Mapping a Photographic "Register", and the Dismantling of an Ontological Misnomer in Photography: the "Latent Image"

This paper explores an expanded perspective on the relationship between photons and the photographic process through various articulations in the field of optics and photonics. This framework will illuminate a more thorough explanation of processes that formalize a "register" as interpreted in Dawn M. Wilson's essay "Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why We Need a Multi-stage Account of Photography", and in general, a more complete understanding of image-data acquisition-sequences. Central to this examination is electromagnetic energy (photons of light), and where I introduce Light-energy indices, the variables associated with spatial and temporal frequencies, and optical radiances as representing and vectoring characteristic features of the photographed subject through space. In this sense then, determinate - global (general shape and lines) and distinctive (textures and fine detail) features - are the constituents that optically inscribe a register, thus proposing that a register is more akin to a blueprint - inscribing various indices that need some type of rendering process to reveal a depiction of the exposed subject. This is opposed to contemporary orthodoxy championing the so-called "latent image" - the false-referent paradigm that a fully realized pictorial representation of the subject hides on a register after exposure, and a mainstay Wilson argues in her work and is widely contemplated elsewhere (Wilson 2021; Wilson 2022; Wilson 2023; Lopes 2016; Windsor 2023). Ultimately, this paper proposes an explicit causal link between the subject that is framed before the lens, and what I interpret as Inscribed Structured Patterns of information that embody a register – that will be argued – establishes a more scientifically and philosophically accurate referent identifying a register – that is addressed in the last section of the essay.