Against Barthes: The Eye and the Index

The gesture of pointing is the perfect embodiment of photography’s function as a visual document: an injunction to look at this. In this textual and visual essay, artist Joan Fontcuberta takes the index finger as his point of departure for an insightful and irreverent consideration of photography’s relation to indexicality. He refutes, as well as draws on, Roland Barthes’s suggestion that every photograph tells us ‘this has been’ (‘ça a été’), reckoning with the inconvenient multiplicity of thises in any given image. If a photograph constitutes such a statement – as made explicit in images that include a pointing finger – does the camera witness reality or performance? These existential issues are further complicated by the emergence of post-photography and generative AI.  

In this typically engaging and iconoclastic essay, Fontcuberta destabilises our ideas about the authority and authoriality of images, drawing on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and his own autobiography. His text is interleaved between two compelling visual essays formed of images from the archive of Mexican tabloid Alerta from the 1960s to 1980s, in which the pointing index finger forms a haunting and often humorous through-line.

DISCOURSE is a series of small books in which a theorist, artist, or writer engages in a dialogue with a theme, an artwork, an idea, or another individual across an extended text. Explore the full series here.