In his “Little History of Photography” (1931), Walter Benjamin interprets an early portrait of Carl Dauthendey and his bride. This woman, Benjamin tells us, would “one day [be found] … lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her veins slashed.” In a sort of preemptive jettison of Roland Barthes and his scrutiny of photographs as memento mori, Benjamin notes the “irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency,” for a juncture or sign that might reveal something of her final days. 1 The artists in “Image as Trace” at Brunette Coleman in London levitate off Benjamin’s account of photography, spearheading discussions of photographic indexicality that focus on the past.
When I set out to explore some of these pitched battles, I was encouraged to read Kaja Silverman’s ontological account. In The Miracle of Analogy (2015), the self-described “hardcore cultural constructivist” reads Benjamin and signals: “photography’s truth is disclosive, rather than evidentiary.” She interprets Benjamin’s treatment of photography as “an analogy, instead of an index or a copy … development, instead of fixity.”2
This train of thought led to Nat Faulkner’s Untitled (Mercury Way, London), taken earlier this year and developed in his studio-cum-darkroom. The photograph of a paper-and-metal processing center, made with fiber-based paper to amplify its haptic marks and smudges, capers around this idea of development. The emergence of grease marks and fingerprints, more than the subject itself, gives rise to new meanings. Which is to say, the photograph’s future potential is inextricably linked to its physicality.
Like Faulkner’s Mercury Way, Paride Maria Calvia’s Frotter (2025), a series of cotton napkins moderated by his two cats, has some stubborn gene that keeps it ignited: their secretions, once pressed against the fabric and left to deepen, appear to map the self-generating momentum of time. For this reason, the physical traces grant the work a comparison to the footprints and death masks in Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977); these are those traces of the real which are not only like the subject, but a potent means of acquiring it.3
When Silverman uses the term “analogy,” however, she doesn’t mean “metaphor” or “symbolic substitution” or even a “rhetorical relationship … in which one term functions as the provisional placeholder for another.”4 She is talking about the similarities that tie everything in the world together; relationships not imposed by the photographer, but revealed through the medium itself.
Pictures like Marietta Mavrokordatou’s Virgin verse I and Virgin verse II (both 2025) seem to fit within the idiom. It’s here, in the kaleidoscope’s unpredictability, that a little piece of contingency tiptoes in. By tracing a singular moment across multiple apertures, the photographs have this “constellation” quality, the co-presence of “what is” and “what was,” determined by light and gravity. What Simone Weil calls the two forces that rule the universe.
Rereading Silverman’s Miracle in order to find a reference to “constellations,” I find it repeatedly associated with a “flash,” something I never scrutinized the first time around. “At moments of danger,” she writes, “earlier generations alert us to the mistake that we are on the verge of making through an image that bursts out of the continuum of time and travels toward us. They do so because we are in a position to ‘change the character’ of their ‘day’ [as well as our own].”5 And nowhere is this more vividly realized than inside the breaker boxes of Joyce Joumaa, whose backlit images of two ordinary scenes in Lebanon burst in accordance with the electricity supply schedule at the location the photographs were taken.
But this isn’t the only thing I overlooked. Skipping ahead to “Posthumous Presence,” the sixth and final chapter, it turns out that Benjamin mistakes the woman in the original portrait for Carl Dauthendey’s first wife, Anna Olswang. This woman, as Silverman points out, committed suicide in 1855.6 A harbinger, in some sense. Olswang and Benjamin were both suicidal, and I wonder how much his “Little History,” especially its ideas about the photograph as contingency, might have been swayed by a sense of projection. But if Benjamin projected, then perhaps that projection isn’t a failure of interpretation, but part of what makes photography disclosive in the first place. The image opens onto the past but also our inner world, ripe for confusion or affect. The artists in “Image as Trace” seem to grasp this: the photograph doesn’t just preserve what was, but entangles it with what we want to see, or fear we already know.
