Photographs are a theme in Blade Runner as much as televisions.

They are what convince the replicants that their fabricated pasts are true. In Giuliana Bruno’s discussion of the film, “There is a superimposition here of reality and of the past. Photography is seen as the medium in which the signifier and the referent are collapsed onto each other .” Deckard says “I don’t know why a replicant would collect photos,” and this collapse is exactly the answer. They are proof of a past, a history: Rachel hands over the photograph saying, “Look — its me with my mother!” 

In Sontag’s words, “Photographs furnish evidence .” Our trust in the photograph is its greatest weapon, one which Tyrell uses to better control his replicants. It is a trust which Baudelaire questioned, and a trust which he felt participates in the denigration of vision, with his claim that photography is “a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history (Friedberg 1).” It is a trust which director Ridley Scott accentuates in subtle ways: Rachel’s photograph actually becomes a live-action shot for a moment and shadows shift across the little girl’s face; the Esper machine not only zooms in on Leon’s photograph but actually navigates a corner, as if we were actually in the room. These exaggerations of the photographs’ veracity make us blink: How does the photograph so closely transcribe reality? What does this visual reality mean? How are we to distinguish the simulacrum?

Deckard’s narration, “I don’t know why a replicant would collect photos…,” collapses the movie’s parallel simulacra. The text deals with the discovery of replicants, and the sub-text deals with the construction of representation, visuality, and verisimilitude. The line becomes a hint that Deckard himself is a replicant, the strongest blow to the viewer’s sense of reality, when we see his own piano covered in black and white family photographs. ‘Why is such a premium placed on the family photograph?’, the movie asks us. It is a locus of sentiment, history, and memory. Heidegger answers this question in his essay The Age of the World Picture. Modern knowledge is described by the word “representation”, as Western notions of objectivity converge within the realm of the visual. Heidegger shows that modernity can be discussed in terms of a picture, as in the phrase ‘we get the picture’. “Hence world picture,” he claims, “when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture (129).”

This world picture has a long history. Martin Jay finds its origins in what he calls Cartesian Perspectivalism. This refers to the Renaissance artistic convention of lines receding towards a vanishing point which constitutes perspective, as well as the ways in which this came to work more in the realm of ideology than convention. “Linear perspective,” he claims, “came to symbolize a harmony between the mathematical regularities in optics and God’s will (Foster 6).” Lyotard describes how photography emerged from and validated this perspectivalist regime, with the claim that the camera “was only putting the finishing touch to the program of ordering the visible elaborated by the quattrocento (74).” It was a device which recorded light in a way that corresponded to optics and perspective, and whose premises were thus taken for granted. The ‘eye’ of the camera was known as a neutral representational device until very recently, and its history is undergoing a thorough reevaluation. The photograph, though, was not the finishing touch as Lyotard claimed. A new kind of representation was to emerge which would pave the way for the television, the GameBoy, the videophone, and the laptop computer. This invention is the cinema and its invisible workings and pervading presence are the concerns of Blade Runner.

This interest in representations, shadows, doubles of nature, is a theme in Blade Runner, writes J.P. Telotte, which “recalls our abiding fascination with film itself, and especially with our constant but unspoken hope that in the medium’s fleeting images we might momentarily glimpse something previously unseen, something perhaps of the self, something vital (Kuhn 158).”

Representation becomes an instrument of introspection, and the movie’s narrative problematizes the subjectivity of the viewer. The question about the replicants and their emotions poses a problem which can only be solved by returning to the self who sits in the movie theater, the subject who is without the thrall of the cinematic apparatus.

Taken from the essay “Blade Runner: Tee-Vee or Not Tee-Vee” by Jayme Guokas.