Unfolding the act of photography (original) (raw)
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The «information revolution» has brought radical transformations in the ways we create consume and regard visual media. The possibility of simulating photographic images through software and computational devices has called into question the ontological condition of Photography and its integrity as a distinct medium. Some voices argue that, through digitisation, photographic images lose their indexical quality and thus fail to function as reliable documents. Given that realism is no longer seen as an inescapable characteristic of Photography, but as an «effect» achieved through data manipulation, some people argue humanity might be threatened by a «loss of historicity». In the following pages I challenge some of these notions by arguing photographic images should be conceived as visualisations. By showing that analogue and digital photographs achieve similar representations of the world, but through fundamentally different processes, I argue they should not be approached with the same conceptual toolbox. Moreover, I argue the uneasiness concerning the future of the photographic medium is a symptom of the inadequacies of our current analytical tools to deal with digital objects. From here it follows the need to acquire a new «literacy» capable of dealing with them.
Depictive Traces: On the Phenomenology of Photography
Ever since their invention, photographic images have often been thought to be a special kind of image. Often, photography has been claimed to be a particularly realistic medium. At other times, photographs are said to be epistemically superior to other types of image. Yet another way in which photographs apparently are special is that our subjective experience of looking at photographs seems very different from our experience of looking at other types of image, such as paintings and drawings. While the other seemingly distinctive aspects of photography have been quite thoroughly discussed in the literature, theories of the experience of photography, or in other words, theories of its special phenomenology, are less common. To be sure, the phenomenon has often been pointed out and described, but explanations of the phenomenology of photography are rare. In this paper, I attempt an explanation of at least part of the phenomenology of photography by appealing to the idea, borrowed from André Bazin, that a photograph is a certain kind of trace. Along the way, it is also argued that Kendall Walton's so called “transparency thesis” cannot give a plausible explanation of the phenomenology associated with looking at photographs.
Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images. Introduction
This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.
Photography and its failure to represent
2018
This PhD research project examines the agency of photography and the photographic image. The research develops insights into photography as one of the dominant image making, cultural practices in the Twenty-first Century. Its focus is on digital photography and it begins by understanding agency as distributed, connected and networked: properties predominantly associated with an image that is digital. The intended contribution to knowledge is a philosophical engagement with how images embody notions of representational failure because they present themselves as image in support of a fiction of reality. What this means philosophically, is that there is no access to reality other than through representations that fail to represent. Underpinned by the question as to whether and how “practice interpellates a subject of the signifier” (Burgin, 2011: 196) the research considers the role of photography in helping to determine individuals as viewing subjects. Since photography is the “quinte...
Snapshots, Perception, and Intimacy: Thoughts on the Ontology of Photos
Our treatment of and feelings for photos seem to distinguish them from other sorts of pictures. Yet explanations of this phenomenon often suffer from a lack of technical understanding and employ terms that veil important distinctions. This paper develops a more precise way of thinking about photography by examining and critiquing Kendall Walton's admirably grounded account of " seeing through photos " as an explanation of our special feelings for them. I argue that Walton's account won't do what he wants it to and suggest that the very idea of "seeing through photos" rests on a confusion. Finally, I gesture at a different way of understanding why photos can move us in a special way. Snapshots, Perception, and Intimacy: Thoughts on the Ontology of Photos
‘Unfixing the Photographic Image: Photography, Indexicality, Fidelity and Normativity’
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies , 2008
Normative conceptions of embodiment can operate only by fixing or essentialising the body’s necessarily processural (or existential) ontology. Given that traditional film-based photography and cinema are reliant on the arrestation of a process, a process of fixing analogous to that seen in the constitution of normative bodies, this paper suggests that it is not surprising that photography has long been considered a privileged realm for the presentation of idealised bodies. Some critics have of course problematised this primarily indexical role of the photographic image by showing how this is disrupted in avant-grade practices in both photography and the cinema. In this paper, what is suggested instead is that the rupture of indexicality in traditional cinema and photography was always already inscribed in the technological apparatus or medium itself, and that what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) was therefore only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium. To this end, this paper presents case studies of the work of (amongst others) Edward Weston and Bill Henson, paying particular attention to their conceptualisation of the material ontology of the medium in which they work to show how they, respectively, reinforce or disrupt normative modes of embodiment.