What is Photographic Research? A Pocket Reader

In what ways and to what extent is it possible for photography to be self-reflexive or self-researching? To some extent all photographs are reflexive on photography, in so far as photography asserts itself as image, in image and as photograph. Photographs are also a measure or observation of photography, but as a kind of invisible substrate to observations of some other attendant thing that is more (and primarily) visible. Roland Barthes writes ‘whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.’ (Barthes,1981:6)