Facepoeia: The Author Becoming a Photographic Subject. The Example of Tadeusz Różewicz (original) (raw)
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Kepes, 2015
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Photography as Writing of the Self
Igi-global, 2023
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Text was published in: “Images” vol. XXXI, no. 40. Poznań 2022. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 13–36. ISSN 1731-450X. The article presents the theoretical views and, to a+lesser extent, artistic practices of Joanna Zylinska, who in her artistic activity combines epistemological strategies of a researcher and theorist with her activities in the field of art. She develops in different manners an original project of philosophy as photography, or photography as a form of philosophizing. Posthumanist and post-anthropocentric inspirations and the inclusion of her reflections in a wider circle of a nonhuman turn constitute an epistemological framework of numerous statements devoted to the “photographic condition” in the age of dominance of digital technologies. The author argues that, in fact, photography has been a nonhuman practice since its beginnings, which is developed in her book "Nonhuman Photography", preceded by the concepts of mediation and photomediation. In her latest proposals addressing the issues of the functioning of art in the era of algorithmic systems, the author develops the concept of undigital photography, which constitutes an extension of thinking about those manifestations of photography that are not of/by/for the human. The idea of “vision machines” (once proposed by Paul Virilio) takes the form of a holistic view of photography as a “medium of life,” which, unlike modernist descriptions of it as a “medium of death” (Roland Barthes), makes a significant contribution to both the theory and the history of photography. The synthetic presentation of Zylinska’ s concepts is an attempt to describe and interpret the contemporary state of theoretical and methodological awareness in the field of contemporary image studies. It stems from the need to constantly reinterpret the canon of thinking about the medium of photography in the epoch of cooperation between human and nonhuman agencies in the area of pictorial production of images addressed to both people and machines.
Evgen Bavcar: self-portraits and the "images-stain
2020
Este artigo apresenta a leitura de quatro autorretratos feitos pelo fotógrafo e filósofo cego Evgen Bavcar, os quais se encontram reunidos em seu livro Memória do Brasil, na tentativa de compreender como o fotógrafo constrói uma figura ou persona do “fotógrafo cego”. Ao analisar o primeiro desses autorretratos, levanto a hipótese de que Bavcar apresenta um caráter de manifesto em seu livro e proponho pensar nessas fotografias enquanto imagens-mancha, as quais, ao dirigirmos nosso olhar esperando encontrar nelas imagens feitas por um cego, são capazes de devolver uma imagem de nossa própria cegueira comum, já que, situadas no liminar da visibilidade, questionam e colocam em disputa nosso imaginário acerca da cegueira.In this article, the reading of four self-portraits made by Evgen Bavcar, a blind photographer and philosopher, is presented with the purpose of trying to figure out how he creates the character, or persona, of a ‘blind photographer’. Published in his book Memória do Bra...
Portrait and Mugshot Metonymical Foundation of Photographic Genres
Law and Literature, 2023
This article focuses on the genre distinction between artistic and legal photographs of faces: while the artistic portrait tends to express the singular soul of the person pictured, the biometric mugshot aims to scan singular physical traits without any psychological expression. How do these photographic genres allow us to identify the represented person? What do each of them seek to recognize? To grasp our metaphysical expectations of photographic technology, and thus to bridge the gap between discursive styles of these two photographic genres, I revise Derrida’s deconstruction of the law of genre. Further, I argue that Derrida’s and Nancy’s subversive readings of Kant’s concepts of parergon and schema help us to understand the rhetorical setting of the human mind, which organizes the photographic work of framing fragments. Finally, I explain the metaphysical conditions of possibility for both photographic genres by situating their opposite goals in the interval of personal recognition constructed by metonymical schematism.