the mechanically achieved, empirical, and representational "evidence" of the world constituted by photography. Until very recently, the photographic has been popularly and phenomenologically perceived as existing in a state of testimonial verisimilitude--its film emulsions analogically marked with (and objectively "capturing") material traces of the world's concrete and "real" existence. [14] Photography produced images of the world with a perfection previously rivaled only by the human eye. Thus, as Comolli suggests, with the advent of photography, the human eye loses its "immemorial privilege" and is devalued in relation to "the mechanical eye of the photographic machine," which "now sees in its place."[15] This replacement of human with mechanical vision had its compensations however--among them, the material control, containment, and actual possession of time and experience. [16] Abstracting visual experience from a temporal flow, the photographic chemically and metaphorically "fixes" its ostensible subject as an object for vision, and concretely reproduces it in a material form that can be possessed, circulated, and saved, in a form that can over time accrue an increasing rate of interest, become more valuable in a variety of ways. Thus, identifying the photograph as a fetish object, Comolli links it with gold, and aptly calls it "the money of the 'real'"--of "life"--the photograph's materiality assuring the possibility of it's "convenient circulation and appropriation."[17]In his phenomenological description of human vision Merleau-Ponty tells us, "To see is to have at a distance."[18] This subjective activity of visual possession is objectified and literalized by the materiality of photography, which makes possible its visible possession. What you see is what you get. Indeed, this structure of objectification and empirical possession is doubled, even tripled. Not only does the photograph materially "capture" traces of the "real ...
