The Nostalgic Referent: Photography, Simulation, and the Fate of “Cela a été”

Bertillon’s police mugshots. AI image

Introduction: The Return of the Real

The renewed exaltation of the photographic referent, particularly in current debates around synthetic imagery, reactivates a familiar anxiety about the status of visual truth. As new technologies appear, one feature of the previous medium is usually amplified and repositioned; in the present moment, the referent has been elevated to a criterion of legitimacy. Analogue traces and digital captures are invoked as guarantors of authenticity against images produced by generative models. Yet this intensified longing for the “that-has-been” can be illuminated through a different conceptual lens: Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum.

Baudrillard describes four regimes of the image, not as a chronological history but as logical modes of relating appearance to the real. Used heuristically, these regimes clarify how photography has shifted, from its evidentiary origins to its artistic manipulations and, now, its proximity to algorithmic synthesis, and why the referent, once marginal in art, reappears today as a symbolic frontier.

The Evidentiary Photograph and the Sacramental Image

Baudrillard’s first regime conceives the image as “the reflection of a profound reality” (Baudrillard, 1981/1994, p. 6). Early photography embodies this with precision. Alphonse Bertillon’s police mugshots, colonial mapping enterprises, and scientific documentation all rely on the assumption that the camera provides unmediated access to the world. Roland Barthes’ formulation—“cela a été”—captures the evidentiary force of the photographic imprint (Barthes, 1980). Philippe Dubois likewise defines the analogue photograph as an index, grounded in a continuous physical chain linking object, light, and emulsion (Dubois, 1994).

Within this regime, the photograph acquires a quasi-sacramental status. Its value does not stem from style or expression but from a presumed fidelity to empirical reality. The camera functions as witness, document, and proof.

Artistic Practice and the Veiled Real

Once photography becomes an artistic medium, its relationship to the real begins to loosen. Pictorialists emulate painting by softening contours; modernists deform space; surrealists manipulate negatives or assemble impossible scenes. In these practices, the referent remains necessary, light must still strike the film, but it loses its centrality. What matters is expressive force, not factual precision.

Baudrillard’s second regime—the image that “masks and denatures a basic reality” (Baudrillard, 1981/1994, p. 6)—captures this shift. The photograph still originates in the world, yet its purpose is no longer to record it.

At this point, a Nietzschean inflection becomes relevant. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche suggests that unfiltered reality is often harsh, even unbearable, and that the Apollonian veil is necessary for human experience. Artistic photography adopts precisely this veil: it transforms the raw real into an aesthetic fiction. The world is not mirrored but reimagined.

Walter Benjamin already noted that artistic aura does not depend on accuracy but on the uniqueness of a creative gesture (Benjamin, 1935/2003). The photograph begins to distance itself from the forensic model; indexicality persists technically, but its authority shifts from testimony to expression.

The Staged Image and the Fiction of Presence

A further transformation occurs when photography fabricates scenes that imitate the appearance of reality. Elaborately constructed tableaux, artificial interiors, or digitally reassembled landscapes invite viewers to read them as observational records even though they are meticulously engineered. This dynamic corresponds to Baudrillard’s third regime: the image that “masks the absence of a profound reality” (Baudrillard, 1981/1994, p. 6).

Baudrillard’s reference to the Lascaux replica is instructive: the copy simulates authenticity while concealing the disappearance of the original. Likewise, the staged photograph creates the impression of an encounter with the real while substituting it with a crafted fiction.

Digital technologies intensify this logic. Once the photographic trace becomes a grid of numerical values shaped by interpolation and processor operations (Flusser, 2000), the tactile anchor of the analogue index weakens. The picture may originate in light, but what reaches the viewer is a computed reconstruction. Reality retreats behind code.

Synthetic Images and the Pure Simulacrum

In Baudrillard’s fourth regime, the image “bears no relation to any reality whatever” and becomes “its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 1981/1994, p. 6). Synthetic images generated by machine-learning models inhabit this domain. They arise from statistical associations among images rather than from a scene, negative, or exposure. What they depict never existed, even though their visual surface carries the stylistic memory of countless photographs.

Yet these images fluctuate between the third and fourth regimes. When they present themselves as portraits, landscapes, or documents, they fabricate the illusion of a referent that never existed—precisely the logic of the “sorcery” Baudrillard identifies. At other times, they embrace their artificiality and remain pure simulacra. Their ontological status is therefore unstable, moving between the fiction of presence and the autonomy of the sign.

The Nostalgic Referent

Seen through this framework, the contemporary defense of the referent does not arise from its historical importance—art photography thrived precisely by veiling, manipulating, or subordinating it—but from an urge to demarcate indexical capture from synthetic production. The referent becomes a badge of identity at a moment when the boundaries between depiction, fabrication, and simulation are dissolving. Its resurgence is less an ontological necessity than a strategic reaction: a desire to preserve a category threatened by technological proliferation.

Old-school photographers, who once freely distorted or minimized the real for artistic purposes, now revive the referent as the arbiter of authenticity when confronting generative imagery. The nostalgia for the referent functions less as a return to truth than as a defense of professional and symbolic territory.

Rather than depicting a linear decline of the real, this trajectory reveals continuous displacement. Reality migrates from object to negative, from negative to sensor, and from sensor to algorithmic model. Each shift prompts a renegotiation of authenticity. The central question is no longer whether an image corresponds to the world but how concepts of “world,” “image,” and “truth” are reformulated within a culture increasingly shaped by simulation.

Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1980). La chambre claire. Paris: Gallimard.
Baudrillard, J. (1981/1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Benjamin, W. (1935/2003). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dubois, P. (1994). El acto fotográfico. Barcelona: Paidós.
Flusser, V. (2000). Hacia una filosofía de la fotografía. México: Trillas.
Fontcuberta, J. (2016). La furia de las imágenes. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.