Most people think photography captures reality.
It doesn’t.
Something else is at play.
A photograph does not establish a direct physical relation between the object and the photosensitive surface.
What it records is a causal chain: light from the object travels through space and reaches the recording surface, where it produces a trace.
This remains true across all forms of photography, whether analog or digital, with or without optics.
Optical systems do not create or break this relation. They shape it.
- a lens refracts light through a medium
- a mirror redirects light through interaction with matter
- glass is never a simple passage
- nor is air: no medium is neutral
What varies is not the existence of a physical link, but the number and nature of its mediations. At the limit, the least mediated case would be propagation in vacuum.
Photography remains, in this sense, indexical, and analog photography is not inherently closer to the real than digital.