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Abstract

This article takes Jean-Luc Nancy’s analogy of ‘the photograph itself, as a death mask’ at the conclusion of ‘Masked Imagination’ as its starting point to investigate and extrapolate what his thinking has to offer to contemporary photography theory. In contrast to the indexical approach of Sontag and Bazin, Nancy recasts the photographic image as a mode of exposure (posed in exteriority) to being-in-common. The author situates Nancy’s debt to Maurice Blanchot’s ‘Two Versions of the Imaginary’ for thinking the photographic image in terms of ‘absence as presence.’ The author also reviews Nancy’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s use of the death mask as the ground of the image as well as Nancy’s affirmation of photographic alterity, strangeness, and straying in ‘Nous Autres.’ Nancy’s views on photography’s hallucinatory quality are compared with Roland Barthes to underscore his expository approach and the article concludes with some thoughts on the ‘exscription’ of photographic meaning.

Keywords

alterity death death mask exposure image index Jean-Luc Nancy photography

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References

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Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image

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