ABSTRACT
The absolute dependence of photography on the real that it represents, and the impossibility of any disinterested judgement of something so dependent on the real means very simply that for classical aesthetics, photography cannot be beautiful. Among the many threads of the text one thus finds the thesis that photographs transmit something unique: that, unlike other signifiers that can be modified and recast — one thinks of Baudelaire's fear of photography's ambitions — the photographic signifier is singular. Although the effect of the photograph is delayed or deferred, it still depends on the initial presence of camera and subject. The light flows, in Roland Barthes's analogy, from sitter to viewer, even if it is stored by the photo, as in a battery, until the moment the viewer sees it. Its subject is simultaneously there and not there, even if the photograph has travelled many miles and existed for several decades.
