ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to connect Martin Heidegger’s critique of identity and metaphysics with his later work on the question of technology to propose that photography, understood as an image-making technology, provides a privileged point of entry into the question of ontological difference. To think about photography from the perspective of exposure and not the image will require the re-evaluation of the photographic ‘is’ as the factical correspondence between an image and the thing represented. The ban on graven images seems to be connected to the perfect and transitive presence that is outside of time and constitutes the event of all events. The understanding of photography as the poetic expression of techne, implies that photography is the ‘graven image’ of the age of cybernetics and allows to suggest that a leap out of metaphysics is best performed not in the field of language but in the space of the technical image.
