"On Photography. The Medium, The Scandal and The Silence"

Italo Calvino once referred to photography as an “anthropologically new object”, while Roland Barthes described it as a “bizarre medium”. In all accounts photography can be seen to resist our attempts to theorize it. Accepting this challenge, the present essay seeks to investigate the specificity of photography with reference to three concepts and pairs of authors: These concepts are then used to consider three photographs: a snapshot taken by an American soldier deployed in Iraq between 2003 and 2004; Le croci di Guerra (1991) by Oliviero Toscani for Benetton; and Dead Troops Talk (1992) by Jeff Wall.