Image and archaeology in the age of post-photography

reflections from a diffractive experience in Egypt

Abstract

“No one can leave the cave”. With this phrase, Joan Fontcuberta targets the heart of the ontology of the photographic image and exposes the fictional nature of “documentary” representations of reality. The consolidation of photography as a document, a consequence of techno-scientific culture associated in the 19th century with positivism and colonial expansion, concealed its Janus Bifrons nature for nearly a century. More than “representations”, photographs are taken as substitutes for the things photographed, and this status, associated with the idea of truth, makes them the ideal visual expression medium for 20th-century science, particularly archaeology. However, the exhaustion of the guiding principles of the modern world has brought to light the dark side of the documentary moon, namely: that photographic truth, like magic, depends on a “collective agreement” that ignores its tricks and, in a “tangled web of fictions”, structures the experience of reality.
The following text investigates the origins of photographic realism and traces the paths of its overcoming, concluding with a reflection on the implications of the transcendence of documentary truth for archaeology, using as an example a “diffractive ensemble” composed of images of objects excavated from tomb TT123 in the Theban Necropolis, Luxor, Egypt, within the scope of the Brazilian Archaeological Project in Egypt (BAPE).