Abstract
Doubts about the evidence of the ontological-indexical reference of the photographic image and the proclaimed end of the "photographic age" (Wolf 2002 and 2003) are certainly contemporaneous, if not entirely new and surprising phenomena. Even if it may seem that it was only with the advent of digital image processing techniques that photography lost its indexical anchoring in reality, which had previously emphatically determined its pictorial programme, the entire history of photography proves to be one of deliberate image manipulation. Seven brief flashes into the history of photography, showing pars pro toto experiments and rules, may illustrate this (cf. Fineman 2012). They are programmatic explorations of a work on photography that was interested in playing with the new medium, exploring its limits and its possibilities. Questions of a praxeology of photography are at least as important as those of its ontology.
