The claim “This is photography!“ conceals the question “Well, what is photography?“ The first answer, concise as it is, should have precluded any misunderstandings. But whereas we are often in agreement in regard to general definitions, preambles of constitutions are a prime example, our opinions on their practical application often widely and irreconcilably diverge. Hence, I want to supplement this first concise definition of photography with several other definitions circling around the existence and the effects of this light-recording instrument:

            Spatially speaking, photographs are little segments of the world, abstractions onto a plane surface, square or rectangular, construed according to the rules of one-eyed central perspective, which recorded in close-up does not correspond to our actual vision, but appears stunningly similar beyond a certain distance.

            Temporally speaking, they are the fixed traces of the light and the shadow of a thing that was in front of the camera at a certain point in time, whether the photograph was taken somewhere out in the world or whether it was produced in a studio. The shutter clicks and the clock jumps to the past. The future is excluded from this medium.

            Semiotically speaking, photographs are only slightly coded images. In contrast to language, which combines letters in complex structures with a comparatively exact meaning by means of rules—and yet, even in this field, misunderstandings are not the exception, but rather the rule, as we know—photography functions as a kind of subtraction from the world, which itself is an only slightly coded structure. Consequently, a photograph rarely comes alone. Not only reporters but also amateur and family photographers love series as the single photograph is similar to a obstinate, mute, enigmatic child.

            Speaking in terms of the theory of perception and of epistemology, photographs function as a reinforcement of vision. In photography, we begin to retreat from the world. We orient ourselves less towards the tactile, olfactory, audible, and experiential world and more towards optical signals and visual data, sometimes without making a precise distinction whether our gaze is resting on immediate reality or on worlds mediated by images. When we are standing on the beach and comment on the sunset with the words, “This is almost as kitsch as a postcard,“ this is a good example for the confusion of our experiential worlds. We believe to come closer to the world, and yet we are simultaneously withdrawing from it. Photography accompanies vision's triumphal march and helps to pave the way for abstractions of the concrete world.

            And finally—speaking in terms of world view—photographs advance a positivist approach to the world. They are a visual confirmation of the turn to the worldly and the superficial. The world's surface is optically scanned and photographically examined in the belief that we can say something about that which is behind the surface by means of surface signs. We could call it “photographic research based on circumstantial evidence,“ alluding to the types of research based on circumstantial evidence that emerged parallel to photography during the 19th century: surface data are collected, combined, and interpreted in order to discover truth in the sum of the single parts—of a painting in art history, of a crime in criminology, of the psyche in Freud, of the world in photography.

            And finally, it is important to emphasize—speaking in terms of media theory—that photography not only documents events and incidents; it not only creatively represents them but actually engenders them. In a mediatized world, only what is “talked“ about and displayed matters. Anything else does not exist; it is simply not there. Photography is creating the world that we want to and will remember by means of its images.

Photography as an instrument to show things. Most of all, photography is probably an instrument to show things, a device to display them. As soon as its principle was discovered and its technology invented, things were photographed in order to show them: photographs were taken abroad in order to show them at home, to present them to one's own social class. Right from the beginning, it encompassed a great degree of social distinction. The first photographs (in the 19th century) showed the world calmly and in its entirety, from an appropriate distance. The use of smaller cameras, of roll film, of flash lights (in the 20th century) disturbed this calm and violated figure's unity. Photography now “discovered“ the sunken and the hidden; it discovered the snapshot showing the unexpected: a beggar on the street, kissing lovers, a drop of milk on impact, a woman climbing stairs, a body revealing itself in contortions. New film stock, new telephoto lenses, electronic nightviewers soon disrupted the intimacy of film stars as well as the integrity of space (Hubble). Through electronic devices, public display arrives at an all-encompassing totality. Simultaneously, it becomes clearly obvious for the first time that the research and discovery of things and their relations, virtue's nobly attributed to photography, are merely the lesser and duller side of the medal; its shiny side are revelation and public display: “Here, here, look at what I have to show you, what we have to offer to you!“ It was always like that. But, step by step, we have diminished the appropriate and “courteous“ distance to the world and to the Other, down to a shameless and acerbic closeness that alienates us even from ourselves.

            The history of photo, video, and digital technology is just one aspect of this rapacious swirl from distance to closeness, of dragging the private into the public, of privatizing the public sphere. But it is the visible index of the increasingly pornographic nature of society. Yesterday, Stan and Ollie threw pies in each other's faces; today, close-up genitalia are smacking against the screens. None of the calm, integrity, and distance of the photographic gaze of the 19th century. The pornographic gaze transgresses all limits; it dissects everything in a hectic and fast movement, constantly exalting itself. The gesture of total revelation always and already offers an infinite abundance of signs and meanings, like a gigantic smorgasbord that is always here for us, morning, evening, and night, constantly replenished and newly set. But it also means tiring redundancy.

Photography draws its representational power from its paradoxically dual nature. On the one hand, the realism of photographs is so convincing that they appear to be spatial and temporal facts, and we begin to believe that we can grasp the world through them. As if we were standing on a slightly elevated point of view, the position of a military strategist, where we can visually participate in the world without any immediate consequences, without actually having to be a part of it—out of reach and reaching out to it at once. We could speak of the colonization of the world by the photographic gaze because it makes us believe that we can know and own the world without ever having been in it. We become mere connoisseurs and traders of the images of the world. On the other hand, photography is open for any kind of projection on the viewer's part as it is only slightly coded and discontinuous, a mere segment taken out of the world's spatial and temporal continuity. It is a kind of mute tale that starts and stops, suggests and offers, only to fall silent again, leaving the results open. It is at once clear and opaque. This amalgamation of understanding and wondering—at once illustrative information and open visual field, testimony and surprise packet—adds up to an unusual power and endows photography with modern-day magical properties. This attractive and powerful combination of document and image is the source of many misunderstandings regarding photography. Research has repeatedly shown that ten people will give ten very different readings of one and the same photograph, in particular if it is a single image and has no caption, or if it is not part of a reportage, a narrative, or structured according to intelligible rules, i.e. partaking in a “legible“ visual language.

And the question of photography's truth. As a photograph is always simultaneously an autonomous image as well as the representation of something, we are forced, time and again, to talk about the things it represents. Two things manifest themselves in a representation: the view of subject taking the photograph and the motif itself, the world in front of the lens. In the first case, I as another subject feel qualified to talk about it as we are all accustomed to look at the world. In the case of the latter, we are inevitably confronted with other fields of knowledge—about landscapes, citiscapes, urbanism, and urban organization for example. Talking about photography always forces us to talk about many different worlds. Consequently, it is a kind of destabilizing discourse with a generalizing claim.

            I am actually pointing out a fundamental problem: the question of what photographic truth consists of, or what truth in photography is. I am talking about the perpetual confusion of “that it was“ and “how it was.“ An analogous traditional photograph is the trace of an actual event. Something happened at a certain point in time in front of the camera. It was there, as Roland Barthes said. And this thing that was there caused an optical-chemical imprint that we can now look at in a photograph. A trace of Napoleon III is present in an old photograph of Napoleon III. Napoleon III was there (intentional forgeries excluded). This trace of time or of existence contains a truth, i.e. something happened, but is does not tell us—or only very imprecisely and with a bias, from a singular and furthermore one-eyed perspective—how, where, and in what context something happened. Photography talks about pure, almost meaningless factuality: that something was there, that something happened. This is in the nature of photography, the medium itself. Everything else is not the pure, almost automatic imprint of reality on film, but the result of the photographer's or the artist's relation to the world. It corresponds to the context he moved in. The image is expression of this relation, which is never neutral, never static, never complete, never democratic, never truth in any absolute sense. It much rather emerges from a dynamic, performative process, a larger spatial-temporal context, and from the construction of the world as an image world.