The issues that inform the very process of representation in photography are generally those around the relationship between fact and fiction (or the documentary and the aesthetic), objectivity and subjective description, and material object and interpretation.

In Introduction: Photographic Interventions in the International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication Volume 29, Number 1, Spring 2008 Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri say:

More than anything else, it is the photograph’s mechanical production and its supposed indexicality which have set the study of photographic images as well as their use in literature apart from other images Theorists who have linked the photograph’s specificity to its mechanical origins include Bazin (1975), Sontag (1977), and Barthes (1984), among others. As Rosalind Krauss (1981: 26) specifies, “photography is an imprint or transfer of the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints.” The product of an automatic apparatus, “a photograph is always a photograph of something which actually exists” (Walton 1984: 250). It is the photograph’s indexical quality that makes it the most realist of images and links it to the real world.

The almost automatic association of the photograph with the real, the authentic, and the referent is difficult to break. Belief in the photograph’s objective truthfulness persists even in what William Mitchell (1994) calls a “post-photographic era,” an age in which the photomechanical image is being replaced by digitally manipulated or constructed images.