Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence

<p>This manuscript, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn, relates what photographs are to what they’re said to be and to how they’re said to be this what. I argue that photographs are vulnerable to and dependent upon rhetorical constitution, not only for their sense, but also for their reference. But rather than establish the rhetorical life of photography, rather than only show how photographs become what they’re said to be, I also show how photographs reveal the limits of the rhetorical life. In the structure of photographic reference I discover a temporal predicament, one that the rhetorical life neither overcomes nor avoids, but which constitutes its very urgency.