Vilém Flusser’s Theories of Photography and Technical Images in a U.S. Art Historical Context1 (original) (raw)

The Photographic Universe: Vilém Flusser’s Theories of Photography, Media, and Digital Culture

2016

Despite accelerated changes in the way we create, view, and experience photographs, critics and scholars in North America continue to read and assign an accepted canon of photography theory, often predicated on old concepts and technologies. This dissertation seeks to remedy that situation. It focuses on the work of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), author of such books as Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), which develop a theory of technical images that reaches beyond photography to include film, television, video, computer, and satellite images. Rather than reading images textually, Flusser employed philosophy and information theory to consider the apparatuses of image making and the screens through which we communicate. Born in Prague in 1920 and forced to flee Europe in 1939, Flusser spent thirty-two years in Brazil before returning to Europe. He was a philosopher, yet practically an autodidact. His entire family was killed in the holocaust and he became a proponent of migration and wrote in multiple languages: German, Portuguese, French, and English. Moreover, Flusser was writing at a moment when digitization and biotechnology and were both emerging and these overlap in books like Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1983) and his "Curie's Children" column for Artforum magazine (1986-1991). This dissertation will examine Flusser's thought from its roots in European thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Kafka, to its place alongside contemporary theorists and media philosophers such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway, Alexander R. Galloway, and François Laruelle. Not only this does this v dissertation introduce Flusser into the U.S. conversation on photography history and theory, it coincides with renewed interest in other artists and theorists from the seventies and eighties whose work, rather than becoming "obsolete," like early versions of technology, aids us in thinking about images and culture today. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Professor Anna Chave who saw me through this process, even into her own retirement. Her careful reading and astute editing and suggestions helped this manuscript immeasurably and taught me a great deal about both writing and advising other students.

Photography and Beyond: On Vilém Flusser s Towards a Philosophy of Photography

2010

The following short pictorial and textual contributions by Mark Amerika, Sean Cubitt, John Goto, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Michael Najjar, Simone Osthoff, Nancy Roth, Bernd-Alexander Stiegler, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Siegfried Zielinski explore the practical and theoretical relevance and actuality of Vilém Flusser‘s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, first published as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie in 1983. It has been translated into more than 14 different languages.

Photography and Art History: The History of Art Born from Photography

Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

In the timeline where histories of art and photography intersect, Preziosi, with his statement of "Art history is born out of Photograph," makes an initial point. As known, technologies related to cinema have played a key role on analytical Works, classification systems, and the creation of historical narrations since the times when art history appeared as a separate academic discipline in the last quarter of the 19 th century [1]. Widespread use of photography through the end of 19 th century brings the nutrition of modern art trends and its placement in the artists' agenda as an apparatus along itself. The stage of the art history is the universal, national museums of the 19 th century during the period before the foundation of photography archives [2]. The role and efficiency played by painting to determine the plastic language of photography have always been defended in all related researches and arguments done so far. Therefore it is crucial to draw two important guide maps in the research: The first is the bodily extension and photography language which uses in art; the second one is the revelation of intersection points of art history and photography in the narration of art, the points where they blend in each other or disintegrate.

Critical textual analysis of "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" by Vilém Flusser

Flusser Studies, 2020

"Für eine Philosophy of Caixa Preta" is a critical textual analysis of the different versions (in German, English and Portuguese) of Vilém Flusser's book "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" and a short history of its editions. Vilém Flusser has frequently written the same texts in several languages, not only translating himself his initial text, but rewriting it, modifying it, enriching it through its various self-translations. His best-known, most widely distributed and most translated book, "Fur eine Philosofie der Fotografie", of which he wrote and published four original versions, two in German, one in English and one in Portuguese. The German versions have been translated in more than 20 languages. The original English version has been dropped in favor of a third-party traduction from German. And the Portuguese version, which is the mots complex and advanced, exists only in Portuguese. The existence of these four original versions of the book allows one to develop an attempt at an original Flusserian textual critique on the basis of a thorough and detailed analysis of these texts. This essay also presents the story of the publishing and the translations of the book, and analyzes the power apparatus behind the differences of treatment of the various versions.

In History, the Future: Determinism in the Early History of Photography in France

Technological determinism and media specificity have profoundly shaped the history of photography—two strands of thought inherited from nineteenth century predecessors. Media archaeological approaches—while not always explicitly and perhaps, as Thomas Elsaesser has recently suggested, rather as symptom—have been taken up in the history of photography in response to long held narratives shaped by a disciplinary media determinism. This article explores discourses of futurity and historicity in early photographic writing in France, examining one thread in the early trajectory of media determinism in the history of photography. Taking up Eric Kluitenberg's concept of " imaginary media " , this article argues that early photographic discourse employed both historical and future-oriented narratives in order to define photography as a discreet medium. Medium specificity—photography as a unified set of technologies with a shared history and a set of specific aesthetic characteristics—can therefore be understood as one characteristic of the media imaginary. The story of photography's medium specificity is most often (and not incorrectly) told as a narrative of photography's acceptance as a fine art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this article aruges that a parallel genealogy of photography's medium specificity can be outlined based upon the construction of photography as a progressive technology with a unified technical history. Building on recent work focusing on future-oriented rhetoric and the technological imagination in nineteenth century photographic discourse, this paper will examine roots of this historiography of photography in Enlightenment thought and Utopian philosophies of technology of the early nineteenth century, asking what photography's history would look like if photographic hopes, dreams, and failures were given due consideration alongside those objects deemed by the historical canon to represent photographic " success. " Keywords History of photography, media studies, media archaeology

A new kind of history? The challenges of contemporary histories of photography

2010

Since the late 1970s, when the history of photography became an academic subject, and with increasing interest in photography in the art market, there have been frequent calls by various scholars for a 'new kind of history' of photography. These calls were part of what Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson described in a special photography issue of October (Summer 1978,) as a renewed scholarly 'discovery' of the medium, characterized by the 'sense of an epiphany, delayed and redoubled in its power.' This rediscovery carried the message that photography and its practices have to be redeemed 'from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it had been consigned.'1 The calls for a new history of photography suggested that the time has come to substitute Beaumont Newhall's hegemonic modernist classic The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present with new text/s.2 Newhall was a librarian and later the first director of photography of t...

A Hundred Years of Photography. A Critical Rereading of an Innovative Contribution

Lucia Moholy between Photography and Life, 2012

The book A Hundred Years of Photography 1839-1939 sums up Lucia Moholy's whole critical experience of the history of photography and theory of the image. The brief text was published by Penguin as a Pelican Special shortly before World War II to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Daguerre's invention. This rare text, one of the first histories of photography by a woman, together with the fundamental 1936 essay La Photographie en France au dixneuvième siècle by Gisèle Freund , deals with the subject by articulating different levels of interpretation: the symbolic, decisive for understanding the first hundred years of photography, from its invention to its impetuous break into modernity, and the technicalscientific, which emphasizes the importance of the whole process of creating images down to the discovery of the reality hidden behind the appearances of the visible world. The purpose of the book, as a popular, scholarly pocket-sized edition, was direct and practical: to make known the technical, historical, social and economic essentials of photography. The author explained that the text was not written "to replace any of those previously published, but because it was felt that at the age of a hundred, which, by now, photography has reached, it may be worth while to give a thought not only to the achievements of photography as such, but to the part it has played by mutual give and take throughout these hundred years in the life of man and society." 1 The distinctive quality of the book lies in the author's vision. Like Gisèle Freund, she focuses on the social context of the medium, backed up by a broad knowledge of art history. Her vision also emerges in many details of the treatment that bring out eccentric and original views. In twenty-eight short chapters she presents objectives and areas of development. In the opening chapters the reader is struck by the breadth of her treatment, the inclusion of large historical and scientific areas, for the most part overlooked by photography historians of the time. At the beginning of the second chapter, Lucia says explicitly, "Every art has its technique," 2 and immediately adds: "This does not imply that painting and photography have been completely dependent on each other. It does not mean that painting and photography are two sides of the same thing. They are, on the contrary, independent, each of them evolving on the basis of their own laws. But they are subjected to similar forces from the world outside, and also to their mutual interaction." 3 Beginning in 1839, between beauty and truth, appearance and reality, creation and contemplation, a new current was created, a dialectic that drove the philosophies of art to question themselves on the relations between artistic experience and the new medium. Lucia Moholy accepts the challenge by trying to show how the practice of art and that of photography, apparently so different, evoke each other and generate a history that is entwined with the history of mankind. Evoking the major Western philosophies, from Aristotle and Paracelsus to contemporary theories of art, Lucia explains how every great artwork entails an essential relationship 41 Il libro Cento anni di fotografia. 1839-1939 sintetizza l'intera esperienza critica di Lucia Moholy nel campo della storia della fotografia e della teoria dell'immagine. Il breve testo, che trova posto nella serie "Pellican Special" della casa editrice Penguin, viene pubblicato poco prima dell'inizio della Seconda guerra mondiale, per commemorare il centesimo anniversario dell'invenzione di Daguerre. Questo raro testo, una delle prime storie della fotografia vergate da una penna femminile -insieme al fondamentale saggio del 1936 La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle di Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) -affronta l'argomento articolandolo tramite piani di lettura differenti: quello simbolico, determinante per comprendere i primi cento anni della fotografia, dall'invenzione al suo impetuoso irrompere nella modernità; quello tecnico-scientifico, nel quale viene sottolineata l'importanza dell'intero processo di creazione di immagini fino alla scoperta delle realtà nascoste dietro le apparenze del mondo visibile. Lo scopo del libro, in quanto tascabile scientifico-popolare, è diretto e pratico: far conoscere la fotografia nei suoi essenziali aspetti tecnici, storici, sociali ed economici. L'autrice stessa spiega come il testo non sia stato scritto "per sostituire i libri precedentemente pubblicati ma perché ci si è accorti, dopo cento anni di storia della fotografia, che valeva la pena di dedicare un pensiero non solo ai traguardi raggiunti dalla fotografia, ma al ruolo che essa ha giocato nel reciproco dare e avere, attraverso questi cento anni nella vita dell'uomo e della società" 1 . La particolarità dell'opera consiste nella visione dell'autrice, che si concentra, così come accade in Gisèle Freund, sul contesto sociale del mezzo, sostenuta da un'ampia conoscenza storico-artistica, così come in numerosi dettagli della trattazione vengono rivelati punti di vista eccentrici e originali. In ventotto brevi capitoli vengono indicati traguardi e settori di sviluppo. Nei primi capitoli colpisce l'ampiezza della trattazione, l'inclusione dei grandi ambiti storicoscientifici, per la maggior parte tralasciati degli storici della fotografia dell'epoca. All'inizio del secondo capitolo, Lucia mette in chiaro: "Ogni arte ha la sua tecnica" 2 . E subito aggiunge: "Questo non implica che pittura e fotografia siano state completamente interdipendenti. Non significa che pittura e fotografia siano due facce della stessa medaglia. Esse sono, al contrario, indipendenti e mutano sulla base delle loro stesse regole. Sono però soggette a forze simili provenienti dal mondo esterno, e anche alle loro vicendevoli interazioni" 3 . Dal 1839 tra bellezza e verità, parvenza e realtà, creazione e contemplazione si è creata una nuova tensione, una dialettica che ha spinto le filosofie dell'arte a interrogarsi sul rapporto dell'esperienza artistica con il nuovo medium. Lucia Moholy raccoglie la sfida cercando di mostrare come la pratica artistica e quella fotografica, in apparenza così eterogenee, si richiamino l'un l'altra dando vita a una storia che si intreccia con la storia dell'uomo. Rievocando le principali filosofie occidentali, da Aristotele e Paracelso alle teorie artistiche contemporanee, Lucia spiega come ogni grande opera d'arte implichi un rapporto essenziale con il mondo e con la verità, e si contraddistingua per un contenuto filosofico nascosto che si tratta di intercettare e rivelare. 40 A Hundred Years of Photography.

The Photographic Effect: Making Pictures After Photography, 1860-1895

2017

I am indebted to the libraries, museums, and scholars that enabled my research over the past four years. I would like to thank the librarians, archivists, and staffs of the Fine Arts Library at the University of Michigan and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, my two home bases during the process of writing this dissertation. In France, I am obliged to the librarians and staffs of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Salle de documentation at the Musée d'Orsay. For providing access to the Delacroix/Durieu album, and for discussing my research at its earliest stages,