What does a presentist see when she looks at photographs of dead relatives? (original) (raw)

Imagens do inimaginável: fotografia e a (re)presentação do evento

Discursos Fotograficos, 2013

We seem to live in a time of omnipresent images. Guy Debord's diagnosis about the becoming image of reality pronounced in the late 1960s still seems to be relevant to describe our time. We have reached the point when it is not surprising to have images of the extraordinary but not having them. The connection between extraordinary events and images seems natural today. However, it could be still legitimate to ask what can images do regarding those events? What can photography do when facing the unimaginable? In this text, we would like to present three cases that could serve, and actually have been used, to reply this inquiry about the possible relation between photography and the event.

Aporetic Apparatus Epistemological Transformations of the Camera Janne Seppänen

2016

In this article, we examine the epistemology of the camera today. In order to answer this question, we concentrate on three social and technological forms: the camera obscura, the photographic camera, and the digital camera. On the one hand, the camera extends our human sensibilities and helps us to obtain knowledge of the world. On the other hand, it works as a device for delusion, bodily vision and spectacle. Historically, these two functions are meshed together in complicated ways and this establishes the paradoxical epistemology of the camera. We argue that, even if contemporary debates about the truthfulness of the photographic image have persistently been tied to the digitisation of the photographic process, the very origin of these debates actually lies in the camera itself and its contradictory epistemology. The camera has worked, and still works, as an apparatus that relentlessly produces irresolvable ambiguity, aporia, between true knowledge and illusory vision.

Notes of epistemology of the images

This article has as its subject of analysis the images as they are perceived by the observer. As a heuristic symphony this work is a paradigmatic crossover of the phenomenology, the genetic epistemology and the hermeneutics, amalgamated by semiotics. In the first paragraph, a phenomenological reflection of the images is carried out, reaching a division between internal images and external images and between objective images and sign images. In the second paragraph, a genetic analysis of a thought in images is carried out, reaching a division of the sign images in signal images, index images, icon images, symbol images and sign images with its correspondingly levels of abstraction and societal. Finally, in the third paragraph, hermeneutics of the object images as a cultural unit or culturema is carried out. It ends by framing the present study in visual studies and highlighting their relevance in the context of visual culture.

Reflections on Objects, Spirits and Photographs from a Present Becoming Damaged Future

History and Anthropology 26 (4): 504-514 [2015]

My afterword engages six papers in the special issue “Archives and Anthropologies: From Histories to Futures”. It teases out particular arguments, locates common themes and explores the papers' relevance to wider debates in anthropology and visual culture. My paper particularly focuses on discussions around anthropology's analytical priorities and the position of the visual/material Vis-à-vis the social.

Phenomenology of a Photograph, or: How to use an Eidetic Phenomenology

PhaenEx, 2010

The present essay aims to make good on what turns out to be a promissory note signed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. There, in the opening pages, he writes that he wished to identify photography"s "essential features" through a phenomenology, and that " [he] wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was "in itself"" (3). Yet, in the years that have passed, it has become increasingly clear that he neither accomplished this aim, nor that he ever really intended to do so. Jacques Derrida shows quite clearly that the work fails to achieve its aims, and that it enacts this failure by contradicting its claims to universality. 1 Patrick Maynard similarly argues that Camera Lucida has really nothing to say about photography at all, and is instead a meditation on representation and mourning. 2 Finally, Nancy Shawcross provides what is perhaps the most compelling reason for this failure, namely that the work is an experiment in what Barthes called the "third form" of literature, between an essay and a novel, so that any straightforward extrapolation is bound to be mistaken. 3 The result is that scholarship on this matter has tended to focus on what can be salvaged from the project, if anything, for reflection on photography. 4 Yet, and here is the question I want to pursue, what would have resulted had Barthes stuck to his stated aim of pursuing an eidetic phenomenology? Has something been overlooked in the phenomenological tradition, which has favored painting almost exclusively in -13-L. Sebastian Purcell the visual arts? Is there something troubling in the photograph for the status of the phenomenon?

Modern Time: Photography and Temporality

International journal of technology, knowledge and society, 2009

This dissertation explores the fluid relationship of photography to time. Many theorists have noted that photography has a distinctive manner of representing temporality. Roland Barthes, for example, wrote that the photograph has a peculiar capacity to represent the past in the present, and thus to imply the passing of time in general. 1 As a consequence, Barthes argued, all photographs speak of the inevitability of our own death in the future. Moreover, he linked photography's peculiar temporality to its capacity for a certain kind of realism:-false on the level of perception, true on the level of time.‖ 2 Barthes's analysis poses a challenge to all commentators on photographywhat exactly is photography's relationship to time, and by extension, to reality? This dissertation addresses that two-part question by analyzing in detail a sample of understudied vernacular photographic practices. Rather than provide a comprehensive, and necessarily incomplete, study of every possible way in which photography can relate to time, this study instead focuses on a number of in-depth 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Death and the Experience of Photography an Existential Consideration

Person, Encounters, Paradigms Commitment, and Applications, eds. D. Prokofyeva and C. Patterson, 2023

This upload includes Auxier's contributions to the book Person, Encounters, Paradigms Commitment, and Applications, eds. D. Prokofyeva and C. Patterson. In this essay Diana Prokofyeva considers “the photograph” in an unusual way – not just as an ordinary visual image and an imprint of reality, or as an expression of feelings, emotions and thoughts of a person. Photography as a common phenomenon of modernity is mostly seen through the filter of a person’s need for self-expression or social approval, to capture a memory, or as an attempt to establish social communication with the world. Here Prokofyeva analyzes the photograph as an existential phenomenon and as a way of avoiding death. In this case, the photograph as a phenomenon belongs to two “worlds” – the world of life and the world of death. This brings us to the main existential dichotomy of a human being’s life – the dichotomy between life and death, but against the background of our understanding of the inexorable progress of time and the mortality of everything. Therefore, Prokofyeva shows a connection between the “phenomenon” of photography, the experiential aspect, and this existential knowledge. In the background of this inquiry is a question about “the person” as an existential concern or care, a project or a hope. Does the person, in the existential sense, “survive” as image, in image, through image?