Unfixing the Index: The Hand in the Image

Photography is often tied to truth. But what happens when we smudge, ink, and press that truth by hand? This post considers photogravure’s indexical roots - and how it transcends them.

The indexical inheritance

Roland Barthes argued that the photograph is an index - a physical trace of a moment that once existed. Light bounces off a subject, hits a photosensitive surface, and creates a mark. The photograph, in this view, is a wound left by time, a scar of the real. It says, this happened.

But what happens when that trace is reinterpreted by hand?

Photogravure begins with that same indexical logic: a photographic image is captured and etched into a plate. But then the image passes through ink, hand-wiping, paper, and pressure. What was once a strict imprint of light, becomes something more layered, more ambiguous - more human.

Inking a plate isn’t mechanical. It’s intimate. The hand alters tone, emphasis, texture. No two prints are exactly alike. The original truth of the photographic index becomes flexible, suggestive - even poetic. It’s still rooted in a real moment, but it no longer claims to be neutral.

The human touch introduces intention. Mood. Even memory.

This is where photogravure parts ways with photography. It carries the index in its DNA, but doesn’t serve it blindly. It pushes against it, smudges it, complicates it. The print is not a window—it’s a veil. What you see is filtered through labour, material, and the alchemy of touch.

From evidence to essence:

Photogravure doesn’t just show that something existed. It shows how that existence feels. It moves from that physical imprint of reality to a visual essence.

There’s a kind of grace in that shift.

We’re no longer looking at a frozen moment. We’re looking at a moment passed through time, tools, and transformation. The image is still indexical - but it’s also expressive. It contains both a trace and a translation.

What began as a visual fact becomes a visual feeling.