Transparent Image

As a unique visual media, photography represents the reality objectively. This representing ability rooted on the automatic and mechanical properties of the process of producing images and the idea of representing in the western painting theory. In the discussion of photography essence, the article points out that any photographic images are the trace of reality, the indexical icon. As the main point of this dissertation, the author argues that this property of photography comes from the similarity between shooting and imaging-making technology, and reference and analogue relation between images and reality. After an analysis of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, the photography theory of Henri van Lier and Rosalind Krauss’s art theory, the author puts forward the nature of photography is indexical icon, and points out that an photographic image is not a copy or a reflection of the reality, but argues that the messages on a photographic image could be find in reality and it an index of real object. So, the nature of photography is totally different from painting theory and other visual arts theory, and never changed from Daguerotype to digital photograph, determining the meaning and use of photograph in cultural and social practices.