I see my own critical project now as an attempt to understand the social character of “the traffic in photographs.” Taken literally, this traffic involves the social production, circulation and reception of photographs in a society based on commodity production and exchange. Taken metaphorically, the notion of traffic suggests the peculiar way in which photographic meaning—and the very discourse of photography— is characterized by what Lukács termed the “antinomies of bourgeois thought.” This is always a movement between objectivism and subjectivism.