CONCEPT
The Icon Consuming the Index
Rosalind Krauss's analysis of AI image generation as the moment when photographic icons—images that merely resemble their referents—become indistinguishable from indexical photographs, collapsing the evidential basis on which a century of visual epistemology rested.
Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished three fundamental kinds of signs: the icon (a sign that resembles its referent), the index (a sign that bears a physical, causal connection to its referent), and the symbol (a sign whose relationship to its referent is conventional). Rosalind Krauss's intervention was to recognize that photography's distinctive power—its peculiar authority as a record of the real—derived not from its iconic properties (its resemblance to what it depicted, which painting could achieve equally well) but from its indexical properties. A photograph is, physically, a trace: light reflected from the subject struck the photosensitive surface and caused a chemical or electronic transformation. The image bears a causal, physical connection to the thing it depicts, in the same way that a footprint bears a causal connection to the foot that made it. This indexical connection is what gives photography its truth-claim—its sense of the
ça-a-été, the “that-has-been,” as
Roland Barthes put it. AI-generated images sever this