ABSTRACT
Doubt is not a property of the photograph: it is a tendency of the human mind. As a cognitive condition, it typically operates as part of some reciprocal structure: doubt is opposed to certainty, or conviction, or faith, or confidence. (The absence of doubt is certainty; the absence of certainty is doubt.) By locating doubt in our minds, we can from the outset avoid the trap of opposing it to “truth,” veracity, or facticity and turn directly to questions of belief and response – away from metaphysics and toward psychology. By one account, it is not the camera that reports (or distorts) the truth, it is human agents and their institutions. If my paranoid colleague believes the NASA photo he is shown represents a faked moon landing, he will surely harbor the same skepticism toward any audio clip or moon rock or other vestige of the event the agency presents. It is not photography or sound recording or geology he distrusts, it is NASA and its sponsoring government. But what about the photograph itself? Is it no more or less trustworthy than a watercolor or a verbal description? Too often our texts seem caught between an urge to identify the photograph as something unique – to concentrate upon its innate physical properties, its indexical or automatic “nature” – and an impulse to dismantle the cultural authority flowing from this uniqueness and the dangers that such authority brings with it. An internalist, essentially mechanical understanding of the photograph is set against an externalist, rhetorical one: a theoretical object and real-world use. Yet neither understanding is sufficient, so long as their common denominator, the photographic viewer, is left out of consideration. At a phenomenological level, the photograph offers its hypothetical viewer occasion for both confidence and doubt, and in the act of viewing, this spectator connects ambient social knowledge to what he or she takes as the attributes of the object. Whether proposed to be an ideological tool or a special kind of mimetic representation, the photograph always has as its target the viewer, whose responses to the image, if attended to, resolve a variety of theoretical difficulties surrounding the medium and indicate where doubt begins.
