See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/350787219

Photography and Imagination (Routledge, 2020): Table of Contents and

Introduction.

Book · April 2021

CITATIONS READS

0 680

2 authors, including:

Margaret Olin
Yale University
54 PUBLICATIONS 431 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Margaret Olin on 10 April 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Photography and Imagination

As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once

viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable
representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity,
photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more
vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from
diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these
two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various
forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even
reality itself.

Amos Morris-Reich is Professor in the Department of Jewish History and Thought at

the University of Haifa, Israel.

Margaret Olin is Senior Research Scholar in the Divinity School at Yale University, USA.

Cover image: A balcony overlooking the “Women’s March,” a protest following

the Inauguration of Donald Trump. New York City, January 21, 2017. Photograph:
Margaret Olin.
Routledge History of Photography

This series publishes research monographs and edited collections focusing on the
history and theory of photography. These original, scholarly books may take an art
historical, visual studies, or material studies approach.
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/
Routledge-History-of-Photography/book-series/RHOP

1. Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography

  Desirous Bodies
   Staci Gem Scheiwiller

2. Travel Marketing and Popular Photography in Britain, 1888–1939

  Reading the Travel
   Sara Dominici

3. The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence

   Boris Kossoy

4. Photography and Ontology

  Unsettling Images
   Edited by Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty

5. Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age

   Edited by Daniel Rubinstein

6. Photography and Imagination

   Edited by Amos Morris-Reich and Margaret Olin
Photography and Imagination

Edited by Amos Morris-Reich

and Margaret Olin
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Amos Morris-Reich and Margaret Olin to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morris-Reich, Amos, editor. | Olin, Margaret Rose, 1948-editor.
Title: Photography and imagination / edited by Amos Morris-Reich and
Maragaret Olin.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge
history of photography | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025800 (print) | LCCN 2019025801 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138314375 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429457005 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Photography. | Imagination.
Classification: LCC TR185.P485 2020 (print) | LCC TR185 (ebook) |
DDC 770–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025800
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025801
ISBN: 978-1-138-31437-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45700-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Plates ix
List of Contributors xi
Introduction xiv

PART 1
Techniques of the Imagination 1
1 Cat in the Window? A Closer Look at How People Try to
Have a Closer Look 3
STEFFEN SIEGEL

2 The Surface-Depth of Photography’s Stereoscopic Imagination 15

MEIR WIGODER

3 Radiant Matter: X-Ray Photography and the Visual

Imagination of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann 36
MARY BERGSTEIN

4 The Artemidorus Papyrus: Imagination and the

Digital-Photographic Archaeology of Pictures 52
JAŚ ELSNER

5 Photography’s Imagination: The Visible and the Invisible 69

HAGI KENAAN

PART 2
Imagining and Encountering Others 81
6 Photography and the Imagination of Authorship:
Karl May’s Picture Cards from 1896 83
BRITTA LANGE
vi Contents
7 Photography and Imagination in Nazi “Racial Science” 102
AMOS MORRIS-REICH

8 Attentiveness and Visual Imagination in Looking and Photographing:

A Gay Liberation Rally in Chicago 1970 118
MARGARET OLIN

9 The Performative Index: James VanDerZee, Roland Barthes,

Lorna Simpson, and the Photographic Imagination 133
SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH

PART 3
Images of a New World 147
10 Photography and the Possibility of Return 149
VERED MAIMON

11 Queering Imagination, Queering Futurity: A Methodological

Approach to Military Photography 161
JUNG JOON LEE

12 The Idol of Imagination: Manhatta 176

BLAKE STIMSON

Epilogue: Photography and the Question of the Image 193

Index 199
Figures

1.1 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Le Boulevard du Temple, midi” 4

2.1 “Traveling by the Underwood Travel System—Stereographs,
Guide-Books, Underwood & Underwood stereograph, 1908”  18
2.2 Map, “Rome Through the Stereoscope, 1902, Underwood
and Underwood”  21
2.3 Detail, “Traveling by the Underwood Travel System—
Stereographs, Guide-Books, Underwood & Underwood
stereograph, 1908”  22
2.4 The faux-book of “Stereographic views of Italy, Underwood
and Underwood, c. 1900” 24
2.5 “The Famous Leaning Tower and Venerable Cathedral, 800
Years Old, Pisa, Italy, Underwood and Underwood, c. 1897” 25
2.6 Description for “The Famous Leaning Tower and Venerable
Cathedral, 800 Years Old, Pisa, Italy, Underwood and
Underwood, c. 1897”  26
2.7 “The stereograph as an educator—Underwood patent extension
cabinet in a home library,” Underwood and Underwood c. 1901 29
3.1 Giullaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne
[signed DUCH] X-Ray Apparatus  37
3.2 Guido Holzknecht. Ex libris. Klischee o. 0. o. J. Holzknecht
Nachlass I R print Klischee 5 40
3.3 Photographically reproduced X-ray photograph of a
pneumothorax showing compromised right lung, and a left
lung infiltrated with tuberculosis 43
4.1 Artemidorus Papyrus, Recto. The Map 54
4.2 Artemidorus Papyrus, Recto. Hand and foot, R 12 and R 13 54
4.3 Artemidorus Papyrus, Verso. The fight of the lynx and the
wild goat (top, V 38) with two fish, the sauros and the
physalos (V 39 and V 40) below 55
4.4 Artemidorus Papyrus, Verso. A griffin seizing a leopard
cub with the leopard below (V 19) with two fish at left and
right, the zygaina (V 18) and the Ouranoscopos (V 20)  57
4.5 Artemidorus Papyrus. Rolled avatar made to show how the
mirror images from the dampened ink match the drawings 59
5.1 Julius M. Wendt, Street Scene, photograph, Albany NY, 1900s 71
5.2 Maxime du Camp, Sphynx of Giza, 1850 75
viii Figures
5.3 Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887 75
5.4 Henri Cartier-Bresson, photograph, West Germany,
Hamburg, December 1952–January 1953 77
6.1 “Dr. Karl May”  84
6.2 “Pavilion in Karl May’s garden”  90
6.3 “Dr. Karl May in his study”  91
6.4 “Dr. Karl May’s library” 92
6.5 “Karl May—Old Shatterhand”  93
6.6 “Karl May—Kara Ben Nemsi”  93
6.7 Picture Card by Emma Pfeifer to Karl May 97
7.1 Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, Rasse und Seele: Eine Einführung
in den Sinn der leiblichen Gestalt106
7.2 Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes109
7.3 Gerhard Kittel and Eugen Fischer, Das antike Weltjudentum
Tatsachen, Texte, Bilde113
7.4 Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes115
7.5 Rabbi Ber (Dov) Erlich (Sloshny) made to cover with Talit
and kneel before his execution 116
8.1 Margaret Olin, photograph, Gay Liberation Activists at a
Rally in Grant Park 122
8.2 Margaret Olin, photograph, Spectators at a Gay Liberation
Rally, Grant Park 123
8.3 Margaret Olin, photograph, Activists and Spectators at a
Gay Liberation Rally 124
8.4 Margaret Olin, photograph, Spectators at a Gay Liberation
Rally, Grant Park 125
8.5 Margaret Olin, photograph, Spectators at a Gay Liberation
Rally, Grant Park 126
8.6 Margaret Olin, photograph, Gay Liberation Activists at a
Rally in Grant Park 127
8.7 Margaret Olin, photograph, Bystanders on a Street,
Observing a March by Gay Liberation Activists 128
9.1 James VanDerZee, Family Portrait, 1926 134
9.2 “When the Little Girl Goes to School” 139
9.3 James VanDerZee, Beau of the Ball, 1926 143
10.1 Google Drive Containing PDF Images of Protestors Killed
by Israeli Military Snipers during the Great March of Return, 2018 150
10.2 Oren Ziv, photograph, Return’s Memorial Ceremony for
Razan al-Najar, July 3, 2018 153
11.1 Hankoo Lee, from Kunyong (Military Use), 1989–1992 163
11.2 Hankoo Lee, from Kunyong (Military Use), 1989–1992 163
11.3 Hankoo Lee, from Kunyong (Military Use), 1989–1992 164
11.4 Hankoo Lee, from Kunyong (Military Use), 1989–1992 168
11.5 Joo Myung Duk, Yongjuggol, P’aju, 1968 169
12.1 Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921, film still 179
Plates

1 Charles Leo: Colorized Version of Daguerre’s “Le Boulevard du Temple, midi.”

October 28, 2010
2 Charles Leo: Colorized Version of Daguerre’s “Le Boulevard du Temple, midi.”
With annotations, October 28, 2010
3 Charles Leo: Colorized Version of Daguerre’s “Le Boulevard du Temple, midi.”
With further annotations, November 1st, 2010
4 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre: The So-called “Munich Triptych,”
Presented as a Gift to the Bavarian king Ludwig
5 Anonymous: “Daguerréotipe. Expérience publique faite par M. Daguerre”
6 Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre: “Le Boulevard du Temple, midi.”
C. 1838, daguerreotype
7 Inscribed, “Hand mit Ringen.” First medical X-ray by Wilhelm
Röntgen of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig’s hand
8 Lupus erthematosis. Histological drawing, Karl Henning 1886,
graphite on paper, for Moritz Kaposi
9 Henry Peach Robinson, “She Never Told Her Love,” 1858
10 Artemidorus Papyrus, Pre-restoration cartonnage ‘konvolut.’
The only published image of the original unrestored object
11 Artemidorus Papyrus, Verso. A griffin seizing a leopard cub with the leopard
below (V 19) with two fish at left and right, the zygaina (V 18) and the
Ouranoscopos (V 20)
12 Artemidorus Papyrus, Verso. A griffin seizing a leopard cub with the leopard
below (V 19) with the fish removed
13 Artemidorus Papyrus, Recto. Hand and foot, R 12 and R 13
14 Artemidorus Papyrus, Recto. Hand (R 12)
15 Artemidorus Papyrus, Recto. Foot (R 13)
16 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 7 a.m., New Year’s Morning, photograph, circa 1930
17 Hagi Kenaan, A Ghost in the Snow
18 William H. Mumler, Bearded Man Seated with Three “Spirits”
19 Lorna Simpson, 9 Props, 1995, 9 heat transferred felt panels
20 Lorna Simpson, Beau of the Ball, from 9 Props, 1995 (detail),
heat transferred felt panel
21 Orin Ziv, photograph, The Exhibition, by Return, of Slain Palestinian
Demonstrators on the Gaza Fence, June 26, 2018
x Plates
22 Oren Ziv, photograph, Return’s Activist Hangs Photographs of
Slain Palestinian Activists on the Gaza Fence, June 26, 2018
23 Oren Ziv, photograph, The Changing of Street Names by Return,
July 3, 2018
24 Oren Ziv, photograph, Return’s Memorial Ceremony for Razan al-Najar,
July 3, 2018
25 Naval Disaster Rescue Squadron in Training, January 2019
26 Pak Ch’anguk, from Ǒibak (Sleepover), Duiro (no. 1), 2016
Contributors

Mary Bergstein is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at
the Rhode Island School of Design. Among her books are The Sculpture of Nanni di
Banco (Princeton University Press, 2000), Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography,
and the History of Art (Cornell University Press, 2010) and In Looking Back One
Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography (Rodopi-Brill, 2014). Her most
recent work, which has taken a subjective turn, has appeared in the form of articles
in Afterimage, Arion, History of Photography, and as a chapter in the edited vol-
ume, Photography and the Optical Unconscious.

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford University and Humfry Payne
Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is
also Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in
late antiquity, at the British Museum. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British
Academy. Among his books is Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and
Text (Princeton, 2007) His most recent book is the edited volume Comparativism
in Art History (Routledge, 2017).

Hagi Kenaan is Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, specializing in phe-

nomenology, aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He is the author of The Present
Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (Columbia University
Press, 2005) and The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze
(Tauris 2013). His new book, Photography and its Shadow is forthcoming with
Stanford University Press.

Britta Lange teaches at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin. She is author of Die Entdeckung Deutschlands. Science-
Fiction als Propaganda (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2014) and has published on
photographs of forced laborers during the Second World War (“Bilder der Anderen -
Andere Bilder. Fotografien von Kriegsgefangenen und Zwangsarbeiter/innen,”
in: Thomas Medicus (Hg.): Verhängnisvoller Wandel. Ansichten aus der Provinz
1933–1946: Die Fotosammlung Biella, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2016).

Jung Joon Lee teaches the history and theory of photography at the Rhode Island
School of Design. Lee is currently completing a monograph examining the
ways that the medium of photography, and its subjects, have been politicized as
xii Contributors
transnational militarism shapes life in the two Koreas and beyond in the Asia-
Pacific region. Recent publications include “Traveling Images, Traveling Bodies:
Korean War Orphans in Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Interracial Adoption,” in
PhotoResearcher (2018) and “1984 A Camptown Story” in photographies (2017).

Vered Maimon is an Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv
University. Her essays on the history and theory of photography and contempo-
rary art appeared in October, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, Art
History, Parallax, TDR: The Drama Review, and Third Text. She is the author
of Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Early
Photograph (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and the coeditor of Activestills:
Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel (Pluto Press, 2016), and Communities of
Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Duke University Press, 2009).

Amos Morris-Reich teaches in the Department of Jewish History and Thought at the
University of Haifa. He is the author of The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern
Social Science (Routledge, 2008) and Race and Photography: Racial Photography
as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 (The University of Chicago Press, 2016) and the
coeditor of Ideas of ‘Race’ in the History of the Humanities (Palgrave, 2017).

Margaret Olin is Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. Among her publica-
tions are Touching Photographs (University of Chicago, 2012) and Monuments
and Memory, Made and Unmade, coedited with Robert S. Nelson (University of
Chicago, 2003). With Steven Fine and Maya Balakirsky-Katz, she coedits Images:
A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. Her photographic work has been
exhibited in the United States, Germany, and Israel.

Steffen Siegel is Professor for Theory and History of Photography at Folkwang

Universität der Künste in Essen, Germany. At Folkwang, he is in charge of the
master program “Photography Studies and Research.” Among his most recent
publications are: First Exposures. Writings from the Beginning of Photography
(Getty Museum, 2017) and “Playing the Photograph,” special issue of the journal
PhotoResearcher (no. 27, 2017).

Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. She has published six books on the history and theory of
photography, including At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Duke,
2013), which won the 2014 Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American
cultural history from the Organization of American Historians and the 2014 Jean
Goldman Book Prize from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most
recent book is Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke, 2017), which she
coedited with Sharon Sliwinski.

Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at University of Illinois, Chicago. He is

the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT, 2006),
Citizen Warhol (Reaktion, 2014) and editor, with Robin Kelsey, of The Meaning of
Photography (Clark Art Institute and Yale, 2008), among other publications.
 Contributors xiii
Meir Wigoder teaches at the School of Communication at Sapir College, Sderot.
A photographic theorist and a practicing photographer, he writes mainly on the
representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in photography, films, and the
media in writings that have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Public Culture, Third
Text, Parallax, Journal of Architectural Historians, History of Photography,
Psychoanalytic Review, History and Memory, and Journalism: Theory, Practice
and Criticism.
Introduction

L’Imagination est une faculté quasi divine qui perçoit tout d’abord, en dehors des méth-
odes philosophiques, les rapports intimes et secrets des choses, les correspondances et
les analogies.
–Baudelaire1

Whatever exists can be photographed, or so it would seem. Throughout the twentieth

century, however, critical and theoretical discussions of photography have turned this
conjecture around. Centering on issues of representation, “objectivity,” and “truth,”
and on the relationship between the photographic image and its “real” represented
object or referent, it seems to ask instead whether anything photographed must have
existed. Photographic representation, it is assumed, exists in the interplay with the
real, and it is this real that is most often stressed and questioned in photographic
scholarship.
In contrast, it might seem that anything at all can be imagined, whether it exists or
not. Perhaps for this reason, the imagination, indeed the idea of an “image,” has been
questioned very little in photographic discourse, much of which makes assumptions
about perception and representation that bypass the extensive role that imagination
plays in these activities. Yet much perceptual theory regards the idea of an image of
the real as central to the activity of perception. If so, the idea of an “image” precedes
and intervenes in the activity of taking and producing photographs. The “image”
constitutes the shape of the photographic image, and interrupts the usual, binary
understanding of photography (reality—representation) with a third term (image—
reality—representation). We thus find ourselves forced to integrate imagination into
the discussion of photography. A rather stubborn cliché connects imagination primar-
ily with certain kinds of photographs, primarily black and white, out of focus, blurred,
and without a clear representational content. In fact, our core argument is that imagi-
nation plays a role in each and every kind of photographic context, exemplified by the
photograph illustrating this book’s cover. You can—in fact you are almost compelled
to guess at what is going on in the photo, speculate on its context or on the situation
that preceded it. Such a “guess” involves an irreducible form of imagination, however
small, fleeting, or unconscious. Imagination in turn summons a performative element
into photographic images. The static idea of photographs as statement-like representa-
tions to be judged “true” or “false” gives way to a dynamic, interactive conception of
photography. Inspired by this performative understanding, the present volume looks
at new and reformulated questions that emerge from it for the study of photography.
 Introduction xv
Let us pause briefly over the term “performative,” which, coined first by J.L. Austin
in a 1955 lecture series, has since come to denote a wide and contentious field. Two
different branches of “performativity,” one related to representation and the other to
identity, inform our thoughts here.2 Austin used “performative” to denote the use of
language to bring about an action, contrasting it with “constative,” to denote descrip-
tive language. The meaning of “performative” widened and changed in the hands of
later scholars in philosophy, literature, performance, and other areas, so that it now
encompasses subjects and contexts far outside Austin’s definition, context, or inten-
tion, including photography. It is questionable whether photography can be formally
divided into performative and constative categories, that is, photographs that do things
as opposed to photographs that describe things. Photographs have a tendency to do
both at once: think of the “photo ID” that admits many of us to libraries, airplanes,
or our workplaces. Austin’s theory was in opposition to the philosophy of the logical
positivists, who conceived of language first and foremost in terms of descriptive state-
ments, and of the main task of the philosopher as their analysis. There was no room in
Austin’s thought for language that does something by means of a description. Although
the chapters collected in this volume explore a wide range of photographic practices
and contexts, however, ranging from art to science, or politics, in all of them the per-
formative analysis is closely attached to its representational (descriptive) features.
If Austin’s notion of performativity has to do with communication and action,
another branch of the field is concerned with how performance affects identity. Judith
Butler, with regard to gender, claims that identity results from its performance, rather
than the other way around. It follows that photography plays complex constitutive
roles with regard to constructing “race,” gender, or class.3 Essentially, a performa-
tive approach to photography destabilizes the apparent fixity with which the past
may appear to come down to us, for which the single photochemical photograph
that arrests time and space is arguably the quintessential modern metaphor. To regard
photography as a human activity is a constant process of exploration and inquiry that
requires addressing it in performative terms.4
It may not seem immediately obvious why the challenge offered by the introduction
of performativity requires the deployment of the term “imagination.” Yet imaginative
investments in photography are responsible for the tension in the relationship between
the photograph and its referent and are also central to the performative elements that
we think generate potential new ways to understand photography. To begin with, even
to associate a photographic representation with its subject, before one asks whether
the subject exists, takes a leap of imagination. Those who take this leap daily, as many
do, might not always be aware that they are doing so. Moreover, how one views this
leap depends on the conception of imagination at play in a given representation.
Imagination is a chameleon-like term. As it moves from one language to another,
translation problems arise. The inability to differentiate between standard meanings
of the word imagination makes it difficult to separate its connection with images,
including mental images, from its link to false belief, misperception, and fantasy, and
complicates any attempt to address it together with photography. The discourse of
“imagination” in the more than 175 years since photography was invented in 1839,
or more generally, the ongoing, much older discourse into which photography inserted
itself, has varied considerably. One view has it that imagination is the active compo-
nent of vision. It turns spots of color, the manifold of perception, into real things that
we can not only see, but also recognize, and often perceive with other senses such as
xvi Introduction
touch, smell, or taste.5 In this view, imagination has a positive epistemological role to
play. Nothing is, or seems, real but what can be imagined. This view, already present
in Aristotle’s De Anima, envisions imagination as the active component of vision, and,
in Immanuel Kant’s formulation, the notion that imagination has a basic epistemologi-
cal role to play continues to inform philosophical thought.6 In Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, the job of the pure imagination (Einbildungskraft) is to posit the notion of
the image on which experience depends. The role of the empirical imagination is to
synthesize the manifold of perceptions by bringing the heap of percepts into an image
that can then be recognized (Bild). Only this synthesis makes possible an empirical
apperception. As described above, the role of imagination could be similar for photog-
raphy. Imagination would intervene in two ways: first, the concept of the image must
exist apriori for a photograph to exist; and empirically the photograph might serve as
an apperception, with “reality” taking the role of raw sense perception.
But sometimes imagination, in a still active but negative sense, is considered an
alien force that comes from outside, as likely to confuse and raise havoc as to make
perceptions comprehensible. An outsider might literally plant a disruptive image. In
the Hebrew Bible, the ruse of a mysteriously inserted visual cue—the spotted stick
shown to the herds of Jacob’s father-in-law Laban during mating season, enabled
Jacob to make off with most of Laban’s flock, because it caused the cows to produce
only spotted calves, which Laban had allotted to Jacob in their agreement.7 In a mod-
ern variation on this theme, the “power of suggestion” stimulates in its target victim
an image that may seem true, but just for that reason can deceive. As it does in the
bible, a fantastic image can affect its viewers, or the subject of its representation, or
the way that these subjects are treated or regarded. In yet another view of imagination,
to “imagine” is what one does with one’s eyes closed, when one is not “seeing” at all.
Imagination in photography has been interrogated primarily in its fantastic guise,
most notably as it is deployed by photographers who treat photography as an art form,
creating imaginary narratives, or outspokenly fictional images. For these photographers,
imagination was always in dialog with the patently “real” of the photograph. The inter-
play between the two is the power of staged photographs of theatrical scenes such as
Fading Away (1858), by Henry Peach Robinson or the imaginary creatures in the fic-
tional scientific treatises of Joan Fontcuberta.8 The vocabulary of imagination and fan-
tasy also appears almost interchangeably in the scholarship of spirit photography.9
One could, however, view photography as the purveyor of a special form of image
that allows one to imagine its subject in an especially vivid form. We might call this
form realism or naturalism if it were not produced with the aid of a machine. If so,
then photography could be viewed as a process rather like academic realism or even
impressionism. Some photographers have sought to realize this possibility. They
sought to embellish genres such as landscapes by formal and technical means, pushing
them in the direction of the fantastic. P.H. Emerson devoted his career to making pho-
tography as freely expressive as naturalist painting through control of such technical
means as selective focus. He went so far as to write a book on the subject, although
ultimately he regarded his attempt to force imagination into photography as a fail-
ure.10 Photorealist painting of the 1970s can be seen as disclosing the conventional
underpinning of photographic realism.
Imagination has also been interrogated in the form of connotation. Roland Barthes
teased out the mythological element of photography by asking what we see when we
look at a photographic advertisement: vegetables or the freshness that they connote
 Introduction xvii
as they are seen tumbling out of a market bag. Our imagination spreads the freshness
of an object in the photograph around so that it attaches to other things in the pic-
ture, such as packaged goods. We look through the image on the piece of paper to the
freshness of the object imaged on the paper.11 What is objectively there is difficult to
distinguish from what is only imaginatively there.
The issues can change when rather than (or in addition to) vegetables or landscapes,
the subject of a photograph is a person. One of the most startling imaginative leaps,
it could be argued, is that which sees a person in the image of a body. Or doesn’t. The
attempt at the distinction between the body and the person may seem obscure but it
raises the question, “what is a person”? If, for example, the answer is that a person
only exists in her interiority, then the question arises, how does a photograph portray
this? In turn, this new question raises the issue of mind-body dualism. Indeed, a num-
ber of assumptions about imagination depend on mind-body dualism. Photography
can be seen as one of the ways in which imagination is materialized and experienced
as real, with photography living at the conjunction of body and mind.12 When Barthes
maintained that a photograph of his mother as a child showed “the kindness which
had formed her being,” he made a giant leap of imagination, or of faith, that explains
why he did not wish publicly to identify any picture in Camera Lucida with the photo-
graph in question, the “Winter Garden Photograph” of his mother.13 The reader, after
all, might fail to make the same leap.
An image that one sees of oneself also lends itself to such leaps of imagination.
Might what Jacques Lacan writes of a mirror also apply to a photographic representa-
tion? In his “mirror stage,” a child looks into a mirror and sees itself a step ahead of
the collection of miscellaneous limbs that it thought it was. It imagines itself as older,
more developed, unified and whole, thus splitting its being into two selves, an ordi-
nary internal self it feels itself to be, and a second more advanced self that it can never
overtake. It sees itself, in other words, as an image.14 Could a photograph bring about
this critical moment in human development like a mirror does, the moment where
the subject comes into being? Unlike a mirror, the image in the photograph does not
move, a critical element in Lacan’s argument, yet a photograph might act as stand-in
for a mirror at later stages of development, reinforcing the sense of the transformation
of body into image. As Amos Morris-Reich’s contribution to this volume suggests,
photography can also harness imagination to help us to see a body without a person:
a body as a type, or the sample of a race.
These issues lead to another, relational conception of imagination, and relationships
notoriously have little to do with truth and falsity. Because phenomenology so often
uses as a starting point the notion of an image, phenomenological views of imagination
help us move in this direction, with phenomenology’s emphasis on perception poten-
tially strengthening but also complicating the relation between imagination and pho-
tography. An early meditation about the perception of images in general by Edmund
Husserl could help establish a bridge between the notion of imagination as phantasy
and the epistemological sense of imagination. There he argued that the contemplation
of an image is less like the perception of an actually existing thing and more like

that in which I vivaciously project something into reality from phantasy. The dif-
ference consists only in the fact that the “phantasy image” is a reproductive image,
the seen image a perceptual (perzeptives) image. Both are cases of imagination.
This must never be forgotten and is absolutely certain.15
xviii Introduction
This apprehension of the image object, that is, straddles the divide between internal
and external perception. Both are cases of imagination. And similar ideas would have
consequences for his later understanding of how we recognize not merely images, but
other people.
That phenomenology’s “image” is sometimes only metaphorical does not neces-
sarily detract from its relevance to photographic theory. Indeed, in the fifth of his
Cartesian Meditation, Husserl uses the image precisely to distance the phenomenologi-
cal reduction from questions about whether perception, from which he derives the phe-
nomenological [creation] of the world in the self, actually pertains to anything existing
independently in the world. Yet even though the image remains internal for Husserl, it
is always a negotiation between “ownness” and an existing external world.16
Henri Bergson, who famously argued that experience should be conceived in terms
of active temporal rather than static spatial concepts, conceived and inspired others
to adopt a performative view of imagination, which some have sought to apply to
photography.17 In his Matter and Memory, where he articulated the ideas applicable to
the imagination primarily in terms of memory, Bergson wrote of the interplay between
the time (the past of memory) and the coming into being of an image that ”imitates
perception.”18 Photography could be seen as the embodiment, the externalization of
such a process.
Building on Bergson’s thought in L’imaginaire, Jean-Paul Sartre turned a per-
formative notion of imagination into an intersubjective one that recalls Husserl.
He argued that a (mental) image is “nothing other than a relation,” and used a
new term “imaging consciousness” (conscience imageante) to denote the conscious-
ness one has of an object or person whom one is imaging. He wanted to use the
word “image” to denote the type of attention one might direct toward an object,
and imagination, or imaging consciousness, to characterize the act that seems to
produce a mental image.19 Sartre rejected any conception of the imagination as a
storage place where percepts live on, in perhaps dwindled and faded forms, in his
words “a place peopled with small imitations.”20 Imagination is an act, or rather, in
Bergsonian terms, a process.21
If I am thinking of someone, according to Sartre, I am not conscious of an image
of her. My attention is not directed at an image, but at a person. The imaging process
consists, however, in this attentive relation, through a process that could be called
“imagining.” Imagining, then, is distinct from perceiving directly but is inseparable
from grasping, or taking an attitude toward that which we see. Imagination enables
us to distance ourselves from the immediate present. When imagining, we stand back
and distance ourselves from any object. In her chapter, Margaret Olin teases out the
implications of an “attentive” reading of imagination.
For Sartre, the imagination is never planted from the outside. It comes from an
internal site of complete freedom apart from real life, the exigencies of immediate
perception. It happens in that moment when we are able to step back and envision
someone or something in a generalized sense. Even though we may relate through the
image to the object of representation, even confuse a representation with that which it
represents, yet the object, the person to whom we relate, is not an image and need not
be compared with the image that we create. Because imagination deals with an atten-
tive relationship rather than with facts, it, like feeling, cannot be mistaken or coerced.
Hence it represents, for Sartre, not just one way, but the quintessential way in which
humans experience freedom.22
 Introduction xix
Photography is for the most part absent from the concepts of imagination discussed
above, present only in the occasional general statement, either because the writings pre-
dated photography, or their authors did not express an ongoing and consistent inter-
est in the medium. Philosophers and other thinkers who started their philosophical
deliberations from photography, however, quickly found it necessary to address imagi-
nation. Unsurprisingly, their definitions of imagination take over some of the assump-
tions of the philosophical traditions addressed above, but also exhibit some interesting
deviations from them, predominantly based on a technical conception and understand-
ing of the medium. One of the most prominent among such theorists is Vilém Flusser.
Flusser developed a set of interrelated concepts and terms that enabled him to
formulate photography’s revolutionary impact on the world.23 His understanding of
imagination is closely related to his understanding of photography as an “apparatus”
that transforms phenomena into codified information. Photography is a subset of the
“image,” its effect in the world a particular variety of the process Flusser defines as
“imagination.” For Flusser, the image is a two-dimensional abstraction not just of the
three spatial dimensions, but most importantly of the fourth one, “time.” The act of
projecting this abstraction back into the 4-dimensional world is “imagination.” The
image, however, can be decoded by a critical viewer. At one time the image, when
projected back into the world with no critical distance, became confused with the
world itself, as though the image stepped in front of the world and took its place.
This erased especially the fourth dimension, thereby denying time. The “magic” of the
image resulted in idolatry. At this critical juncture, linear writing developed from the
deconstructed line of the image. It seemed to restore time, and certainly inaugurated
history, although texts do not in themselves signify (and give access to) the world; they
signify the images that are “torn” to create them. Eventually, texts themselves become
the source of idolatry. When this phase became critical, the “technical image,” of
which photography is a subset, was born, itself a child of scientific texts. In this post-
historical age, technical images are difficult to decode because they seem to signify that
which causes them. Time is cyclical; images once more are magical, and dangerous.24
Flusser’s account reverses the relationship between photography and reality: while
one might once have thought that photography documents things and events in the
world, it now causes them to happen.25 “The goal of the political demonstration is
not to change the world but to be photographed. The goal of the battle that has been
fought this week is to be filmed.”26 Flusser’s view applies a fantastic notion of imagina-
tion to photography, and gives it a performative element: that humans are motivated
by the contents of photographs.
Even discourse directly on photography tends to pair it with something that we
might call imagination, but the relationship between imagination and photography
changes in accord with the differing meanings of its two terms. Sometimes the two
terms are at odds: As the prototypical exemplar of modern technology in the area of
vision, photography has been viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagina-
tion, producing more reliable representations of reality by blocking out caprice and
misapprehension. It was this view of photography as uncreative if not brainless, that
once blocked the efforts of photographers to use their medium artistically. Sometimes
imagination and photography are allies. Photography is seen as a way to realize a
creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. The landscape
photographer Ansel Adams harnessed imagination directly in service to photography
when he used the term “visualization” to explain his view of the photographic process.
xx Introduction
His influential “zone system” that matched camera settings to chemicals, paper and
developing techniques depended on the photographer’s ability to visualize (imagine)
the final print.
But the magical potential of photography’s relation to imagination can influence
photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative invest-
ments and displacements, to affect reality itself, sometimes so much so that the real
object has to be revisualized and even altered to meet its photographic depiction.
Hence, photography can “serve as a laboratory for social reconstruction,” often
implying that photographs can be interchangeable with that which they represent.27
Like “imagination” the word “photography” also covers a number of subcatego-
ries. Most familiar are those that use cameras conceived in a sense as perspective
machines serving to point at the surfaces of objects in the world and produce more
or less recognizable images of them. Some of these images can be manipulated—by
manipulating the subject or by manipulating the medium—to produce images that
originate in or are embellished by fantasy. But other means of reproduction seek to
show things that one cannot see with the naked eye: the insides of things or objects
that have been destroyed and been made visible again through photographic manipu-
lation and restoration, composite photography and the like. Furthermore, photog-
raphy itself has evolved since its invention by Daguerre, from unique polished metal
plates to reproducible negative-positive images using glass or paper to digital images
that are often visible only on a screen and never printed at all. Some media use photo-
graphic techniques in the process of creating something that is not a photograph, like
a film or a hologram, and others use them solely for the purpose of collecting data, as
do X-rays and various digital technologies.

***

As they explore photography and imagination in different social spheres and var-
ied functions, the chapters in this volume reveal the dissimilar and unstable mean-
ings of both “photography” and “imagination”. The two terms intersect differently
in a photographers’ quest for political change (Stimson) than in a scientist’s genetic
or physical-anthropological publication (Morris-Reich). The different assumptions
of photographers, intermediaries and end-users as well as the irreducible differences
between individuals underlie differing interpretations of imagination and photography
and make it impossible to formulate exhaustively their investments and responses.
A performative orientation helps to acknowledge the range and degree of imagina-
tive investment in photography, and to account for the absence of stable boundaries
between the social spheres in which photographs move. Photographs taken in one
context drift to and are easily used in another context or sphere for different purposes.
(as Maimon shows, for instance) Photographs taken by an art student for who knows
what purpose during a political rally can be forgotten for decades and, when they ree-
merge, serve other purposes as historical documents, as illustrations of photographic
theory and as art. (Olin) Landmark historical photographs can serve the exploration
of modern visual decoding technologies. (Siegel) The ease with which photography
lends itself to endless forms of multidirectional repurposing and exchange within and
across social spheres, in which photography intersects in manifold ways with imagina-
tion, is arguably an inherent quality of photography. Imagination is relevant to any
interpretation of photography, but, as is built into the argument developed in this
volume, this relevance evades and resists rigid and universal formulae.
 Introduction xxi
In three sections, this volume tackles meanings that have been attached to pho-
tography and imagination. The first section, Techniques of Imagination, focuses on
technologies. Exploring different contexts in the history of photography, the chapters
collected here show that different kinds of photographic technology shape the imagi-
nation differently because of their technological dispositions with regard to a par-
ticular range of subjects, objects, contexts, and markets. Taking his cue from Walter
Benjamin’s idea of the “optical unconscious,” Hagi Kenaan explores imagination’s
investment in photographic technology by evoking photography’s “invisibles” in the
framework of the conditions of possibility of photographic visibility. An understand-
ing of the relation between imagination and photography demands an understanding
of photography’s relation to multiple and diverse “invisibles”—the microscopic, and
macroscopic, the temporal instant, the panoramic, the radically strange, the metaphys-
ical—that are present in photographs and which relate to a structural invisibility basic
to photography as a whole. Jaś Elsner casts his lens on photographic conservation.
His subject, the ancient Greek Artemidorus Papyrus, was first published in 1998, and
is now no longer visible. Only painstaking restoration from numerous fragments, of
which no published photographic record has been retained, enable one to “see” it, and
it is hardly available to direct study except through the precarious means of digitally
enhanced photographs and digital reconstructions. Mary Bergstein engages the poet-
ics of the X-ray, which uncovers objects not otherwise visible using the photographic
magic of science, and seems to create a kind of immaterial world that can then be
extended to other realms, such as spiritualism. Immersive techniques and experiences
are investigated selfconsciously using twenty-first-century technologies to analyze the
experiences offered by the earlier techniques. Steffen Siegel begins his inquiry by look-
ing at a recent effort to use technology to try to find mostly invisible details in one
of the first daguerreotypes. Linking this effort back to the first public reactions to
Daguerre’s invention, he finds that the supposed “inexhaustibility” of photography
seems to leave no room for imagination. He argues, however, that even though photo-
graphic information seems to be just “there,” it actually results from mentally driven
processes. Imagination plays a crucial part in the production of these images. Meir
Wigoder analyzes viewing through a stereoscope. Challenging traditional discussions
of immersive experience (i.e. the viewer is unaware of his surroundings while looking
into the image’s depth), he argues that the additional use of maps and books to expli-
cate the travel images was no less significant for triggering the imagination than the
act of viewing itself.
Part 2, Imagining and Encountering Others, focuses on imagined relations. The
role, or more precisely roles played by imagination in photography, cannot be fully
isolated from the roles imagination plays with regard to the world in which the activ-
ity of photography takes place. The chapters in this section illustrate several inter-
related modes of the constitutive role played by photography in the encounter with
others in historical reality. Britta Lange shows how the photographic engagement of
imagination that we might regard as the most conventional kind opens a space for
human contact. In 1896 Karl May, German author of popular westerns and other
exotic genres, assumed the garb of the well-known characters of his own novels—Old
Shatterhand, Kara ben Nemsi and so on—for a series of exoticizing photographic self
portraits. The photographs fused the writer and the written, the economic world and
the world of imagination, to create a new fiction blending the real and the imaginary.
Interestingly, some of his readers also sent May photographs of themselves in costume.
The result was a meeting in disguise between reader and author, facilitated by the
xxii Introduction
fictitious real—or the authentication of the fabricated—created by photography. By
studying the exploration by a contemporary artist of a renowned African American
studio photographer of the 1920s, Shawn Michelle Smith shows how deep layers of
photography’s cultural memory can suggestively be brought back into play. In his
study of Nazi racial photography, Amos Morris-Reich addresses the perplexing way
in which photographs can alter the way their viewers see and treat the subjects of
the photographs, although no change in the subjects themselves has occurred. Using
photographs from a gay liberation rally that took place in Chicago in April, 1970,
Margaret Olin compares photographing to looking, viewing photography as the prac-
tice of giving form to an imagined relation between the photographer and the subject
of the photograph, with the camera in the role of the gaze. The consequences of this
view of the role of imagination for the ethics of photography concern both the quality
of the “look,” whether it is the look of a witness or a bystander, and of the dissemina-
tion of the resulting photograph. In the role of the look, photography shapes and even
creates a relation in the world outside the image, while the role of dissemination is to
shape the memory of events, and, in turn, affect events themselves.
The last section, Transformation, centers on the concept of imagination as a demon
that comes from outside and effects a change in the real world. These chapters dem-
onstrate that the shift to a performative framework brings to the surface imagination’s
central role in historical, present and no doubt future attempts to employ photography
to change the world. As components of reality that circulate within it as well as seem-
ing to represent it, photographs can act like and with imagination. All three of the
chapters in this section seek to use photography to visualize a changed future. Focusing
on the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, in the midst of violent clashes with Israeli military
on the border between Gaza and Israel, Maimon studies a group of Israeli activists
who use photography to imagine the return of Palestinians to their homes inside Israel.
Lee studies photographs of a Korean photographer taken during his military service,
to show how his photographs of young male recruits delicately unsettle and queer the
hetero-normal imagination. Photography that can affect the way the future is viewed is
also the occasion for Blake Stimson’s meditation on allegorical and symbolic forms of
image-making. The allegorical form in which Paul Strand made his first work engages
imagination only to breathe animate life into inanimate things and concepts and to
endow them with seemingly permanent and unchangeable agency, intention and folly
not their own. Conversely the symbolic form of his later thinking harnessed imagina-
tion’s larger capacity to engage the world symbolically. Symbolism, Stimson argues,
is a productive faculty that can imagine a new reality and also imagine how it can
use photography to put it into effect. Finally, an epilogue explores a thread that runs
through all the chapters, as well as this introduction: the concept of the “image.”
While photography may and hopefully will, contribute to the creation of a new reality,
the “image” may have bearing on the future of the study of photography itself.

***

Photography and Imagination has been a multi-year endeavor. Our thoughts on the
subject began to take shape in a conference on “The Photographic Imagination”
organized by the two editors and Vered Maimon, and held in Tel Aviv in May, 2014.
The editors wish to express their gratitude toward Vered as well as to the participants
in the conference, some of whom also contributed to the volume, and to the audiences
 Introduction xxiii
of the panels. We would also like to thank the staff of the Bucerius Institute at Haifa
University including Lea Dror and Amir Bar-On. When this volume itself began to
materialize, we were the beneficiaries of the Research and Academic Program at the
Clark Art Institute. In 2017, the Clark generously provided all the contributors with
time to gather and to meld our disparate papers into what we hope is a stronger and
more cohesive volume, and did so in warmly inviting, beautiful surroundings. For
this weekend, which they organized painstakingly, and a light, hospitable touch in
a moment of transition for the Clark, we are especially indebted to Deborah Fehr,
Christopher Heuer, and Kristen Oehlrich. Our editor at Routledge Press, Isabella Vitti,
has guided the task of publishing our volume, with her assistant Katie Armstrong.
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments on the pro-
posal. Our thoughts have been honed, along the way, in conversations with many of
our colleagues and students. Margaret Olin regards the participation in discussions,
by the students in two editions of a seminar on Theories of Imagination and Visual
Perception, in 2017 and 2018, as essential for the later development of the ideas in this
volume. And our families, although they may be happy to see the end of this project,
have nevertheless lived with it amicably and with grace.

Notes
1 “The imagination is a quasi-divine faculty that perceives first of all, apart from any philo-
sophical methods, the intimate and secret relations of things, their correspondences and
analogies” (trans. M. Olin). Charles Baudelaire, “Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” in
Edgar Allan Poe, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris:
Michel Lévy Frères, 1857), xvi.
2 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
3 For an overview of performativity, see James Loxley, Performativity (London and New
York: Routledge, 2007); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), as well as Butler’s Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), where she elabo-
rates on her theory of performativity. A third branch of the field concerns performance
studies, which when it deals with entertainment, is directly relevant to the cases collected
in this volume.
4 John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Henry Holt: New York, 1938).
5 Aristotle De Anima.
6 Vered Maimon has contributed to the discourse on the relationship between Kant’s phi-
losophy and photographic theory. See Singular Images Failed Copies: William Henry Fox
Talbot and the Early Photograph (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015), 52–62.
7 Genesis 30:32–43.
8 For example, Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, Fauna (Cordoba: Junta de Andalucia,
1989).
9 For example, in Alison Ferris, “Disembodied Spirits: Spirit Photography and Rachel
Whiteread’s Ghost,” Art Journal 62 (2003): 47. Annette Hill uses both terms in Parnormal
Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture (London, New York: Routledge,
2011). See also Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 8–14.
10 Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (London: Sampson
Low; Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1889), and Death of Naturalistic Photography, pam-
phlet (London, 1890).
11 Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 33–51, see esp. 34–35.
 xxiv Introduction
12 See Birgit Meyer, “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations:
Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding,” in Birgitta Meyer, ed.,
Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2009), esp. 6–11.
13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Notes on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York, 1981), 67–69; also Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s
‘Mistaken Identity,” Representations 80 (Autumn, 2002), where among other arguments,
the suggestion is made that one reason that Barthes did not reproduce the photograph is
that it did not exist in the form in which he described it.
14 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in the
Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, London: W.W.
Norton, 2006), 74–81.
15 Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, trans. John B. Brough
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 570, quoted in Victor Biceaga, “Picturing Phenomena:
Husserl on Photography,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 41 (2010),
81. Biceaga draws out important implications for photography from Husserl’s writing on
the image.
16 Edmund Husserl, “Fifth Meditation: Uncovering of the sphere of transcendental being
as monadological intersubjectivity,” in Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrech: Kluwer, 1950; 1999), esp. 92–105.
17 For example, see Stella Baraklianou, “Pasearse: Duration and the Act of Photographing,”
in John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille, ed., Bergson and the Art of Immanence:
Painting, Photography, Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 131–147.
18 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 171. See the discussion of Bergson in relation to photogra-
phy in Sarah J. Kember, “The Virtual Life of Photography,” Photographies 1 (September
2008): 175–188.
19 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris:
Gallimard, 1940; 1986), 21. Translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological
Psychology of the Imagination trans. Jonathan Webber (London and New York:
Routledge, 2004), 7.
20 Ibid, 5. In this, Sartre is pursuing a long discourse about memory and imagination, based
in empiricism. Cf. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), esp. 104–149.
21 Sartre frequently quotes Matter and Memory in The Imaginary, quoting for example, a
“celebrated passage” from it on p. 27.
22 Sartre, The Imaginary, 179–188.
23 What follows is largely taken from Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography,
trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1983).
24 In the last of his trilogy on communication theory, Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have
a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011),
Flusser determines that writing has little or no future.
25 Vilém Flusser, “Das Politische im Zeitalter der technischen Bilder,” Volkszeitung, August
17, 1990.
26 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 56.
27 Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press, 2006), 17.

View publication stats