Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term "photography"

Elleström, Photography and Intermediality

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Photography and Intermediality Analytical Perspectives on Notions Referred to by the Term

“Photography”

Lars Elleström

This is a draft. Final version published in Semiotica #197, 2013:

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/semi.2013.2013.issue-197/issue-

files/semi.2013.2013.issue-197.xml

Abstract: Given the complex reality of media and mediation, it is reasonable to question the

meaningfulness of treating photography as “one medium.” This article suggests that it is

necessary to distinguish between a number of complementary media aspects. It takes an

intermedial perspective, based on the belief that one cannot understand photography without

thoroughly comparing it to how other media are construed. First of all, photography can be

understood in terms of media of production, storage, and distribution. This paper focuses

primarily on the aspect of distribution and the critical meeting of the material, the sensorial,

and the cognitive. It supports the view that photography, like all other media, should be

analyzed in terms of what are referred to here as the four modalities of media. Minute

investigation of the material, the sensorial, the spatiotemporal, and the semiotic features of

media products that are understood to be photographs makes it possible to discern essential

relations to other media. Finally, photography is discussed as qualified media. Media products

cannot be fully understood without considering the historical and social processes that form

our understanding of how they communicate and produce aesthetic import. At least two

different types of qualification dominate our present culture: photography as documentation

and photography as art.

Keywords: Photography, semiotics, intermediality, multimodality, media modalities, qualified

media.

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/semi.2013.2013.issue-197/issue-files/semi.2013.2013.issue-197.xml

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/semi.2013.2013.issue-197/issue-files/semi.2013.2013.issue-197.xml


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1. Framing photography

One may ask: what is photography? Or: what distinguishes photography from other media?

Questions like these are fundamentally unclear. Because “photography” and “medium” are

both notoriously ambiguous words, it is essential to postulate how to use them as terms.

Terms are of little use, however, if they are not properly tied to elaborated notions. Discussing

photography is discussing an intricate web of related ideas, which cannot be done properly

without trying to disentangle the complexity of the notions to which the term refers; a

comprehensive treatment of the subject of photography requires a multifaceted media

conception. The intention of this article is to suggest a way of understanding photography

within a theoretical framework of media. The article seeks to demonstrate that it is necessary

to distinguish between several complementary media aspects and that photography, like all

other media, should be understood in terms of what are referred to here as the four modalities

of media — four categories of basic media traits.

Photography needs a general theory of media, given that the distinguishing features of

what we call photography can only become clear if it is systematically compared to other

media. Photography, no matter how it is defined and regardless of whether one is interested in

it as art, shares characteristics with other media, and the differences can only be distinctly

seen against the background of media similarities. Consequently, this paper argues that the

most accurate way of defining how to use the word “photography” is to place it within a

theoretical structure that connects it to the conceptual complexity of media and mediality.

The word “photography” has Greek roots and means to write with light, or the

inscription of light. However, there are many techniques of “writing” or “inscribing” and

there are many kinds of “light.” There is no point in limiting “photography” to mean only, for

instance, the chemical registration of visible light on a surface covered with photosensitive

substance. What are known today as photographic techniques have evolved and will continue

to change and develop. There are now ways to take photographs of things that we cannot even

see and images can be digitally stored and manipulated in myriad ways.

On this basis, one could argue that those of Albrecht Dürer’s images that were created

with the aid of a camera obscura are actually photographs. Although the artists of the 17th

century did not know how to fix the light on a surface automatically, the camera did the job of

creating an image of light in all other respects. In fact, no photographs, and certainly not

modern digital photographs, are created without some kind of human intervention. It would be


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futile, therefore, to claim that a photograph must necessarily be produced mechanically from

beginning to end. Furthermore, it is also commonplace to say that images created with the aid

of X-rays and other kinds of radiation are photographs. According to Peter Osborne, some

modern inscription techniques that should be included in the realm of photography include

“digital photography, as well as photocopying and scanning, and even microwave imaging,

infra-red, ultra-violet and short-wave radio imagery.” He also argues, correctly I would say,

that “there is no particular ontological problem posed by digital picture taking” (2010: 61,

65). While digital techniques do significantly expand the possibilities of photography, they do

not really offer a shift of paradigms; digital photography is simply another way to write light.

To begin with, one could state that the word “photography” denotes ways of producing

visual images, including a cluster of technologies and a variety of types of light and radiation.

Photography includes automatic processes but also manual handling at different stages of the

image production. While much more could be written on this point, the aim of this paper is to

demonstrate how the idea of photography as a delimited “field” or as “a medium” must be

tried out compared to other media. All media overlap, in many ways, and even if there are

palpable differences between media, they are all — considered as “singular” media —

historical constructions in one way or another. Media borders are put up by media users on

various grounds, including the idea that inscription of light should be seen as a unique media

trait.

Identifying the implications of such an idea requires several distinctions. In what has

been said so far in this article, a whole range of different media types and media aspects are

actually hidden. It is far from sufficient to state that photography is a medium characterized

by the inscription of light, even if the many variants of inscription techniques, lights, and

radiations are acknowledged.

2. Media of production, storage, and distribution

The first step must be to discern three essentially different media stages. There is no firmly

established terminology and one could even argue that “media” is not the proper word to

denote the different devices and functions involved. Nonetheless, it is common to distinguish

between media of production, media of storage, and media of distribution. This separates

devices that actually bring the media content into being from devices that prevent the media


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content from disappearing and those that make the media content perceptible for the

recipients. Some objects contain only one of the three functions, some have two of them, and

some have all three. Pencils and brushes are media of production; they have the capacity to

produce various sorts of texts and images. Ink and paint on paper or canvas, on the other

hand, are media of storage and media of distribution; the media content is captured in the ink

and color at the same time as it is perceptible for the onlooker. A violin can be said to be a

medium of production and distribution as it is used to create artistic sound that is heard

immediately. However, the violin cannot store the music. A computer’s hard disk, completed

with software, is a medium that can produce and store a wide range of media content, but it

cannot make this content discernible without media of distribution such as screens and

loudspeakers. The human body, including the brain, is often a medium of production, storage,

and distribution. A dancer who has invented a dance and memorized her movements stores

vital media content information, which is distributed every time she reproduces it.

This distinction is not always clear, of course, but it offers a good way of separating

different stages of mediality. It is also essential to recognize that photography must be

understood in terms of production, storage, and distribution. Even a cursory review of the

many technical methods for inscribing various sorts of light and radiation reveals that

photography involves widely differing processes and devices for producing, storing, and

distributing images. Light and radiation may be registered both chemically and physically,

and even before the light is registered it is transmitted and transformed by the camera’s lens,

shutter, and aperture (to mention only the most basic technical components of a common

camera). The produced image may be stored, for instance, on silver-plated sheet copper,

negatives, or photographic paper, or as digital data. Some of these media of storage also have

the capacity to distribute the photographic image in a more or less correct version, whereas

others, such as the digitally stored photograph, require separate distribution media, such as a

computer screen, a display on the camera itself, or paper. A digitally stored photograph

sometimes includes so much information that the photograph can be realized in many

different ways. This makes it similar to traditional media such as music and dance, which are

hardly ever realized in exactly the same way when performed live.

Therefore, the distinction between media of production, storage, and distribution is an

initial move toward understanding what it means to talk about the medium of photography.

The stages of production and storage cannot be ignored, since they (especially production) are

essential for what has come to be understood as distinctive features of photography. However,

references in this paper to the characteristics of media, and to intermedial relations, refer


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primarily to media of distribution and the distributed media content. This is arguably the most

interesting stage of mediality, since it includes the recipient and the process of interpreting

and making meaning of the media content. This is a complex area of investigation and

requires further refinements of the notion of medium. In order to understand the intricate

process of perceiving and interpreting the distributed media content, I suggest distinguishing

between several “modalities” of media.

3. Media modalities

Photography is often compared to painting and other graphic arts (see, for instance Friday

2002). While it is easy to see the advantages of such comparisons, they tend to be much too

narrow. A broader communicative and aesthetic understanding of photography requires an

investigation of its relationships with not only a wide range of art forms, but with the field of

media in general. That is why an intermedial approach to photography is essential.

This paper advocates a systematic approach to the study of intermedial relations. What

has come to be known as photography is part of an intricate intermedial web, which makes it

appropriate to briefly recapitulate some of the main ideas in “The modalities of media: a

model for understanding intermedial relations,” in which I presented a theoretical model for

explaining the complex notion of “medium” (excluding media of production and storage)

(Elleström 2010). The aim of that article was to understand similarities and differences

between media, which is a necessary condition for understanding interaction between media.

The article argued that all media should be understood as being constituted by four modalities,

meaning types of essential media qualities.

The notion of “multimodality” has been used for several decades, but it has suffered

from the same sort of weaknesses as the notion of “intermediality.” While various research

traditions have dealt with approximately the same entities — the verbal, the visual, language,

images, music, sound, gestures, speech, and so forth — they have labeled them differently: as

“modalities,” “modes,” or “media.” The fact that these entities overlap in many fundamental

ways has made it difficult to develop a more precise understanding of multimodal and

intermedial relations. Although they are seldom stated explicitly, due to the lack of

communication between the two research traditions of multimodality and intermediality (cf.,

however, Lehtonen 2001; Page 2010), there is some common agreement that one must operate


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on two levels. The first level includes books, movies, internet and other means that are

understood to be technologically based, and the second includes “semiotic resources” that can

be used by these channels: for instance, text, image, and gesture (Kress and van Leeuwen

2001; Kress 2010). However, this single distinction is not enough. In order to achieve a firm

grasp of multimodal and intermedial relations, it is necessary to operate on three levels. This

paper proposes referring to these as media, modalities, and modes.

The rationale behind this idea is that all media can be understood in terms of four types

of media characteristics, which I choose to term modalities. Individual media, however, differ

when it comes to the modes of the modalities. For instance, the visual and the auditory are

different modes of the sensorial modality. A medium is not simply a sum of the modes of the

modalities — far from it — but the four modalities are fundamental for understanding

similarities and differences, such as those between “text” and “image.” Also “photography”

can partly be characterized as a specific set of modes of the four media modalities.

The four modalities are actually familiar categories, yet, as far as can be ascertained,

they have never before been systematically related to each other. The modalities, referred to

here as the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality, and the

semiotic modality, are to be found within a field of mediation that ranges from the physically

tangible to perception and cognition. Media, particularly art forms, have long been described

and defined on the basis of one or several of these modalities (see, for instance, Mendelssohn

1997 [1757]; Steiner 1982; Mitchell 1987). This paper, however, argues that all four of them

must be methodically observed.

The material modality is the physical interface of the medium of distribution, the

materiality that connects the medium and the perceiving agent. There are many material

modes, including solid objects, non-solid objects, and human bodies. Some media are realized

by way of only one material mode, while some are multimodal on the material level. Movies,

for instance, consist of a combination of a flat surface and sound waves.

The sensorial modality is the physical and mental perception of the material. Without

our sensory activity, there are no media. Human beings have many kinds of receptors, located

internally and on the outside of our bodies, and the pieces of information that they register

interact in many ways. The exact relation between external stimuli and actual sensations is a

disputed scientific question. In this context, it is sufficient to say that the types of information

registered by our five external sense organs — sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell — are

the five most important modes of the sensorial modality. Sight and hearing, our two most

cognitively advanced faculties, are the most important ones to consider.


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Our brain constantly interprets the external and internal signals it receives, regardless of

whether we are aware of it. Not everything that is registered by our receptors is processed

consciously, as that would lead to incomprehensible chaos. Perception is tied to cognition,

which means that our conscious sensations are structured from the very beginning. The

spatiotemporal modality includes forming sense-data into experiences of time and space and

into cognitive configurations with spatiotemporal character. Therefore, the spatiotemporal

cannot be said to be merely an aspect of the material, even if the experience of material

spatiotemporality is the model for the formation of more abstract conceptions of space and

time. This paper makes the distinction between six main modes of the spatiotemporal

modality: space as a trait of the physical interface of the medium, time as a trait of the

physical interface of the medium, space as a feature that characterizes all cognitive activity,

time as a feature that characterizes all perception, space as an aspect of what the medium

represents (virtual space), and time as an aspect of what the medium represents (virtual time)

(cf. Steiner 1982: 50; Levinson and Alperson 1991).

The semiotic modality includes the creation of meaning in media. This is a process that

begins even before we form our first conscious impressions and it is clear to see that the

semiotic aspect is in no way isolated from the other modalities. All four modalities are

entangled with each other, of course. However, there is still a point in persevering with the

notion of a semiotic modality that includes our most advanced cognitive activities. The

activity of thinking can be roughly divided into two main categories that are connected to the

two cerebral hemispheres. The first category is abstract thinking based on propositional

representations and the second is spatial thinking based on pictorial representations. These

essential cognitive abilities are related to basic semiotic categories. Up to the turn of the 20th

century, it used to be common to distinguish between conventional and natural signs. Charles

Sanders Peirce’s most famous trichotomy — symbol, index, and icon — is a development of

the classical dichotomy. The symbol is a conventional sign. The index and the icon are natural

signs based on contiguity and resemblance, respectively (CP 2.274–2.308). This paper

suggests, therefore, that these three sign functions are the three main modes of the semiotic

modality. According to Peirce, the three sign functions are always mixed, but one of them

often dominates (CP 2.295–2.296, 2.302, 2.435–2.444).

All media have modal characteristics that overlap with other media. The model in this

paper roughly supports W. J. T. Mitchell’s vague dictum that all media are “mixed media” (in,

for instance, 2005: 257, 260), but it also clarifies precisely why media are always

interconnected and the ways in which they actually differ. It demonstrates that all media share


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the four modalities, but that they only have some of the modality modes in common. A visual

verbal text and a still image (understood in the most conventional ways), for instance, share

material modes, since they are both solid objects, and sensory modes; they are both visual.

They also have many spatiotemporal modes in common. They are spatial and non-temporal

(they are static considered as material objects), but obviously realized in time and also

creating spatial, cognitive configurations. They may both represent virtual time and virtual

space; that is, illusions of space and time that are not actually aspects of the medium’s

materiality. The principal difference between a visual verbal text and a still image is to be

found in the semiotic modality. Verbal texts are mainly (but not exclusively) symbolic,

whereas images are mainly (but not exclusively) iconic.

Many of the debates about what photography actually is, or should be understood to be,

concern the semiotic nature of photography. Most people find it reasonable to say that

photographs are images. While some argue that photographs are specific sorts of images

distinguished by a particular kind of indexicality — contiguity connecting them to the visual

characteristics of material reality — this is disputed by others. It all comes down to the

question of what sign functions are attributed to them. This important issue will be developed

step by step in the following line of argumentation.

4. Basic media, qualified media, and technical media

Although the four modalities of media are essential for mapping fundamental media

similarities and differences, it is not always enough to consider only modality modes in order

to understand how media are realized and perceived. There are also other relevant

characteristics, which this paper refers to as qualifying aspects. For instance, not all written

texts count as poetry. A written text must have certain features, in itself or in a context, that

qualify it as poetry. The qualifying aspects can be roughly divided into two main categories:

the contextual qualifying aspect, which includes the origin, delimitation, and use of media in

specific historical, cultural, and social circumstances (poetry is not a universal media type,

independent of time and place), and the operational qualifying aspect, including aesthetic and

communicative characteristics (poetry is distinguished from other types of written texts, such

as novels and news articles).


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According to the terminology used here, media types that are understood solely in terms

of modal characteristics are basic media (visual still images, auditory and temporal verbal

texts, iconic body movements, and so forth). Art forms and other socially shaped media types

depending on the ever-shifting qualifying aspects are qualified media (music, dance, sport

commentary, and the like). There is also a need for a third notion in order to understand how

media are realized. Technical media, as narrowly defined here, are any objects, physical

phenomena, or bodies that mediate — that is, “display” — the content of media products (for

instance, book pages, screens, vibrating air, and human bodies) (cf. Müller 1996: 23, 81–82).

Technical media can be identified according to which basic media types they can mediate.

Basic media, qualified media, and technical media are therefore different aspects of the

notion of medium (of distribution); they are three ways of categorizing partly different kinds

of media characteristics. Basic and qualified media are abstract categories that assist in an

understanding of how media types are formed, developed, and related to each other. Technical

media are the sorts of physical objects that are necessary in order to realize all kinds of media.

Every single media product can be analyzed in terms of all three aspects. Therefore, the

distinction between the three media aspects is theoretical rather than taxonomic.

This leads to the questions of how photography can be understood in terms of basic

media and the modes of the modalities. From a material point of view, it is rare to associate

photography with anything other than flat, solid surfaces. This could change, but for the

moment there is no point extending the material sphere beyond the standard borders.

Sensorially, photography is a visual medium: we see the light that has been inscribed.

Photographs may represent other sensory activities, memories of other sensory experiences

may be evoked, and other senses are activated when handling photographs (cf. Edwards

2009), but for most people the visual mode is the sine qua non of photography. Considering

the spatiotemporal modality, one could conclude that still photography is spatial and non-

temporal, but certainly realized in time and also evoking spatial, mental configurations.

Photographs often represent both virtual time and virtual space. Finally, the semiotic modality

of photography is characterized by iconicity and indexicality. While the aspect of conventions

in creating meaning of photographs certainly cannot be neglected, the iconicity of

photographs — the often salient resemblance between the visual forms displayed by the

photograph and what it is taken to represent — is usually more striking. This resemblance is

intimately connected to the indexical mode, since the representation is connected to certain

objects in the world and the resemblance is supposed to have been created by contiguity.


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However, because photography is inextricably connected to the process of writing light,

it cannot be understood solely as a specific combination of modes of the four modalities. It

would be pointless to define photography as a basic medium. The idea of writing light is

indeed an indexical aspect, but the semiotic implications of this production method reach far

into the domain of qualifying media aspects. Nevertheless, the abstract category of basic

media may help reveal a few critical aspects of photography.

Firstly, photography is intimately connected to the basic medium of “visual still image,”

which can be defined as a two-dimensional, solid surface covered by visual, static, iconic

configurations. Visual still images can have varying degrees of spatiotemporal modes, such as

virtual space and time, and semiotic modes such as symbolicity and indexicality. Photographs

can generally be understood as qualified instances of this basic medium, while also paintings

and drawings are qualified variants of the same basic medium. In order to understand the

differences between qualified media such as photography and painting, it is necessary to

investigate what is included in the contextual and operational qualifications that are used as

criteria for identifying something as “photography” or “painting.” It is clearly not enough to

say that photography is indexical, since also paintings are created by way of contiguity, albeit

of another sort: brushes with color and other media of production touching surfaces such as

canvases. There are many kinds of indexicality and even more kinds of qualifying aspects,

some of which are more or less arbitrary.

Secondly, it must be noted that adding one spatiotemporal mode (namely, temporality)

to the basic medium of “visual still image” results in another basic medium, the “visual

moving image.” Hence, the category of photography may be extended to include moving

images. Photographic films are based on visual moving images, which is also the case for

cartoons and computer-generated films. These film variants resemble each other in many

ways and are often mixed. They are constituted by the same basic medium and sorting out the

differences requires investigating how they are contextually and operationally qualified.

Before moving on to the final discussions of photography as a qualified medium, or

rather qualified media, a few words about technical media are in order. In the model of

intermedial relations presented herein, technical media are defined as any objects, physical

phenomena, or bodies that “display” instances of basic and qualified media. All basic and

qualified media require specific technical media in order to be mediated properly. A visual

moving image, for instance, cannot be mediated on paper, but a television screen can mediate

both still and moving images.


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Since actual photographs mediated by technical media are all there is in the perceptible

material world, they have a strong influence on how the idea of photography is

conceptualized. Basic media types such as visual still images are abstract categories that make

it possible to compare fundamental media modes in a formalized way. Qualified media types

such as literature, music, painting, and photography are abstract categories that help us

understand how media varieties with different aesthetic and communicative functions are

formed in various historical and social contexts. Technical media, however, are concrete

categories. Every technical medium fills a place in space and provides a possible realization

of the material modalities of basic and qualified media. Since the process of mediation is

fundamental for perceptions and conceptions of media, technical media are important for the

historical process of qualifying media.

All kinds of technical media must be considered when discussing the qualified media of

photography. These include sheet metal covered with different kinds of photosensitive

chemicals, celluloid film, paper (in magazines, newspapers, books, etc.), and screens (on

which to project slides, computer screens, television screens, displays on digital cameras,

etc.). Furthermore, it is easy to imagine future technical media that mediate photographs by

way of previously unseen projections of light or radiation. However, the technical media that

mediate photography cannot, alone, constitute the medium or media of photography, in the

more multifaceted sense of the notion. The different media aspects must not be confused and

one cannot reduce photography to the technical mediation of photography. Proper

comprehension of the qualified medium of photography must include an understanding of

relevant basic and technical media, but it is not enough to consider only the modalities of

media or the technical process of mediation. Similarly, although media of production and

storage may be relevant for the qualification of the photographic media, they constitute only a

few of the many relevant aspects that determine how photography can be understood as

qualified media.

5. The qualified media of photography

Predictably, the answers to the questions “what is photography?” and “what distinguishes

photography from other media?” are quite complex, due to the fact that the notion of medium

is, and indeed must be, multifaceted. A comprehensive understanding of photographic


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mediality must include all relevant aspects, ranging from the technical and material to the

sensorial and the semiotic. As noted above, several media of production have the capacity to

“write light” in various ways. There are many ways to store the media content produced by

these media of production and a wide range of technical media that can display media content

produced by light inscriptional technology. Nonetheless, comparisons with other media can be

performed systematically with the aid of the model of four media modalities. Photography is

generally understood as a variation of the basic medium of visual still image, which is

sometimes extended to include some other modes of the four modalities, such as temporality.

Finally, mediality is about how media are qualified in social and cultural communities.

The meanings attributed to words such as “photography” are, ultimately, social constructions.

These constructions are not arbitrary, of course, but they do develop in ways that are not

determined by material and technological conditions. The word “photography” therefore

denotes several qualified media (cf. John Tagg’s oft-cited words “Photography as such has no

identity,” in 1988: 118). Here, space only allows a brief sketch of the contours of how

photography has been qualified in different ways.

First a few words about the contextual qualifying aspect. Compared to many other

media, the origin of photography is quite well known and several book-length studies have

been conducted regarding its cultural and social circumstances. Most researchers prefer to

delimit photography to the methods of fairly automatic image production that were invented

during the 19th century and have been developed in significant ways. Thus, camera obscura

images are generally disqualified as photographs for historical reasons, in spite of the many

important similarities. Other kinds of images that are generally disqualified as photographs

include tanned bodies and bleached items in shop windows, which show contours of clothes

and other objects actually inscribed by light. These images are excluded not only for historical

reasons based on production technologies (they are, after all, automatically produced light

writings), but also because no significant cultural communities have treated them as real

photographs. Many modern images of, say, outer space or individual molecules, are produced

by technological devices that do not register visible light and that have very little in common

with 19th century cameras, but they are still accepted as forms of photography since they

belong to a well-established society of science in which photographic evidence is an

important research method. In this way, the social and cultural processes of contextually

qualifying the photographic medium have led to the peculiar state of affairs in which some

images that are automatically produced light inscriptions are not seen as photographs, while

some images that are not created by visible light are seen as photographs.


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The operational qualifying aspect includes aesthetic and communicative characteristics.

The contextual and operational qualifying aspects are certainly intertwined, but there is a

point in making a distinction between context and function. Media products must fulfill

certain aesthetic or communicative criteria in order to be accepted as music, news reports,

poetry, advertisements, or photography. These criteria are constructed and reconstructed

through history, but they may have a relative stability within one and the same social or

cultural community.

One way of describing how photography has been qualified operationally is to note that

there are two qualified media of photography, or perhaps two conglomerates of media

constructions. The first is based on the idea that photographs do, or perhaps should,

communicate visual information in such a way that it can be classified as documentary in one

way or another.1 The second is based on the idea that photographs have, or at least may have,

aesthetic qualities to such a degree that photography might actually be said to belong to the

types of qualified media that are understood as artistic.2 These two assumptions, which are

sometimes discussed separately and sometimes jointly, and are sometimes seen to be in

conflict and sometimes not, form the backbone of perhaps the majority of critical studies of

photography. It would not be possible to do justice to the many intricate arguments for and

against these communicative and aesthetic assumptions in only a few pages. The aim in this

final section of the article is only to briefly connect the qualifying media aspects to the other

media aspects.

The claim that photography is a documentary medium is based on the assumption that

there is a certain kind of indexicality. Compared to other visual still images, which may also

display a high degree of detailed iconicity connecting the image to the visual characteristics of

reality, the automatic registering of light in the production of photographs is presumed to

guarantee a strong indexical relation to reality. This assumption remains steadfast despite, for

instance, the ability to modify digital photographs after they were taken, the many manual

stages and subjective choices in the production of analogue photographs, and the huge

importance of context for the interpretation of all kinds of media, including photographic

images. Even if one must unhesitatingly refute André Bazin’s peculiar idea that “the

photographic image is the object itself … it shares, by virtue of the very process of its

becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model” (1967

[1945]: 14), the idea that photographic indexicality is more or less magic is very much alive.3

In order to understand the qualifying process of photography as a superior documentary

medium, it is necessary to deepen the discussion of the semiotic modality of media.


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Photography must be compared with all kinds of media, not only painting, in terms of not

only indexical but also iconic and symbolic ways of making meaning. While indexicality is

clearly a key issue, this sign function is a result of many different media characteristics and is

always mixed with other sign functions. Meaning in photography, as in all other media, is

produced by conventions, resemblance, and contiguity. When interpreting photographs that

put on view sharp and detailed images, the aspect of contiguity, the indexical function, may

be foregrounded, which then makes it relevant to compare with other media with similar

semiotic properties, such as realistic painting or detailed, computer generated images, which

may also display decisive indexical traits. When interpreting photographs that are blurred or

otherwise difficult to relate clearly to the external world, a certain kind of weak or ambiguous

iconicity may be found to be important, in which case it might be relevant to compare with,

say, abstract painting, music, or even poetry. Therefore, the level of documentary value can be

judged only on the basis of how indexical sign functions interact with iconic and symbolic

sign functions, and that cannot be done without advanced contextualization. The qualified

medium of photography as a documentary medium will therefore prove to be only one of

several possible media constructions, albeit an important one.

In effect, the qualified medium of photography as documentation has been constructed

as a range of submedia, or genres, with different grades of indexical and iconic criteria.

Photographs are accepted as portraits even if they are tinted or softened; a moderately

beautified portrait is not seen as a forgery, at least not in a legal sense. Photographs used as

identification or to report political events, for example, require stronger indexicality to be

accepted. In order to be admitted as legal evidence, the indexical and iconic qualities of

photographs must be scrutinized even more thoroughly.

The qualified medium of photography as art has a looser connection to photographic

media of production and storage. Photography as aesthetic expression foregrounds how

photographs look rather than how they were created. This is not to say that indexical sign

functions are unimportant for what is taken to be photographic art; sometimes the

documentary aspects may be vital for the artistic quality. Having said that, the historical

process of qualifying certain photographic images as art involves a resistance toward the idea

that photography as such must be understood in terms of documentary indexicality and

detailed iconicity. It can be said, therefore, that the social construction of photography as art is

less original than the process of qualifying photography as a documentary medium.

Photography as art could rely on aesthetic criteria, such as certain iconic and symbolic traits,

that have been developed within qualified media such as painting and drawing. Photographic


15

pictorialism is a well-known early example of such a development, in which photographs

tended to look like oil paintings. Even if photographic art has since developed new aesthetic

criteria, it is inevitably part of the wider field of visual and iconic art. Like all art forms,

photographic art is constantly reevaluated and redefined, with aesthetic qualifications that are

formed by historically, socially, and culturally defined norms. The operational qualifying

aspect is intimately connected to the contextual qualifying aspect of media. Pictorialist

aesthetics, for instance, dominated around the turn of the century 1900, and only among

certain artists and critics.

There are generally no concerns about mixing light writing techniques with other

creative methods — old or new — in the making of original artistic photographic expressions.

Nevertheless, artistic photography is very much based on the same media of production and

storage as documentary photography. It partly uses the same technical media of display and it

is mainly understood in terms of the same basic media, but the way in which it is qualified is

very different.

6. Final remarks

Critical discussions of photography have been informed by several factors, not least of which

is technological knowledge and comparisons to qualified media such as painting and cinema.

Photography is sometimes explicitly treated as a medium, which is an important step toward

recognizing it as one of many media; a medium that deserves to be singled out in certain

respects, but that nevertheless shares properties with other media, as do all media. As this

paper has argued, an intermedial approach is needed in order to clearly see what photography

is, or rather what it is understood to be. Photography, after all, is only a word. As a term, this

word denotes many related but non-identical notions.

It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish between a number of complementary media

aspects. Photography has been thoroughly discussed in terms of media of production, which is

certainly both natural and necessary, but mediality includes more facets that must be

highlighted if photography is to be understood as the complex intermedial phenomenon that it

actually is. Like all media, photography should be comprehended in the light of four

modalities of media. Minute investigation of the material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and

semiotic features of media products that are understood to be photographs makes it possible to


16

discern essential relations to other media. However, photography is not a basic medium that

can be defined only by means of modality modes. Qualified media of photography are

actually founded on the same basic media (primarily the visual still image) as other qualified

media. Consequently, the qualified media of photography can be mediated by the same

technical media (such as paper and screens) as many other qualified media. Technical media

are not neutral carriers of the photographic content, however; they have an impact on the

mediated content. As technical media change and develop, the very idea of the mediated

content also develops.

Given the complex reality of media and mediation, there is doubt as to whether it is

meaningful to treat photography as “one medium.” Even if the multifaceted conditions of

production, storage, and display are bracketed together, there are at least two qualified media

of photography that emphasize two different operational qualifying aspects: the aesthetic and

the documentary. This is hardly news, but earlier conceptions of media cannot properly

account for how qualified conceptions of media can be understood in relation to technical and

modal aspects of media.

One could actually argue that there are more than two qualified media of photography,

even acknowledging that a qualified medium can be divided into several genres. All media

that become qualified in any way (that is, certain groups of actual media products tend to be

treated as categories united by certain traits) are bound to change. This change is affected, but

not determined by the development of new media of production and storage, and by technical

media that display the media content in novel ways. Nonetheless, all qualified media are

based on one or several basic media, which form frameworks that somehow delimit the

conceptual space of the qualified media. If the medium is not visual, spatial, and indexical, it

hardly makes sense to call it photography. The limits may be stretched, but not infinitely. The

modes of the modalities can therefore be seen also as fundamental building blocks for

qualified media. It might be possible to take away one or two, but taking away or exchanging

too many can cause the qualified medium to collapse. Photography may not be one medium;

it may constitute a gathering of several media that can be discerned as an important and

captivating part of the great web of intermediality.


17

Notes

1 In The Burden of Representation (1988), Tagg importantly argues that the documentary value of photography

has a multifaceted history; photography is not intrinsically documentary.

2 A recent discussion of arguments concerning artistic value of photography is found in Davies (2008).

3 Cf., for instance, Kendall L. Walton’s much discussed and ingenious article, “Transparent pictures: On the

nature of photographic realism,” in which he claims that “we see, quite literally, our dead relatives themselves

when we look at photographs of them” (1984: 252).

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Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term "photography"