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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 179–195 | doi: 10.3986/fv.41.1.07
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy
Rok Benčin*
Photography between Affective Turn and 
Affective Structure
Introduction
In Camera Lucida, still a major reference for emerging branches of photogra-
phy theory, Roland Barthes paved the way for thinking about photography in 
terms of affect. In this late work, marked by grief for the loss of his mother, 
Barthes seems to have left his earlier semiotic work on photography behind and 
approached photographs through “an affective intentionality” that views pho-
tographs as immersed in affective responses to them.
1
 Photography theory’s re-
cent embrace of the so-called affective turn in the humanities aims to follow the 
later Barthes at the expense of the kind of photography theory practiced under 
the influence of the earlier, semiotic Barthes.
2
 The affective turn thus turns away 
not only from looking at photographs as images with aesthetic indifference, 
but also partially from reading them critically as meanings. Overcoming critical 
photography theory’s exclusion of affect thus entails a move further away from 
the photograph in and of itself towards the various ways in which photographs 
and photographic practices incite affective responses that are themselves entan-
gled in the often complex social realities in which these affects are felt.
In this article, however, I attempt to examine the photographic affect precisely 
from the perspective left aside by photography theory’s affective turn. The ques-
tion I will be asking is the following: Is there an affectivity of the photograph 
“itself”, an affectivity inscribed in its semiotic structure and the aesthetic ap-
pearance that it produces? By talking about photography “itself” and its aes-
thetic appearance I do not intend to return to a modernist formalism or – even 
worse – an academic aestheticism. In order to tackle the question asked, I will 
rather go back to the way photography theory, inspired by the semiotic Barthes, 
1
 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, Hill 
and Wang, New York 1981, p. 21.
2
 Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, “Introduction”, in Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (eds.), 
Feeling Photography, Duke University Press, Durham 2014, pp. 2–3.

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had already incorporated thinking about the affectivity of photography before 
Camera Lucida was even published. Specifically, I have in mind a 1978 article 
in October, in which Thierry de Duve argues that “photography is probably the 
only image-producing technique that has a mourning process built into its se-
miotic structure, just as it has a built-in trauma effect.”
3
 De Duve clearly distin-
guishes the immanent affectivity of photography from the way a photograph 
might affect its spectator as a result of its content (images of traumatic scenes) 
or personal sentimental value (photographs as substitutive objects). Rather, 
the affectivity built into the semiotic structure of the photograph is a result of 
its “indexical nature,” i.e. the fact that “the referent of an index cannot be set 
apart from its signifier.”
4
 The immanently affected structure of photography is 
thus understood semiotically in the manner proposed by the earlier Barthes. 
De Duve’s approach will help us move away from the focus on the (personal, 
even if socially contextualised) affective experiences of the spectator suggested 
by Barthes himself in Camera Lucida and often taken up by affect theory. But 
it will also allow us to see more clearly how the later Barthes’s own reflections 
on the photographic affect are conditioned by his previous semiotic focus. It is 
after all the specificity of photography as a medium that determines, according 
to Barthes, the way photographs affect us. Barthes’s affective phenomenology 
thus rests on a structure that is itself affected.
Yet, the goal of this article is not only to return from affective phenomenology to 
affective structuralism. It is also to rethink the photographic affect by shifting the 
focus from indexicality to another feature of photography’s structure: the way 
the camera captures a spatio-temporal fragment, isolated from the temporal and 
spatial continuum as well as the symbolic and imaginary frameworks in which 
the referent might be involved at the time of the shot. To a certain extent, this 
contradicts the direct link to the uniqueness of the referent and gives the photo-
graphic image a character of indeterminacy otherwise associated with autono-
mous aesthetic appearance. The aesthetics I have in mind here, however, is not 
the Greenbergian modernism that has often been the framework for incorporat-
ing photography into artistic discourses. Instead, I will approach the aesthetic di-
mension of the photographic image through Jacques Rancière’s account of pho-
3
 Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox”, October 5 
(Summer, 1978), p. 123.
4
 Ibid.

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photography between affective turn and affective structure
tography within the conceptual framework of what he calls the aesthetic regime 
of art. The structure of photography, I will argue, produces a specific type of aes-
thetic appearance, which has more to do with indeterminacy than indexicality.
This brings me to the second and central question of this article: If there is in-
deed an affect inscribed in the photographic type of aesthetic appearance, what 
kind of affect is it? As suggested by both Barthes and de Duve, it has to do with 
dealing with loss. Even though photography is distinguished from other types 
of images by providing an authentication of presence, its presence is necessarily 
a presence of loss.
5
 The privileged relation of the photographic image to reality 
does not amount to the triumph of representation, but rather to a direct emana-
tion of a past reality, evidence of “that-has-been.”
6
 This peculiar dynamic be-
tween direct presence and evident loss produces an affective polarity, with poles 
shifting with regard to what is lost: the referent itself or the world it belonged 
to. In Barthes, we can see this polarity or ambivalence as an alteration between 
amazement and desire, on the one hand, and grief, mourning, and melancholy, 
on the other. There is a similar combination in de Duve, who juxtaposes the 
mourning process inherent to photography (which he also characterises as mel-
ancholic and depressive) with its traumatic (or manic) side.
Barthes’s and de Duve’s accounts of photography’s affective polarity are clear-
ly dependent on the indexical nature of photography. But what happens if we 
focus on indeterminacy instead? Below I will show how this move implies a 
different kind of affectivity of photography. First of all, indeterminacy endows 
photography with indifference in relation to the referent. Yet this indifference 
has its own effect on affective polarity. If loss is no longer tied to a unique refer-
ent, new distinctions begin to appear. Rather than amazement or trauma, which 
both block the process of symbolic or imaginary reinscription of what is seen, 
the photographic isolation of the object entails curiosity about the possible con-
texts or worlds this moment could have belonged to. Instead of the monolithic 
block of mourning and melancholy, which appear as synonyms in both Barthes 
and de Duve, a crucial distinction between the two conditions noticed by Freud 
5
 See Jay Prosser, Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, University of Minnesota 
Press, Minneapolis 2005.
6
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 85–89.

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can be taken into account. While mourning is always tied to a specific lost ob-
ject, melancholy is a consequence of an indeterminate loss.
From index to affect
While Camera Lucida grasped photography through a strong new conceptual 
apparatus that subsequently proved to be vastly influential (especially the studi-
um/punctum distinction), it simultaneously renounced any generalising theo-
retical ambitions, with its author claiming to be “interested in Photography only 
for ‘sentimental’ reasons.”
7
 As James Elkins has noted: “Camera Lucida is at the 
beginning of a flourishing interest in affect, feeling, and trauma in the art world, 
and that may be the best explanation of its staying power.”
8
 Yet, the affective 
intentionality that governs the book’s understanding of photography remains 
firmly attached to the direct relation between the referent and its representa-
tion. Unlike in any other system of representation, “in Photography I can never 
deny that the thing has been there.”
9
 The causal relationship between the refer-
ent and its sign, along with the collision of presence and absence, is something 
that Barthes already developed in his earlier semiotic writings on photography, 
influencing Rosalind Krauss’s conceptualisation of the indexical nature of pho-
tography published in October a year before de Duve, following Krauss, exam-
ined its affective implications in the same journal. In Camera Lucida, published 
two years after de Duve’s article, Barthes drew his own affective conclusions 
from the photographic that-has-been.
While grief and mourning are most often brought up when addressing the af-
fective side of Barthes’s book, the affect that first strikes Barthes as inscribed in 
the very semiotic structure of photography is actually one of astonishment or 
amazement (étonnement). The primary affective reaction to photography is not 
a reaction to the loss it implies (the referent is no longer what it was when the 
photograph was taken), but to the unique representational presence it is able to 
provide. Yet, the emanation of a referent that is no longer there does not bring 
with it the past world it belonged to. Photography, as Barthes makes clear, does 
not resurrect lost time:
7
 Ibid., p. 21.
8
 James Elkins, What Photography Is, Routledge, New York 2011, p. xi.
9
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 76.

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photography between affective turn and affective structure
The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). 
The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, 
by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed. Now, this is a strictly 
scandalous effect. Always the Photograph astonishes me, with an astonishment 
which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly.
10
If it is not the nostalgic yearning for the past that introduces loss to photogra-
phy’s presence, how does grief come to accompany amazement as the other side 
of photography’s affective polarity? While amazement is a consequence of mak-
ing what is lost to the past present, the actual loss photography implies is less 
oriented towards the past than it is to the future. This is also what distinguish-
es photography from cinema, which might have the same “indexical” relation 
to reality, but does not share its arrested temporality: “Like the real world, the 
filmic world is sustained by the presumption that, as Husserl says, ‘the experi-
ence will constantly continue to flow by in the same constitutive style’; but the 
Photograph breaks the ‘constitutive style’ (this is its astonishment); it is without 
future (this is its pathos, its melancholy).”
11
 The loss of the past is less important 
for Barthes, because what is astonishing about photography is precisely that 
it can keep the past present. Yet, the presence that it keeps comes at a price: it 
does not develop further, its future is lost.
The loss of the future is what makes time a punctum, i.e. what truly affects us 
when looking at photographs. While the first part of the book looks into the 
apparently insignificant details in a photograph that accidentally arouse our at-
tention, the loss of the future is what brings to light this other kind of punctum, 
which ultimately makes photography a sign of death: “It is because each pho-
tograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, 
however attached it seems to be to the excited world of the living, challenges 
each of us.”
12
 The way photography refers to the specific thing that has been in 
front of its lens also individualises our affective relations to it. A found photo-
graph of Barthes’s mother (the “Winter Garden Photograph”) can thus become 
the central item of the book (or its central absence, since it is not reproduced). 
10
 Ibid., p. 82.
11
 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
12
 Ibid., p. 97.

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This photograph of the mother he still mourns achieves for Barthes “the impos-
sible science of the unique being”
13
 and it is with this same uniqueness that death 
addresses itself to every one of us through the photographs we come across. 
Astonishment thus makes way for grief and mourning – much more than for 
melancholy itself, as I will argue below.
*
In de Duve’s account, photography’s semiotic structure produces an affective 
duality similar to the one proposed by Barthes. The mourning/melancholy/grief 
complex remains in place (although de Duve adds depression to the list), while 
the positive affect of amazement that Barthes proposes as its other side is re-
placed by de Duve with the more negative composite of trauma and mania. De 
Duve also attempts to give a more precise conceptual status to both affective 
poles than Barthes. Following Freud, de Duve understands affect in terms of the 
allocation (cathexis or Besetzung) and withdrawal of libido to and from specific 
objects.
14
 But before we come to this, we should note that de Duve understands 
the affective duality of photography as linked to a split in its indexical nature.
In an almost dialectical fashion, de Duve understands photography as a contra-
diction between two constitutive and coexisting models of photography, mod-
els that are at the same time abstract (they cannot be empirically separated as 
two types of photography) and concrete (a clear description and examples are 
given of both). This contradiction is irresolvable and thus makes for a consti-
tutive paradox of photography.
15
 The two models or ways of perceiving photo-
graphs are the time exposure, an example of which is the portrait, the funerary 
portrait in particular, and the snapshot, the prime example of which is press 
photography. While the time exposure is perceived as a picture, an autonomous 
representation, the snapshot is perceived as the pictured event itself.
16
 The two 
models engage two different relations between the referent and the image, as 
well as two different modes of temporality. Crucially, both are destined to miss 
out on what they aim for. The time exposure aims to preserve the referent, but 
13
 Ibid., p. 71.
14
 De Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot”, pp. 123–124.
15
 Ibid., p. 125.
16
 Ibid., p. 113.

185
photography between affective turn and affective structure
cannot help designate its death. Meanwhile, the snapshot actually manages to 
preserve an artefact of the event itself, but freezes the temporal fluency of life 
that it wants to convey. In turn, this fluency is captured by the time exposure as 
the temporality of the memory activated by the image. The time exposure and 
the snapshot thus fail at their own respective goals, but manage to achieve each 
other’s: “Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying 
it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as departed. 
Reciprocally, whereas the former freezes the superficial time of the image, the 
latter releases it.”
17
De Duve considers the snapshot to be traumatic, since it blocks any attempt to 
resolve what we see by symbolising it. The encounter with an artefact of the 
event renders us “momentarily aphasic” and prevents us from including it in 
any kind of narrative.
18
 The frozen movement of the event splits the present mo-
ment it attempts to capture: we are always too early to witness the resolution 
of what is going on in the image, but also too late to witness or intervene in the 
depicted situation.
19
 In a certain sense, the photograph brings us too close to 
the event, the thing itself, at the expense of the narrative context or symbolic 
framework the event was inscribed in. In other words, we get a hold of the object 
(an image of the referent as it was at a crucial moment in time and space), but 
lose the world it was a part of (due to the continuous nature of time and space).
The time exposure, on the other hand, stimulates speech instead of blocking 
it. The captured moment in time encourages the unfolding of “a narrative that 
meshes the imaginary with the symbolic and organises our mediation with re-
ality.”
20
 The funerary portrait or the family photo album activate our memory 
and help us reconstruct periods of the portrayed person’s life. They thus help 
us to regain the world in the context of which the photograph was taken, but at 
the price of the referent, which the photograph consigns to death. As such, the 
time exposure lends itself to what Freud called the work of mourning: the photo-
graph functions as a substitutive object that ultimately helps us accept the loss 
and reinvest our libidinal energy into other objects. It is in this sense that “there 
is something like a mourning process that occurs within the semiotic structure 
17
 Ibid., p. 116.
18
 Ibid., p. 119.
19
 Ibid., pp. 119–121.
20
 Ibid., p. 121.

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of the photograph.”
21
 The primary opposition between trauma and mourning 
is then generalised by de Duve as the “unresolved oscillation between two op-
posite libidinal positions: the manic and the depressive.”
22
 In the conclusion of 
the text, he simply equates mourning with melancholy and depression, even 
though he quotes Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, a text that explicitly 
deals with the difference between the two conditions it mentions in the title.
*
For both De Duve and Barthes, the affective polarity of photography ultimate-
ly tips to the side of loss as the primary factor. The opposite resolution is also 
possible, of course, as testified to by, among others, Shawn Michelle Smith’s 
discussion of F. Holland Day’s photography through the Barthesian affective 
intentionality. Emphasising desire instead of grief, Smith argues for “a punc-
tum of pleasure”
23
 to supplement the punctum of death. By unveiling the queer 
dimension of Barthes’s conceptual framework, Smith shows how the indexical 
nature of photography allows one’s desire to “find a beyond that is proximate, 
an absence that is present, something desired that can be attained – and that is 
the ecstasy of photography”.
24
Another version of the ecstatic punctum is proposed by Serge Tisseron in his 
psychoanalytic account of photography as not only an image but also a practice. 
Stepping away from the indexical nature of photography, Tisseron argues that 
photography theory should shift its focus from the “that-has-been” of the repre-
sented object to the “that-was-lived” of the photographer.
25
 Taking a picture not 
only freezes a moment in time, cutting it off from the continuity of the world, 
but also affirms the connection between the photographer and the world in a 
moment of ecstatic participation.
26
21
 Ibid., p. 123.
22
 Ibid., p. 124.
23
 Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography between Desire and Grief: Roland Barthes and F. 
Holland Day”, in: E. H. Brown and T. Phu (eds.), Feeling Photography, p. 43.
24
 Ibid., p. 44.
25
 Serge Tisseron, La mystère de la chambre claire: Photographie et inconscient, Flammarion, 
Paris 1996, p. 60.
26
 Ibid., p. 169.

187
photography between affective turn and affective structure
Yet, tipping the affective balance from grief to bliss – as Smith and Tisseron 
do in different ways – is not the only way to challenge Barthes’s affective af-
finities. In his book-length confrontation with Camera Lucida, James Elkins ar-
gues that Barthes’s punctum, for all its emphasis on grief, misses what is truly 
painful about photography, namely its “non-humanist, emotionless side.”
27
 
Elkins replaces the combination of realism and affective phenomenology that 
governs Barthes’s dealings with photography with what could be branded an 
impersonal materialist approach. What photography reproduces is not so much 
the reality of our experience of the world but all the material details that we 
otherwise ignore. If we look beyond the represented figures and situations that 
present themselves as meaningful to the spectator, what we see in a photograph 
is a collection of material details of little interest, the indifference of matter. 
Photographs show us “something about the world’s own deadness, its inert re-
sistance to whatever it is we may hope or want. Photography fills our eyes with 
all the dead and deadening stuff of the world, material we don’t want to see or 
to name.”
28
 Elkins thus proposes a more radical shift: instead of balancing the 
photographic experience between grief and astonishment, he presents it as an 
experience of the world’s indifference to the subject’s affective investments. By 
this kind of intrusion of peripheral details, the notion of the punctum is expand-
ed but also made impersonal and thus completely undermined with regard to 
Barthes’s definition.
From indeterminacy to indifference
The impersonality of peripheral details is at the centre of another account of 
photography that progresses through a critique of Barthes. For Jacques Rancière, 
photography’s ability to register all sorts of material details that can lend them-
selves to potential apprehension as a punctum is not only a specificity of the 
photographic medium that sets it apart from art, but also what makes photogra-
phy a part of the modern aesthetic revolution. In this sense, the aesthetic re-
gime of art, which started to emerge even before photography was invented, 
was already “photographic”. Due to its rejection of traditional hierarchies of 
noble and ignoble subjects and the higher and lower genres and styles that cor-
respond thereto, it could treat anything as significant within the self-sufficiency 
27
 James Elkins, What Photography Is, p. xi.
28
 Ibid., p. xii.

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of aesthetic appearance. Photographs can thus be considered art “according to 
the aesthetic logic, because they do not owe anything either to the quality of 
their subject or to any artistic addition meant to raise them from their mediocri-
ty. They owe it only to themselves. They are the testimony of a glance directed at 
the right time at the right spot to catch what is in front of it.”
29
 The significance 
of the insignificant detail thus exceeds the meaning assigned to it by Barthes, 
but also suggests another kind of affectivity.
In his essay “The Pensive Image”, Rancière argues that Barthes’s opposition 
between the studium and the punctum is a deeply flawed one, since both poles 
tend to collapse into a short circuit.
30
 Looking at Alexander Gardner’s Portrait 
of Lewis Payne, Barthes defines the punctum as “he is going to die.”
31
 Yet, as 
Rancière rightly points out, there is nothing in the picture itself that could tell 
us that the man in the photograph is sentenced to death. One could still argue 
that for Barthes any photograph is a sign of death, which entails that the death 
sentence of Lewis Payne is not necessarily what makes the spectator be affect-
ed by his death. But this would not change the fact that the punctum of time 
and death presupposes the indexical relation between the image and the person 
photographed. The photographic affect is thus “an affect produced directly on 
us by the body of the one who faced the lens.”
32
 The direct line between the 
unique being that we see in the photograph and the way it affects us, Rancière 
suggests, lets studium back into what is supposed to be pure affectivity beyond 
knowledge.
For Elkins, Gardner’s Portrait is, “just to be literal about it – an image of scratch-
es and scrapes on iron sheets, with a figure interposed.”
33
 Along with the fig-
ure, the whole drama of human finitude is dissolved in the indifferent matter 
of the background. For Rancière, on the other hand, this dissolution happens 
within the figure itself. What we see in the photograph is not the determinate 
29
 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Z. Paul, Verso, 
London 2013, p. 209.
30
 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. G. Elliott, Verso, London 2009, pp. 
107–132.
31
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 96.
32
 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 113.
33
 Elkins, What Photography Is, p. 117.

189
photography between affective turn and affective structure
unique being, but a “tangle between several forms of indeterminacy.”
34
 Nothing 
in the photograph can tell us that the man is sentenced to death, but even if we 
knew that, we could not penetrate the thoughts hiding behind his pensive gaze. 
Rancière uses his own example, a portrait by Rineke Dijkstra, to show that the 
presence of the photographed figure in general is “that of the ordinary being, 
whose identity is unimportant, and who hides her thoughts in offering up her 
face.”
35
 Such indeterminacy defines the image as “pensive”, not only because 
we are unaware of the portrayed person’s thoughts, but because thought in the 
image ceases to be linked to the story of the unique being. The image is pensive 
because it “contains unthought thought, a thought that cannot be attributed to 
the intention of the person who produces it and which has an effect on the per-
son who views it without her linking it to a determinate object.”
36
 The immanent 
thought of the image emerges precisely where the relation between the creator, 
the referent, and the spectator’s response is interrupted.
Instead of focusing on the indexical nature of photography, Rancière emphasis-
es another leitmotiv of photography theory, namely the way photography cap-
tures a framed moment, cut off from the continuum of time and space. As Sigried 
Kracauer pointed out (in reference to a well-known passage in Proust’s In Search 
of Lost Time in which the narrator sees his grandmother as in an unflattering 
snapshot), photographs are fragments, whose meaning remains undetermined 
as they are isolated from the symbolic, imaginary, or affective contexts in which 
they were taken.
37
 Their referents now remain objects that have lost their worlds, 
although this does not necessarily make them ruins. Rancière enables us to see 
indeterminacy in a more productive light: instead of its lost contexts, which it 
was supposed to express, we can see the image as a self-sufficient aesthetic ap-
pearance, as a sensory event in its own right.
This does not make the photographic image any less realistic, however. With its 
focus on the ordinary and the marginal, ignoring the traditional hierarchy of 
subjects and genres, realism, for Rancière, is a founding pillar of the aesthetic 
regime. The aesthetic indifference that emanates from the indeterminacy of the 
34
 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 114.
35
 Ibid., p. 116.
36
 Ibid., p. 107.
37
 Sigfried Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, trans. C. Joyce, Diaphanes, 
Zurich 2014, pp. 73–74.

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rok benčin
photographic image is not a result of aesthetisation, but of the impersonal gaze 
of the camera that indifferently registers what is in front of the lens. This is also 
why, as Rancière recalls, Walker Evans could cite Flaubert as a major influence 
on his documentary photography. The aesthetic quality of realism in literature 
or photography is not a matter of “an artistic addition to the banal,” but, on the 
contrary, of “a deletion: what the banal acquires in them is a certain indiffer-
ence,” achieved by the removal, from what they portray, of “what makes it the 
mere expression of a determinate situation or character.”
38
What are the affective consequences of the move from indexical uniqueness to 
the indeterminacy of impersonal life? Do we end up dissolving both astonish-
ment and grief in plain indifference? As I have discussed elsewhere, Rancière 
follows Hegel in showing how aesthetic indifference does not entail an absence 
of affect but is affective and affected in its own right.
39
 Artworks confront us like 
the blessed gods of Olympus, Hegel claimed, blessed precisely in their complete 
indifference to the mortal world. Yet, as Rancière points out, Hegel rediscovers 
such bliss in the pensive gaze of a figure portrayed by Raphael and the delight of 
beggar boys in Murillo’s genre paintings.
40
 The indifferent appearance, even of 
insignificant realistic figures, thus generates its own affectivity.
But if mania transforms into this kind of blissful or pensive appearance, what 
should we make of its traumatic side? In the essay “The Intolerable Image”, 
which appears in the same book, Rancière repeats his argument against the 
direct connection between the referent of the image and its affective power, 
which is often presupposed by the discourse surrounding politically charged 
photography.
41
 In this context as well, Rancière considers the effects of indeter-
minacy. Discussing Sophie Ristelhueber’s landscapes of conflict-torn areas, he 
praises the photographs for shifting the focus away from the emblems that most 
directly express conflict, to the landscapes where the conflict can be seen with-
out anticipating the meaning and effects of the image: “In this way, she perhaps 
effects a displacement of the exhausted affect of indignation to a more discreet 
38
 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 118–119.
39
 Rok Benčin, “Art Between Affect and Indifference in Hegel, Adorno, and Rancière”, Filo-
zofski vestnik 40 (1/2019), pp. 165–182.
40
 Rancière, Aisthesis, pp. 21–37.
41
 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 83–105.

191
photography between affective turn and affective structure
affect, an affect of indeterminate effect – curiosity, the desire to see closer up.”
42
 
This affective shift does not make the image any less “real”. For Rancière, it is a 
way of politically activating the very pensiveness and indifference of aesthetic 
appearance instead of relying on the transfer of a political message through the 
direct line between intention, referent, and reception.
From mourning to melancholy
What remains to be seen is what the indeterminacy of photography entails for 
the other side of its affective polarity. What happens to the affective block of 
grief, melancholy, mourning, and depression that more or less merge together 
in Barthes and especially de Duve? Saying that he ignores any difference be-
tween these negative affects would nevertheless be unfair to Barthes, especially 
considering his remark in Camera Lucida about his inability to turn his grief 
into mourning.
43
 Indeed, Freud presents melancholy as unsuccessful mourning, 
the inability or refusal to detach from the lost object. This is the reason why Jay 
Prosser claims that melancholy instead of mourning (corresponding to Freud’s 
distinction) is the central photographic affect in Camera Lucida.
44
 But there is a 
perhaps more crucial difference between mourning and melancholy identified 
by Freud, which comes to light precisely with respect to the either determinate 
or indeterminate nature of the loss that has caused the condition. In mourning, 
the lost object is determined and unique, while in melancholy it is no longer 
apparent to the subject what has even been lost. Even if the determinate lost ob-
ject that induced the condition can be identified, the melancholic still does not 
know what he or she has lost with that object.
45
 From this perspective, melan-
choly is no longer defined only by the inability or refusal to give up the lost ob-
ject due to its irreplaceable uniqueness. It is also distinguished from mourning 
by the nature of the lost object, which is now marked by radical indeterminacy. 
From this perspective, the focus on the unique being makes Barthes’s approach 
foreign to melancholy. The shift from indexical uniqueness to indeterminacy 
thus enables us to account for the affective difference that mattered to Freud 
42
 Ibid., p. 104. See also Rok Benčin, “Art Between Affect and Indifference”, pp. 181–182.
43
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 90.
44
 Prosser, Light in the Dark Room, p. 23.
45
 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete 
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, trans. J. Strachey, The Hogarth Press, 
London 1957, p. 245.

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but became blurred in affective accounts of photography. Grief and mourning 
are affects related to a specific lost object, the unique being that emanates in-
dexically through photography. Melancholy and depression, on the other hand, 
are affects of indifference, not only in relation to the world seen under the sign 
of the lost object, but also in relation to the lost object itself, which becomes 
indeterminate.
Taking this into account, how are we to understand the shift from indexicality 
to indeterminacy in terms of photography’s paradoxical structure theorised by 
de Duve? To recall, the snapshot aims to capture the flow of life only to obtain a 
seemingly artificial artefact cut off from temporal and spatial continuity. Time 
exposure, on the other hand, manages to capture its object as it wants it, but 
only to immediately consign it to death, which in turn enables the spectator to 
reminisce and commemorate the past. While the snapshot aims at capturing 
the world but provides a worldless object, which causes trauma and mania, the 
time exposure aims at capturing the object but ends up reconstructing a world 
whose central object is lost, inducing mourning, melancholy, and depression. 
Both sides, however, produce their effects based on indexicality, the image’s 
relation to the unique referent, be it a snapshotted moment or an exposed being.
If we focus on indeterminacy instead of on indexicality, however, the affective 
ambivalence reverses its poles with regard to the snapshot and the time expo-
sure. As we have already seen, portraits or landscapes whose identity is unim-
portant are pensive exposures that make us wonder about the worlds they might 
have been taken in. Outside the family album, where no specific past to be re-
constructed is anticipated, memory makes way for curiosity and imagination. 
With their self-sufficiency as appearances, they are not signs of depression, but 
radiate an affected indifference as pensiveness or bliss.
Snapshots, on the other hand, can be seen as melancholic insofar as they cap-
ture moments of worlds at the point of bifurcation. We can see the captured 
moment, but we do not know exactly what world it was taken in. Yet, instead of 
a manic attempt to capture the real movement of the exact world in question, 
an attempt doomed to fail, we can see it as a melancholic desire for the possi-
ble worlds which this moment is simultaneously opening and closing: opening 
because the moment – as artificially isolated by the photograph – is infused 
with potentiality, and closing because we have no access to these potentialities 
and know that most of them necessarily remain unrealised. What makes snap-

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shots melancholic is therefore the way they are cut out from their worlds, i.e. 
the symbolic and imaginary frameworks that provide the multiple contexts in 
which these moments could be made meaningful. But the loss of these specific 
contexts to which the referent belonged can also be seen as a gain: the true mel-
ancholic lost object is the indeterminate possible worlds to which the moment, 
isolated by the photograph, could have belonged. The possible worlds evoked 
by the photograph may be lost, but are obviously also generated by melancholy: 
they only exist as a fiction for the melancholic gaze.
46
 Yet, such fictions are only 
made possible by the indeterminacy of the photographic image itself, its imma-
nent pensiveness.
In contrast to melancholy, depression – in terms of photography – could be 
understood as the complete failure of such a fictional gaze, the inability to re-
connect the meaningless image to anything symbolic or imaginary. This is what 
happens to Proust’s narrator when he sees his beloved grandmother the way a 
photographer could have seen her: as “a dejected old woman whom I did not 
know.”
47
 Elkins’s insistence that what photography actually shows is matter, 
disturbing in its indifference, could be understood as a generalisation of this 
“depressive” way of seeing photography.
Conclusion
This article started as an attempt to retreat from the affective phenomenology 
proposed by Barthes and taken up by the affective turn in photography theory 
to what – following de Duve, but also Barthes himself to a certain degree – could 
be called the affective structuralism of photography. This allowed us to move 
beyond the content of photographs and the affective conditions of their creation 
and reception to the affectivity inscribed into the very structure of photography 
as a medium. Yet, we proceeded to challenge the assumption common to both 
the earlier and the later Barthes: that the photographic affect is both structur-
46
 Here, I am relying on Giorgio Agamben’s argument on the imaginary nature of the lost ob-
ject in melancholy. See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, 
trans. R. L. Martinez, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1993, p. 25.
47
 Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, http://gutenberg.net.au/
ebooks03/0300411.txt (last accessed: 30 November 2020). I discuss Proust in relation to 
photography from a more “melancholic” perspective in Rok Benčin, “Proustian Develop-
ments: The World and Object of Photography”, SubStance 46 (3/2017), pp. 16–30.

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ally and phenomenologically determined by its indexical nature, the direct link 
between the image and the uniqueness of its referent. Instead of focusing on 
indexicality, we have thus followed the implications of another characteristic of 
the photographic image, its indeterminacy, which is a consequence of the way 
the camera captures a moment and isolates it from the temporal and spatial 
continuum as well as the symbolic and imaginary frameworks that could oth-
erwise provide the referent’s contextual meanings. This shift in focus alters the 
affective spectrum that can be discerned within the structure of photography. 
Beyond the astonishment, trauma, and mania associated with the reappearance 
of a specific referent in photographs, it allows us to see in it a certain indiffer-
ence, characteristic of pure aesthetic appearance in which ties with the referent 
are cut. Such indifference, as we have seen, is itself affected, either as the pen-
siveness of the incomplete or the bliss of the self-sufficient. On the other side of 
the spectrum, it allows us to distinguish between mourning and melancholy, 
the former being linked to an identifiable lost object that left an indexical trace 
in the image, while the latter’s loss is of an indeterminate object that evokes the 
possible worlds it might have belonged to.
Breaking the straight line from index to affect thus taps into a different kind of 
affectivity within the photographic structure. This way, Barthes’s emphasis on 
loss is not countered by moments of ecstatic desire or participation in the world, 
but by a different kind of loss. If the loss is not of a determinate object or world, 
it becomes productive in the sense of producing fictions of what the loss might 
have been. Yet, the point is not to redeem potentiality as a value in and of itself, 
but rather to see it actualised in worldless objects and objectless worlds that 
disrupt the narrative temporality that assigns objects to their proper worlds and 
worlds to their proper objects.
References
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Benčin, Rok, “Art Between Affect and Indifference in Hegel, Adorno, and Rancière”, 
Filozofski vestnik 40 (2019), No. 1 

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photography between affective turn and affective structure
—  “Proustian Developments: The World and Object of Photography”, SubStance 46 
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