A Photograph as Evidence of Itself: Representation, Reflexivity, and Tautology in Light-Based Art

Abstract:What habit of perception—of description—gives human viewers of photographs the confidence to regard them as evidence? In this comparative study of work by John Opera (b. 1975) and Jill Freedman (1939–2019), light-based art is subject to an analytic pressure that may undermine epistemic claims about what it is photographs can be said to contain. What constitutes a photograph in nonhuman terms is different from what we say, or want to say, it represents. Physics, philosophy, and the history of photography intersect at the point where we leap from image to meaning.