This essay concerns itself with photographic image productions and their interwoven nature in processes of ethics and politics. To this end, current journalistic image productions are questioned in order to show that even the seemingly most authentic photographs are bound up in image politics and operating modes of power. For these mechanisms, the question of drawing boundaries between the visible and invisible in the field of representation is just as essential as the structuring function of the ‘frame’. The essay asks the question to what extent current image productions can work on the ‘frame’ and a shift of the boundary between the included and excluded, the visible and invisible in order to initiate a critical examination of the limitation that has been imposed on the interpretation of reality. Examples from the works of Bertolt Brecht, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin and Edmund Clark elucidate that a look at the limits of photography opens new perspectives in order to let the socially critical potential of visual forms of presentation come to bear and to develop future modes of ‘disobedient seeing’ in the area of journalistic and documentary narrative forms.
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