- The miracle of Analogy, introduction - Kaja Silverman

In this book Kaja Silverman wants us to think anew about photography.


She starts of by looking at the notion of photography as an indexical sign and a trace of reality and does this through interpeting Barthes and Benjamin. 

But:


“As I hope to show, photography isn’t a medium that was invented by three or four men in the 1820s and 1830s, that was improved in numerous ways over the following century, and that has now been replaced with computational images. It is rather, the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us — of demonstrating that it exists, and that it will forever exceed us. Photography is also an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies. When I say “analogy,” I do not mean sameness, symbolic equivalence, logical ad equation, or even a rhetorical relationship — like a metaphor or a simile — in which one term functions as the provisional placeholder for another. I am talking about the authorless and untranscendable similarities that structure Being, or what I will be calling “the world,” and that give everything the same ontological weight.”
(Silverman, page 14)

"Not only is the photographic image an analogy, rather than a representation or an index, but analogy is also the fluid in which it develops." (Silverman, page 15)