Photographs are used as documents, evidence, and records every day in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work, on passports, permits, and licenses. But how did such usages come to be established and accepted, and when? What kinds of photographs were seen seen as purely instrumental and able to function in this way? What sorts of agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And more generally, what conception of photographic representation did this involve, and what were its consequences?

John Tagg claims that, to answer this question, we must look at the ways in which everything that frames photography - the discourse that surrounds it and the institutions that circulate it - determines what counts as truth.

Against the notion of chance that Robin Kelsey proposes as the opening to a new conception of photography and its relationship to history, this response argues for attention to the apparatuses that strive to “cope with chance” and guarantee meaning—apparatuses whose effective purpose is precisely not to be undone by chance and not to be reminded of their contingent and arbitrary nature—in other words, of their historicity. This opens another kind of encounter with the historicity of the photographic image, as (...) sliding from frame to frame, never quite fitting any of them, the photograph shows itself as an elusive opening, the ground of irreducibly heterogeneous and radically incommensurable stakes––never just one definitive and well-flagged stake driven into the ground at some singular moment in the past. (shrink)