Kaja Silverman’s “The Miracle of Analogy”: Rewriting the Ontology of Photography
An ontological-historical repositioning: understanding photography as an event of “the world’s self-imaging,” in which humans and apparatuses are merely the mediums and witnesses that allow it to happen.
In 2015, American theorist Kaja Silverman published The Miracle of Analogy (Stanford University Press), a systematic rewriting of photography’s history. She reads 19th-century technology, texts, and images (Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot) through a philosophical and phenomenological tradition. Her core argument is that photography’s essence is not the “index” (a causal trace) but the “analogy”—a relationship of resonance, resemblance, and belonging between the world and the image.
Core Concepts: Analogy, Self-Imaging, and Latency
Silverman’s argument unfolds along four primary paths:
1. Photography’s Essence = Analogy, Not the Causal Lock of the Index
Silverman critiques the reduction of photography to an “indexical trace” (a physical connection to its object) as too narrow. She argues that photography is primarily the generation of resemblance—a correspondence between light, surface, and form that allows the world to “rhyme with itself” in the image. Conclusion: The index is only one condition; it cannot explain why a photograph is moving or how it connects to all things.
2. The World’s Self-Imaging: Decentering Authorship
She proposes the concept of “the world’s self-imaging”: photography is not a record of human mastery over the world, but an event where the world reveals itself to us. The photographer’s role shifts from “creator” to “listener/receiver,” emphasizing waiting, receptivity, and the active self-revelation of the object. Significance: This rewrites the author-object power dynamic, opening an ethical posture of humility.
3. Latency and Time: From Technical Process to Perceptual Ethics
The “latency” of the image in early photographic processes (the wait for the image to appear) signals photography’s “delayed temporality”: the image is not made in an instant but emerges gradually. Silverman translates this into an ethics of viewing: a good photograph, and a good viewing, require patience and preparation, allowing the world the time it needs to take shape before us.
4. Chains of Resemblance: Trans-Medial Connections
Photographs form “chains of resemblance” with paintings, sculptures, texts, and natural forms. An image does not just correspond to its referent; it transmits and transcribes forms, rhythms, and gestures across different media. Implication: The history of photography should be written as a “topography of analogies,” not a technical chronology.
Value and Impact: The Turn from Index to Analogy
The enduring value of The Miracle of Analogy can be understood on two levels:
- Value as Method and Tool: The book provides a four-part toolkit: (a) Using “analogy” instead of “index” to address an image’s affective power; (b) “The world’s self-imaging” to decenter the author and build an ethics of humility; (c) “Latency/delay” to understand the temporal structure of viewing; (d) Tracking “chains of resemblance” to read forms across media.
- Long-Term Impact: This book opens another axis for photography’s ontology, creating a direct dialogue with Krauss’s “indexicality” and complementing Barthes’s “affective time.” In an age of digital and generative imagery, Silverman’s analogical perspective encourages us to think beyond “true/false” or “indexicality” and to consider how images attune themselves to the world.
The Miracle of Analogy teaches us: to understand a photograph, don’t just ask what it proves, but ask how it resembles the world and allows the world to appear before us once again.
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