Abstract

According to André Rouillé the search for photography's ontology is both fruitless and pointless. Six decades after André Bazin's seminal essay, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, there is a concerted attempt to remove photography from the ‘reliquary’ of death in which Bazin had locked it. Preferring ‘genesis’ to ‘result’, Bazin had suggested that photography benefited from an ‘essential objectivity’ and that it was close to being a ‘natural phenomenon’: for the first time in history, representation of the external world emerges, mechanically, without human intervention. For Rouillé however, this is a ‘poverty of ontology’, a theory of the ‘index’ based on Peirce erroneously attached to a semiotics of the photographic image. So what happens to the photograph's temporal dimension, crucial to Bazin's definition, if we reject the image as record of the ‘that-has-been’? Can we still use Bazin's ontology in the twenty-first century?