This presentation offers a re-examination of Peircian Indexicality and its historic and contemporary use in photography and media theory. While examining writings on analog and digital photography, and the different manifestations of such media, I find a pervasive problem in the understanding of how the causal reading of photographic indexicality functions by virtue of a series of physical connections to the referent, as well as how it relates to other examples and types of indices in Peirce’s own taxonomic subcategories. In response to this I have worked out an alternative typological strata of indexes and argue that the signs categorized as proper indexes must be ontologically corporeal, while indexicals in language, or what Peirce himself has referred to as subindices, are ostensive gestures that constitute a unique function of language use rather than non-discursive signs that primarily indicate a causal relation to the material world. Building off of this argument, I examine the informational characteristics (index as analog of the referent) in Peirce’s genuine/degenerate distinction and relate them to his concept of collateral observation and the ego/non-ego distinctions in his phenomenology. The result is a nuanced reading of Pierce's index as a phenomenological revealing of the corporeal world by virtue of perceptive analogy and causal relations. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate the value of a causal reading of the indexical taxonomy and the significance of a first order corporeal index, such as Bazin's death mask, in reinforcing a realist commitment to philosophical materialism and related media theory. Furthermore, this examination demonstrates that the digital/analog debate, though more or less exhausted at this point in time, has largely been based on a flawed interpretation of the photographic process in both realms, ultimately over emphasizing the causal relations of analog processes and under valuing the importance of iconicity of such images as well as the potential for digital indexes that clearly operate by virtue of a series of material connections to the referent.