world, because they show just one moment and from one perspective; they can be modified in the post-production, and themselves become objects of subjective reading. Each view on this particular relationship of the picture and the depicted cannot ignore the other side. first counts. paradox dialectics is that eye