Performance is not a photograph, although a picture taken from a performance is called a performance photograph. It is used as a document of the performance, or as a performative taken out of the documentative context, the photograph in itself functioning out of the context of the documentary  situation.
A performative overrides the most common link between a performance and a photograph. It no longer represents the performance. It functions primarily as a photograph. In a photograph the time is paused at a certain moment of  the performance event. A still image is a representative of a process.
From it one can see what has happened at the moment when the picture has been taken and also something that has happened before and after it. The moment in the photograph represents the combinations in a living process.
A series of photographs undermines the individual iconic significations of the images, because it contains a whole number of paused moments, but the representational role of the images is not undermined by such seriality. 
Representativeness is characteristic of a media instrument, a mechanical eye, as it captures individual moments. Representativeness is not diminished by the birth of digital camera technology. It only increases the possibilities of image distribution, the copying power and speed. The situation remains the same even with the still images taken from recordings 
made by a digital video camera. Those stills only put the details of a performance, even more visibly, into representative movement.
Nowadays the technologies of recording create a media environment whose effects performance art more or less tries to regulate and control. The forms and situations vary from one extremity to another. Sometimes artists prohibit photographing. Sometimes they flirt with the cameras, posing to photographers for a moment and then continuing their performance by turning towards the audience. A picture taken from the same performance can be read both as a performative photograph and a documentary photograph. The picture can also be taken before or after the performance to represent it. Nowadays the images can also be manipulated and combined in all possible ways.
What should photographing performances mean? It should be action in the tripolar relationship of the artist, the audience and the photographer, in which the effects of the photographing do not count too much when the performances are evaluated. What about the performances then? They are not produced in an innocent vacuum. The influence of photography is already present in their planning. How about turning the situation upside down: the only proper documents would be the photographs of the photographers themselves taken by the performer. Photographs of the photographers would assure the reality of the performance.

PEKKA LUHTA
Artist & critic

Translated from Finnish by Lauri Luhta