In Pursuit of the Unknown: Photography & the Artifact of Nostalgia (original) (raw)

This paper focuses on building a conceptual framework for looking at contemporary photographic methods through the lens of historical process within the medium; its relationship to the fields of science and technology, how society’s relationship with photography has changed, and why process is not as valued today but continues to have relevance. It is also a defense for reimagining how we can approach the medium in a more holistic way, while still generating relevant and contemporary dialogue about a medium that is rapidly being replaced by it’s digital successor. My concern is that the issue of what is lost, as we barrel into the future, further and further away from the tactile and hand-made image, is that our critical thought of the past, present and future is not considering the contexts of those times respectively, lacking the universal perspective to analyzing over-arching modes of image making. What I attempt to do in the following pages is take a step back from the standard, polarized view of the differences between “then” and “now”, and elucidate the modes of common thought that continue to inform visual culture. To look holistically at the photographic, outside of time, at the objective agenda of why we make what me make.

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