February 2007: Tom Gunning

Tom Gunning, The University of Chicago

"What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs"

Respondent: Noël Carroll, Temple University

Thursday, 8 February 2007

Russell Weigley Room (Gladfelter 914), Temple Main Campus

Directions to Temple Main Campus

In recent decades the concept of the index derived from the semiotics of Charles Peirce has become a central aspect of the theory of film and photography. Most recently the introduction of digital photography has, according to some theorists, called into question the indexicality of the photographic image. In this talk I want to question why digital processes should affect the indexicality of the photographic image. The practice of "faking" photographs has a long history and I will question what it is that the digital process adds to this tradition. However, I will also question the use of the term index as a way of describing the effect of photographs generally, especially the widely accepted use of this concept as an adequate way of explaining André Bazin's theory of realism.

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Art History and the Committee of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Professor Gunning works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work (approximately one hundred publications) has concentrated on early cinema (from its origins to the WW I) as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose (relating it to still photography, stage melodrama, magic lantern shows, as well as wider cultural concerns such as the tracking of criminals, the World Expositions, and Spiritualism).

Noël Carroll is Andrew W. Mellon Term Professor in the Humanities at Temple University. His books include The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (Routledge, 1990), Interpreting the Moving Image (Routledge, 1998), and A Philosophy of Mass Art (Routledge, 1999). He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Embodied Mind: Comic Intelligence and Concrete Operations in Buster Keaton’s The General and recently finished co-editing an anthology with Jinhee Choi called The Philosophy of Film for Blackwell.