Reflections of a mirror called the eye

Abstract

The article proposes an analysis of photography through the articulation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, particularly from the perspectives of Sartre and Lacan. The text presents an investigation of the photographic studio as a space of symbolic production, where the photographed body ceases to be a mere object and begins to reflect the gaze and desire of the observer. Photography is conceived as a field of schize and nothingness: a gaze that splits the subject and transforms it into both image and absence. Drawing on the concepts of the “Object a”, “scopic drive”, and “being-for-others” the article argues that the photographic image does not represent the real, but traverses it, establishing an intersubjective and embodied experience in which the subject is simultaneously agent and specter. Photography thus becomes a field of the production of meaning, desire, and anguish. The article raises a critical question: how does photography, by mediating the relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at, operate a nothingness of the subject, revealing – through the lenses of Lacan and Sartre – a process of alienation and unfolding of subjectivity? Seeking to re-engage with the phenomenological and psychoanalytic debate on the gaze within the context of photography, the text redefines the relations between subject and object. The aim is to understand photography as an intercorporeal experience, wherein the ambivalence between passivity and activity of both the photographed body and the photographing body is at play, revealing layers of desire, absence, and drive. The photographic act is conceived as an event in which the subject is exposed to the gaze that constitutes him.