The assassination of experience by photography

Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media, 2014

By taking and sharing photographs, we are positioned within powerful communication networks that influence our personal and social identities. Over time, ownership and control is lost as our photographs gain performativity that allows them to divert from the purposes, spaces and times for which they are created. These issues are magnified by a number of technological, cultural and economic factors that accompany the evolution of ubiquitous digital media and their associated tools. Given the role that photographs play in the reconstruction of individual and collective memory and history, it is worth considering what is captured by the camera and what happens after the shutter closes. Keywords photography camera memory identity networks control If there is a case for the statement 'the camera never lies', it is in the sense that what is produced by the camera becomes part of the 'truth'. The photograph is analogous to Published version: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ubiq/2014/00000003/F0020001/art00001 2 history, where what is written down becomes, over time, what we believe to have happened. This article is a reflection on the nature of personal photography and how it changes the people who engage with it. Photography: Truth, representation or performance? Although most photographs look very much like the scene that was photographed, there are a number of important differences. First, the photograph is limited in terms of the space it represents. It leaves out what is above, below, behind, to the right and to left of its edges and one cannot look behind the objects it shows (Szarkowski 1980). It flattens and crops the world (Christmann 2008). Second, although it is of a time, a photograph contains little or no time. Other than what can be inferred from visual clues, it does not

2013

This thesis discusses the multifaceted status of the photograph, as a contribution to understanding the mechanics of the production of meaning within the photograph. In order to get a better view of how photographs function, I both revisit discourses that have dealt with medium specificity issues and use my own practice, designing an apprehension model which can assist in the achievement of a more rigorous conception of the photograph. An integrative literature review, based on Photography discourses and debates shaped by both theorists and practitioners, provides the tools needed for defining the medium’s unique and shared properties. Ontological synecdoches of the photograph, issues of representation, time, automatism, agency, the twofold nature –trace and picture- as well as depiction theories of the medium are put into scrutiny towards formulating an apprehension scheme. This body or knowledge, along with my visual practice’s research outcomes, informs the construction of an app...

Photography and Its Shadow, 2020

In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medium in the first few decades after its invention, it was already clear to both enthusiasts and detractors that the new image-making process was poised to radically alter human experience. Today, a hundred and eighty years after its inception, photography has established itself as the regulating standard for seeing and picturing, remembering and imagining, and, significantly, for mediating relations between ourselves and others. It is now so intimately intertwined within our ordinary routines that we cannot begin to imagine our everyday lives without it. Photography has become an intrinsic condition of the human, a condition that—with Heidegger in mind—may be termed “an Existential.” And yet, photography’s rootedness in the ordinary is so deep that its existential dimension also typically hides from us, challenging us to find a vantage point as well as a philosophical language for describing its pervasive presence. The book thus lays the groundwork for a philosophical interpretation of the changing condition of photography in the twenty-first century. It should be understood as a prolegomenon—not the kind of wide-ranging Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics we know from Kant and the history of philosophy, but one that is more narrowly construed, concentrating on a specific metaphysical problem: an introduction to a future metaphysics of the image or to a future ontology of the visual. The term “future” applies here, as it does in Kant, to invite further elaborations of a preliminary ontological framework; but, in contrast to Kant, it also serves to acknowledge and address the ever-changing character of the phenomenon under investigation and, specifically, the fact that as the visual changes, it generates new possibilities for the future of the image. Photography, as Hans Belting reminds us, constitutes only “a short episode in the old history of representation.” The hegemony of the photographic is a short, and likely, a passing chapter in our relationship with images. Yet, as it is caught between “today and tomorrow,” photography also provides an opportune framework for rethinking the condition of the visual image in its movement toward the future, a future for which we are responsible, since its trajectory is determined by our present age.

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...

2018

This paper suggests another way of thinking about the latent image. Instead of conceiving a dormant interiority, my interest is in exploring dimensions of relational latency. A photograph can be manifestly latent (the traditional negative) but it can also be latently latent; that is the manifest photographic image can itself conceal something. This paper considers the photograph as a charged and imperfect mediator of aspects of lived visible experience. In their inanimate stillness and silence, photographic images engage an energetics of paradox. They project an intimate relation to phenomenal experience, while also manifesting distance and gesturing towards the unseen. This relational tension is considered in terms of strands of photographic theory and the philosophy of perception and imagination. I also consider how this tension plays out in my own recent photographic work. This work explores elusive features of local creek environments, demonstrating, through a rhetoric of excess...

Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 11, 05-Special Issue, 2019

A photograph can be described as an imitation of reality, but this description is so primitive. A photograph is not just a copy of reality, nor is it just a reproduction of things that actually exist. It could be argued that a photograph is the imitation of the subject that exits in reality so as to become a symbol that hides behind it various meanings. In other words, a photograph is an existence that includes another existence and this dual existence makes the photograph be framed by the limits of truth, knowledge, time and place. Therefore, the photograph becomes a way of truth happening and revealing, but at the same time it has interrelations with the visual, the tangible and the meaning represented in the thing itself. The truth is revealed only by the intentional vision which opens up the phenomenological position in all its dimensions. The establishment of this position is based on photograph that becomes the first drive and motive for the act of imagination.

Media Theory, 2024

"Seeing photographically" is an act of cultural memory. In an era of AIgenerated images, screenshots, "disappearing" or "view once" photographs, and myriad other practices that challenge the definitional boundaries of photography, the phrase invokes past understandings of the medium's sensory affordances, transferring them into a continually changing present. Focusing on a case study of the digital "rescue" of found film chemical photography, the article excavates cultural memory processes that relocate photographic seeing to digital arenas. The memory of "seeing photographically" does more, it claims, than preserve photography as a "zombie category" that disguises the reality of computational imagery. Rather, it helps construct and maintain a media ideology of what photography was and is, and of its continuing cultural, and especially existential, significance. Mobilizing worldviews, social values, and moral obligations associated with photography in the past, "seeing photographically" reanimates them in contemporary contexts of media ubiquity, intensified visibility, and existential anxiety, with profound ramifications.

International Journal of Education Through Art, 2024

This visual essay presents my journey of coming to experience and conceive photography through the lens of non-representational theory. In the light of nonrepresentational notions of landscape and embodiment, photography is more than an aesthetic and representative medium of one's outer and inner seeing of the world. Rather, photographic practice can be 'a perceiving-with', that with which the new camera-I (eye) sees, and the expressive photograph becomes embodiment as body a-where-ness. This journey of photographic artmaking and conceptual speculation has taught me to live photography as a set of creative tensions between self, camera and the world instead of merely using photography to express and represent one's life.