I do find the well known criticism of photography as representation, which is often made but those who hold that art is composed of sensation, to be a strange one. The criticism states that with representation the photograph erases itself, as an object in itself, in favour of the thing depicted: that is, the photo becomes a metaphysical window on something else, in relation to which it is inferior - the image is of a lesser reality than the thing of which it is an mage or to which it refers; that which it apparently represents. This metaphysical window is organised around the principle or logic of sameness. Hence the idea of good copies and bad copies.
A photograph as an art work as distinct from a mere product as formed matter as it formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning. What this criticism gets right is that a photograph is both a representation of bark fragments and an object in itself, and that the viewer's response to the image is composed of sensations or affects (ie., the ways in which I respond in my bodily encounter with the image and which arise out of my own previous knowledge, understanding and experiences). connection of model and origin
I find the criticism a strange or misleading one. After the demise of modernism, why would we say that the image is a lesser reality and the bark primary? Surely the image is real and just as real as the bark. What we see on the screen is an image -- it's blurry or indistinct, has a rich colour palette of green and orange and it is poetic in its approach to photography. Even though we know that this photo is a representation -- an abstracture of the pieces of bark that have peeled of the trunk of a tree --- we do not see the image as inferior to the bark. We do not see the bark, we do not mistake the image for the object and we treat the image as a thing in its own right.
