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Speculations on transpositional photography

Can we understand photography as transposition? Such a reading seems to be at odds with the major narratives of photo theory. Despite all differences over the question of how photographic images (either still or moving) obtain meanings, there is a basic consensus that an image as such is something different from the specific thing or situation it apparently has a connection to. The main issue of any photo theory, then, is how to define the translation between these two poles of subject and image. The answers range from a direct, indexical relation to no relation at all. Even normative aesthetics of realism that call for closing the gap between subject and image in their first step accept the divide as a problem they promise to solve.1 The notion of transpositional photography, on the other hand, implies that no ontological transformation occurs, or at least that any kind of transformation is less relevant than the change of position or environment that the term transposition suggests. Thus, to understand photography as transposition means that there are not two states but two positions for the same thing. In the course of the photographic process this thing would not change in regard of what it is but of where it is and what surrounds it. So can we replace the ontological question of photography with a topological one? If we dismiss subject and image as the two states that theories of photography under a semiotic paradigm postulate, we have to ask how one can conceive of an identity across very different manifestations. Turning from translation to transposition also has implications for photography as an epistemic practice. Photography understood as translation is based on the assumption that it constitutes a qualitative and positivistic step; a photo isolates and abstracts real-world phenomena and thus shows something we might not see without it, for which the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge are the most obvious example.2 Transposition, in contrast, is a potentially neverending process of shifts, displacements, and assemblies not offering any stable position. Concerning artistic research this can be a venturesome step as the practice of translation is supported by a long tradition of representation and aesthetic competences. To abandon this practice poses the question what the