Abstract: My dissertation, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn, relates what photographs are to what they're said to be and to how they're said to be this what. I argue that photographs are vulnerable to and dependent upon rhetorical constitution, not only for their sense, but also for their reference. But rather than establish the rhetorical life of photography, rather than only show how photographs become what they're said to be, I also show how photographs reveal the limits of the rhetorical life. In the structure of photographic reference I discover a temporal predicament, one that the rhetorical life neither overcomes nor avoids, but which constitutes its very urgency. Barthes' numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, 'TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle'---these works stage the rhetorical life of photography, but they also make it reveal the temporal structure of the evidentiary as such. Barthes claims that every photograph is irreducibly and essentially evidence of what-has-been because every photograph is, as he says in Camera Lucida, 'literally an emanation of the referent.' His own efforts to secure this essence, however, are anything but secure. For Barthes 'photography' names a scandal, a trauma, and a crisis of evidence. That there is evidence means that there is time, death, and obliteration; photography says this, reiterates this---while also denying it. Photographs show survival, vividly, while also granting access to my no longer having access to what-has-been. The rhetorical afterlife of photographic evidence refers to the difference between these two times: the time of the evident and the time of evidence: the evident (what I see, what is manifest) withdraws when I see it as evidence, as a trace leading elsewhere. Further, I argue that whenever Barthes tries to distinguish between oblivion and survival he performs the photographic predicament: he writes of ruin in order to preserve a relation to it, but these preservative efforts remark and engage the force of ruin. The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence... shows how Barthes stages this predicament and shows further how Ronell and Horn, each in her own way, put it to work.