Reflections Essay: What's Untransportable About the Transport of Photographic Images?

Abstract

In this essay I address how photographs function across different realms of popular experience. Tracking assumptions about the use of photographs in religion, art, advertising, law, politics, and journalism, I argue that the easy transportability of the photograph and claims to its indexical force hide its role in blurring the realms that constitute popular experience. Such blurring takes place even when the experience involved might have real consequences for the body politic, creating a need to better consider how photographs function differently in the various contexts that put them to use.