Visibility and Realism: Photography and the Problems of Transparency

Photography's initial claim to represent has been derived from a privileging of the visible world, which, it might be argued, is reinforced by the limited visibility of the camera. The proliferations of utilitarian photographies, therefore, are necessarily also the elimination of the non-visible. Such a notion of visibility, when contested, might provide the starting point for a reconception of the photographic in which the apparently indexical medium is filtered through alternative relationships to representation, transparency, and ultimately, even the discourse of realism. This article proposes that an alternative conception of realism might sceptically underline the limitation of the photographic apparatus in relating to but also limiting the world.