Aporetic Apparatus

In this article, we examine the epistemology of the camera today. In order to answer this question, we concentrate on three social and technological forms: the camera obscura, the photographic camera, and the digital camera.

On the one hand, the camera extends our human sensibilities and helps us to obtain knowledge of the world. On the other hand, it works as a device for delusion, bodily vision and spectacle. Historically, these two functions are meshed together in complicated ways and this establishes the paradoxical epistemology of the camera.

We argue that, even if contemporary debates about the truthfulness of the photographic image have persistently been tied to the digitisation of the photographic process, the very origin of these debates actually lies in the camera itself and its contradictory epistemology. The camera has worked, and still works, as an apparatus that relentlessly produces irresolvable ambiguity, aporia, between true knowledge and illusory vision.