This article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue and explores in depth three concepts integral to the links between science and documentary: unity, indexicality, and reality. After outlining how and why the ‘scientific’ has been conceived as a problem in scholarship on documentary, the author offers an alternative framework based on recent scholarship in science and technology studies. This model seeks to account for the value of critiques of scientific approaches while recognizing the ways in which scientists have developed methods of image management that maintain the usefulness of their evidence while simultaneously recognizing the contingency of their truth claims. The author proposes that a conception of indexicality as both trace and deixis provides one tool for understanding the multiple strategies that scientists employ to figure reality.
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