The Image as Evidence

When an image is born of a machine, it attests. This property, which distinguishes photography from drawing and cinema from theatre, gives image-based mediation a power and a delicacy of its own. Recognising what this implies leads to thinking what I propose to call the machinic third, and to organising the four-stage apparatus that follows from it: intention, capture, image, collective gaze.

The Hand and the Machine

When mediation is offered through theatre, dance or voice, the body of the person is at once the instrument and the matter. When mediation is offered through images, a machine inserts itself between the person and what they produce. Photography, video, sound recording: each time, the image or the sound comes from a device, no longer from the body. I trigger the shutter, I choose the angle, the frame, the moment, but the image itself emerges from an optical, chemical or digital process that partly escapes me. I am the author of it, but in a different way than a painter is the author of a canvas. I press a button, within a technical ecosystem that contributes to the result as much as I do.

In drawing, painting, dance, song or the playing of a character, it is the body that does. The hand traces the line, the voice carries the sound, the body occupies the space. The object produced bears the trace of the gesture, and remains a reinterpretation of the world by that body. One can draw a person from memory when they are no longer there, sing a melody no one has ever heard, play a character who does not exist.

The image made by a machine, by contrast, attests. It records something that was in front of it at a given moment. This property, which the trivialisation of capture tools tends to make us forget, gives such mediation a particular charge. Painting and photography each have their legitimacy, theatre and cinema as well. Their relationship to the real belongs to a different order, and it is this difference that must be named in order to hold the practice with accuracy.

The Ontology of Evidence

Ontology, in philosophy, is the study of what is, of the mode of being of things. To speak of the ontology of an image is to ask what it is, by what means it exists, and not only what it represents or what it signifies. A painted image exists as the gesture of the hand that traced its lines; a photographic image exists as an imprint of a real that was there at the moment of capture. The mode of being differs, and this difference has practical consequences that any image-based mediation encounters.

André Bazin, the film theorist, formulates this idea in an article published in 1945, Ontology of the Photographic Image, later reprinted as the opening of What Is Cinema?. He sees in photography the satisfaction of a very ancient obsession, the desire to wrest from time what is, to fix presence. He links this obsession to what he calls the mummy complex: at the origin of painting and sculpture lies Egyptian embalming, the making of effigies meant to preserve the body. Bazin writes that photography satisfies, for the first time, this obsession through a mechanical reproduction from which the human being is excluded. It is this exclusion that changes the status of the image. Painting, however skilful, remains mortgaged by the subjectivity of the hand that produced it. Photography, by contrast, is an imprint, and its link to the real belongs to another order. An imprint carries its own form of authority, which derives from the very mechanics of its formation, and which cannot be suspected of the same lies as a work of art.

The illustration Bazin invokes in the same article is the Shroud of Turin, that cloth said to bear the imprint of Christ, impressed by a physical phenomenon that would have escaped the human hand. Whether or not it is a medieval forgery, as has eventually been demonstrated, matters little for the reasoning; the function this image fulfilled for centuries, that of attesting to the existence of God, rests precisely on the fact that it is not a work but an imprint. Photography inherits this ontological charge at the moment of its appearance in the early nineteenth century.

The first known photograph that has come down to us is the one Nicéphore Niépce produced in 1827 from the window of his property at Le Gras in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, near Chalon-sur-Saône. He set his camera obscura facing the window, on a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea, and left it exposed for several hours, perhaps several days, the time needed for the light to imprint the image sufficiently. The research of Jean-Louis Marignier, who reproduced the process, suggests that the exposure lasted far longer than the eight hours often cited. The result indeed bears that duration: one can see the sun lighting a wall on the right and another on the left, two moments of the day fixed on the same plate. Every photograph, even one taken at a thousandth of a second, fixes time. Every photograph attests that a presence took place before the machine.

What Bazin names the ontology of the photographic image lies in this property. The mechanical image says, according to the formula Roland Barthes will take up in Camera Lucida in 1980, “that-has-been.” A presence existed, in a place and at a moment, and the image bears its attestation.

The Violence of Evidence

Since the mechanical image attests, it can also do violence. A person can take their own life because of an image. What is at play in this rests on the image’s property of attestation and its circulation in the social space: the image proves, and this proof spreads and persists.

To grasp the depth of what is at play in the capture of a face, one must remember that the conception of the gaze was for a long time the inverse of our own. From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, the dominant theory of vision, called extramissionist, held that the gaze was a fluid, a fire issuing from the eye to touch objects. Empedocles, in the fifth century BCE, describes the eye as a lantern whose inner fire goes out to meet things. Plato, in the Timaeus, takes up this idea and develops it: the eyes project rays of light toward objects, and vision results from the encounter between these rays and the rays the objects emit in return. Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen support similar versions. This conception, which seems childlike to us after modern science established the opposite in the eleventh century with Alhazen and then in the seventeenth with Kepler, lasted nearly two thousand years. It deeply shaped the Western imagination of the gaze. To see is to go and touch, and the gaze carries something of oneself with it.

When one recalls this genealogy, one better understands what the fact of being photographed could mean in certain cultures. In the Kingdom of Siam in the nineteenth century, on the arrival of European photographers, crowds would scatter: it was thought that to take a person’s portrait and carry the image away was to carry away part of their life. James George Frazer, in The Golden Bough at the end of the nineteenth century, records numerous occurrences of this belief, from the Basotho of Africa to the Melanesians, including certain Native American populations. Among the Zulus as among the Greeks, the fear of seeing one’s image absorbed by water or by a mirror, and with it one’s soul, recurs in similar forms. Frazer sees in this the sign of a relationship to the image that we have ceased to name in our industrial societies, without having ceased to live it. When a person today does not want to be photographed, their reaction may seem irrational, since a photograph taken without their knowledge would trigger nothing in them; what they express may stem from an anthropology that recognises more accurately than ours the weight of mechanical recording. The machine captures something of the person, and this capture from then on exists in the world independently of their will. The image escapes them; it belongs to the machine, and then to whoever owns the machine.

The identity card, with its standardised photograph, inherits directly from this logic of forced attestation. Judicial anthropometry, developed by Alphonse Bertillon at the end of the nineteenth century, used photography as a tool for identifying suspects: faces were measured, their features encoded and filed. The identity card, which became widespread under the Vichy regime (the regime of French collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War), extends this function. The mechanical image of the face, taken under standardised conditions, becomes the official proof of a person’s identity. What is at stake has nothing to do with truth or likeness; it is social control. The image-as-evidence, in its very genealogy, is an instrument of power.

The cameras we now carry in our pockets, moreover, integrate automatic processes of artificial intelligence, impossible to disable, that smooth skin, optimise lighting, sometimes only trigger the shutter when a smile is detected. The image that presents itself as an objective recording is already, in the machine itself, constructed. According to Jean-Luc Godard’s formula, it is not a just image, it is just an image. And this image, constructed, nonetheless presents itself as evidence.

Mediation and the Construction of the Self

This property of attestation directly concerns our practices. We work with people, with their journeys, and we propose that they make images with machines. The reach of this proposal is not always taken in within those practices.

This reach, I lay out here in the broadest possible context. Whether mediation takes place in a therapeutic, artistic, educational or social setting, it always touches on questions of the construction of the self and of psychic journey. A photography workshop in a school, a hospital or a cultural centre always mobilises the psychic dimension of participants, because a person exposes something of themselves, because the image circulates, because the gaze of others matters. Therapeutic mediation only makes explicit what is implicitly present everywhere. The methodological questions I will address are, to my mind, the same, whatever the institution that hosts the practice.

When a facilitator proposes painting or modelling, the person works with their hands, with their body. What they produce emanates directly from themselves, however imperfect or involuntary the emanation. The matter resists, the hand trembles, the colour overflows, and through all of this a bodily trace expresses itself. Drawing and painting do not know evidence in the mechanical sense; they belong to gesture.

When mediation goes through theatre or dance, the body becomes the medium even more directly. The person engages physically, takes a risk of presence. The ephemeral nature of performance protects them: what has happened has happened, and unless it is filmed, no mechanical trace remains.

When mediation goes through images, the machine interposes itself. The photograph the person has made now exists in the world. It can be seen, shared, copied, diverted. It carries the ontological weight of mechanical recording. For a person in a fragile situation, this weight becomes either a lever for elaboration or a threat, depending on the way we accompany what is happening. It is this particularity that makes image-based mediation demand more care than the others.

The Machinic Third

In my writings on mediation, I often speak of the created object as a third between people. When two people make a film, a text, an image together, the object made becomes the site of their encounter. It absorbs tensions, displaces gazes, allows each one to invest themselves without feeling judged. The object acts as a third.

In the case of mechanical images, this third is double. There is the created object, the image itself, which acts as a third between people, like any object of shared creation. And there is the machine, the camera, the phone, the video device, which acts as a third between the person and their image. The machine interposes its mechanical process between the person’s intention and the result. This double third, the object and the object-machine, seems to me the conceptual heart of what is at play in this kind of mediation.

Vilém Flusser, a philosopher of Czech origin, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography published in 1983 offers an analysis that illuminates the nature of this second third. Flusser calls the photographic camera an apparat, a programmed device that produces technical images according to its own logic. The photographer, in their gesture, does not merely use the camera; they play within the program inscribed in the camera, actualise some of the possibilities written into the machine. Flusser speaks of the camera as a black box whose program partly escapes us: we do not really know what happens between the moment light enters the lens and the moment the image appears. This opacity has nothing abstract about it when one observes a modern phone that decides for us which skin to smooth, which smile to detect, which blur to correct.

Bruno Latour, sociologist of sciences and techniques, distinguishes for his part between the mediator and the intermediary. The intermediary transmits without transforming; the mediator transports, redefines, deploys what it transmits. Latour shows that technical objects are never simple intermediaries. They act, they make others act, they orient conduct. To think image-based mediation requires taking this idea seriously: the machine is a mediator that transforms what passes through it, and as a mediator it has its own activity in the encounter.

What the machine specifically brings is that it captures more than what the person wanted to show: the frame around the subject, the background they may not have seen, the light they did not choose, sometimes their own reflection, their shadow, their trembling hand. The mechanical image always exceeds intention, and this excess is part of its very functioning.

This excess makes the richness of image-based mediation, and its delicacy. When, in a workshop, people are invited to take a photograph and we then look at it together, what others see in it does not coincide with what the author wanted to put there. There is a conscious part in the creation, the part that belongs to intention, choice, subject; and an unconscious part, made of all that the machine has captured without the person having decided. It is often in this unconscious part, revealed by the gaze of others, that the essential of the process is at play. The person discovers, through the collective gaze on their image, dimensions of themselves they were unaware of. The machine, because it captures blindly, has brought up something that probably would not have come up otherwise.

A remark concerning the objects involved in the workshops. We do not use only digital objects. Scissors, brushes, musical instruments, sheets of cut paper are also thirds, and their presence in the room counts as much as that of the cameras. The machinic third in the strict sense, the one that attests, is inscribed within an environment of technical objects in the broader sense, which together compose the scenography of the workshop. The recording machine fixes, where the other objects accompany the gesture without fixing it; and this specificity of fixation takes its full meaning in continuity with these other objects, rather than in rupture with them.

Evidence Turned Inward

Bazin spoke of evidence as the attestation of an external presence: something was there, in front of the machine. In mediation, this evidence changes direction. The image attests to an inner presence: something was there inside me.

I propose to name this phenomenon inner evidence. The mechanical image, in the context of mediation, attests to what the person carries within them without knowing it. A person makes a photograph on the theme of “therapy and artificial intelligence”; the group reflects back what they see in it (bars, an escaping hand, a particular light, an anxiety, a release), and the person discovers that they have expressed something they did not know they carried. This discovery escapes both verbal interpretation and the projection of the facilitator, since it is inscribed in the image, which gives it a character difficult to contest.

Serge Tisseron, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, devoted a book to this dimension entitled Le Mystère de la chambre claire, published in 1996. Tisseron explicitly takes the opposite position to Roland Barthes, for whom photography was essentially linked to death and melancholy. For Tisseron, photography is first of all a practice, a gesture, and this gesture belongs to symbolisation. To look through a viewfinder, to choose a frame, to release the shutter, to look at the result: these are so many psychic operations that engage the person in a work of meaning-making. Photography is, according to his formula, a practice that does without images, in the sense that the making itself produces something, regardless of whether the image is then looked at or not. This analysis converges with what the experience of mediation reveals. The machine does not only prove the outside; it is also the instrument of an inner putting-into-words, of an elaboration that passes through the image rather than through language.

Inner evidence so conceived is, to my mind, what gives image-based mediation its proper power, without equivalent in drawing or painting. Drawing is wholly within the conscious gesture of the hand, even if it carries an unconscious in that gesture. The mechanical image captures more than what the person wanted to make, and fixes it. This fixation can do violence when it is poorly accompanied. It can also prove structuring: the person sees themselves otherwise than they thought they were. They have an attestation that there are things in them they did not suspect. Since this attestation comes from a machine and not from another human being, it escapes the stakes of interhuman relations; it cannot be suspected of projection, complaisance or manipulation. It remains an image, and yet engages a form of truth for the person who looks at it.

The Four-Stage Apparatus

Our culture values technical mastery: we admire those who know how to handle a device, who produce sharp, well-framed images. In many mediation proposals, we see professional practitioners coming to teach people how to make “good” images, that is, mastered images.

This approach poses a problem as soon as one recognises the nature of the double third. What is interesting in mediation lies precisely in what escapes the person: blurring, involuntary framing, unchosen light, a finger in front of the lens, the shutter released too early or too late. In these accidents and these excesses of the machine over intention, a part of the unconscious manifests itself. The etymology of the word work refers to the tripalium, a medieval instrument of constraint, but more recent research has uncovered an older root, shared with the English word travel, which designates the journey. Work is what transforms: the work of birth, the work of mourning, psychic work. This movement of transformation stands opposed to mastery.

From these considerations, one can describe the apparatus that image-based mediation puts in place as a four-stage apparatus. The first is intention: the instruction, the proposed subject, the desire that prompts the shutter release. The person places themselves in the position of producing something. The second is capture by the machine: it is here that the excess specific to the machinic third comes into play, since the machine fixes both what the person wanted and what they did not see, what they chose and what imposed itself. The third is the image itself: an object now autonomous, which exists in the world and can circulate, persist, be looked at. The fourth is the collective gaze: the moment when other people, in a setting built for that purpose, say what they see in the image, without the author speaking at first.

These four stages do not form a linear sequence but an apparatus that brings the person’s intention, the machine’s own activity, the materiality of the image and the plurality of gazes into work together. What is elaborated is found in the gaps, between intention and what the machine has fixed, between the image and what others see in it, between what the person thought they were showing and what they discover they have shown. The apparatus organises these gaps, gives them a frame, and allows them to become the space of a work. It is this articulation of the four stages that distinguishes, in my eyes, mediation from other uses of images.

Instituting the Image

There remains an operation I call instituting the image. An image on a phone is one image among thousands; it has no particular status, it is drowned in the flow. For it to become an object of mediation, it must be extracted from this flow and given another status: projected large on a wall, deposited in a shared space on a platform accessible to all members of the group, named with the first name of the person who made it.

This operation of institution is the gesture of the facilitator. Through this gesture, the image ceases to be one image among others to become a symbolic object. The person who made it finds themselves recognised, in the same movement, as the author of something that takes its place in the common: a simple place, that no hierarchy, no evaluation comes to qualify. The image is there, it is by this person, it bears their name, it is seen by others.

This institution runs counter to the ordinary regimes of circulation. In daily life, images circulate, multiply, drown, disappear, produced and consumed in a continuous flow that grants them no particular status. Mediation, by drawing the image out of the flow to give it to be seen within a frame of trust and respect, reverses this logic. It affirms that this image counts, that it deserves to be lingered over, and that the person who made it counts too.

Why Machines

It remains to formulate what seems to me the heart of this thinking and what justifies taking, in mediation, the risk of working with machines rather than with the body alone. The formulation comes to me as workshops and reflections accumulate, and I lay it out here as a working hypothesis.

The machine is a non-human otherness that attests without judging. It is this property, to my knowledge, that no other support of mediation possesses, and which explains its power.

It is otherness because it has its own activity, its own program, its own logic of capture, which never coincide exactly with what the person wanted. It exceeds intention, it fixes what one had not seen, it adds to the visible elements one had not wanted to put there. This otherness is non-human, and that is what changes everything: it is not another human looking, interpreting, projecting, who could judge. It projects nothing; it records. It does not judge the subject of the photo, does not prefer one framing to another, does not decide that an image is beautiful or failed. This attestation, because it does not come from a human, escapes the stakes of power that contaminate every interhuman relationship, particularly in the contexts of fragility in which mediation takes place.

For a person on the autism spectrum, for a child who cannot bear instruction, for an adult who no longer trusts the judgment of others, the machine offers an encounter with an otherness that responds without judging. One can do with it what one would not dare to do with a human being. The child to whom one entrusts a camera and who wanders off for hours, as has happened to me in projects in difficult neighbourhoods or in day hospitals, does not do with the machine what they would do with an adult present. That child does something else. And what they do with the machine, which captures without judging, can reveal intimate dimensions that the relationship with a present adult would have prevented from emerging.

The machine attests, and this attestation, because it is mechanical, gives the things captured a weight they would not have otherwise. The person who discovers, through the collective gaze brought to bear on their photograph, that they have expressed something they did not know they carried, has the experience of an inner truth attested by a machine. This articulation between a non-judging otherness and a function of attestation is what gives image-based mediation its singularity among practices. To recognise this, and to hold the apparatus that allows it (the articulation of the four stages within a frame built with care), is to do the work of a facilitator. The rest, technical mastery, aesthetics, is secondary. What matters is that the machine can do its blind work of capture, and that the group can bring a benevolent gaze to what has been captured.

The Necessary Delicacy

A word of caution to close. All that precedes, the power of evidence, the machinic third, inner evidence, the four-stage apparatus, has value only when handled with delicacy. Images can destroy as much as they build. An image poorly accompanied, a presentation poorly conducted can do violence to the person who has exposed themselves.

I have seen practitioners themselves redo the photographs of participants so that they would be “more beautiful” before the institutional presentation. I have seen participants discover a re-edited film that was no longer theirs and experience it as a betrayal. In this temptation of embellishment and conformity to external aesthetic criteria, a negation of what image-based mediation can bring is at play. What is at stake lies in the image’s belonging to the person, rather than in its beauty: the image must bear the trace of their gesture, of their intention, and of what exceeded that intention. The machine must have been able to do its work of blind capture, and the group must bring a benevolent gaze to what has been captured.

Image-based mediation, because it goes through machines that attest, demands more care than other forms of mediation. This care lies in the attention to what the image does to the person, in the respect of consent, in the way of instituting the image without instrumentalising it and of opening the collective gaze without it becoming inquisitorial. It also lies in the awareness that the machine, this object we all carry in our pockets and use without thinking, bears within itself an ontological weight inherited from the Shroud of Turin, from Bertillon’s anthropometry, from the positivist science of the nineteenth century. This weight does not disappear with the daily trivialisation of technology. It is there, in every photograph, in every film, in every sound capture. It is what allows images to change something in people’s lives, on the condition that those who offer such mediation know the delicacy that this requires.