Hubert Damisch defines the photographic process as follows: Imprinted by rays of light on a plate or sensitive film, these figures (or better perhaps, these signs?) must appear as the very trace of an object or a scene from the real world, the image of which inscribes itself, without direct human intervention, in the gelatinous substance covering the support. Here is the supposition of 'reality' that defines the photographic situation. A photograph is this paradoxical image, without thickness or substance (and, in a way, entirely unreal), that we read without disclaiming the notion that it retains something of the reality from which it was somehow released through its physio-chemical make-up.

By total accident I found this definition today of the photographic process that really articulates what I've been trying to say about what happens when a real camera takes a picture.

Also the picture below was accepted in the juried exhibit "Resurrection: A new look at old photographic processes" at the 23 Sandy Gallery in May.