Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each theorist to the term they contributed.
- Roland Barthes
- Walter Benjamin
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- André Bazin
- The ontology of an image formed without a human hand
- The aura, and its decay under mechanical reproduction
- The index, a sign physically caused by its object
- The punctum, the accidental detail that wounds a particular viewer
Hints
- Two of the four wrote specifically about photography and two supplied a wider frame it fits into.
- One of the terms comes from a general theory of signs.
Show the answer
- Roland Barthes → The punctum, the accidental detail that wounds a particular viewer
- Walter Benjamin → The aura, and its decay under mechanical reproduction
- Charles Sanders Peirce → The index, a sign physically caused by its object
- André Bazin → The ontology of an image formed without a human hand
Why
Peirce is the outlier and the most useful. He was building a general classification of signs and never wrote a theory of photography, but the category of the index is what explains why a photograph of a person persuades differently from a drawing of one, the light really did come off that face.
Practise The Birth of Photography and Its First Theory
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