Philosophy of Photography - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010

This paper approaches the problem of the ontology of the photographic image post-digitalization historically, via a conception of photography as the historical totality of photographic forms. It argues, first, that photography is not best understood as a particular art or medium, but rather in terms of the form of the image it produces; second, that the photographic image is the main social form of the digital image (the current historically dominant form of the image in general); and third, that there is no fundamental ontological distinction regarding indexicality between photographically generated digital images and those of chemically based photography. The anxiety about the real produced by digital imagery has its origins elsewhere, in the ontological peculiarities of the social form of value in societies based on relations of exchange. Distinguishing between the event of capture and the event of visualization, it is argued that it is in its potential for an infinite multiplication of visualizations that the distinctiveness of the digital image lies. In the digital image, the infinite possibilities for social exchange generated by the abstraction of value from use finds an equivalent visual form.

Jacques Rancire's theory of the sensible is an attempt to frame and secure the relationship between politics and aesthetics, art and design on the same surface. Accordingly, the reconstruction of the sensible appearances of the world of the built environment, of the dcor of the sensible, as Rancire describes it is more than the negation of bourgeois appearances in the name of either a radical aesthetics or a radical politics; it is, rather, the common invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come. In this respect Rancire's theory has much in common with the historic avant-garde. Following the constructivism of Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, representation here is not just the symbolic life of pictures, but the very materiality of things and their relations. Yet Rancire has little time for the active politicization of art, insofar this destroys, he asserts, the potential democracy of art. This leaves his constructivism in a weakened critical position. This essay explores the hiatuses and limitations of Rancire's cultural theory.

More than 150 years have passed since the invention of photography, and we are still finding it hard to accept that the photographic procedure is not as much about the recording of objects as it is about the recording of a different experience of time. Seen in this way, the photograph can reveal to us the limitations of our own perception of time and a glimpse of another time scale. This article traces the evolution of the idea of photographic time in philosophy from Plato to St. Augustine, to Bergson.

You've been framed Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, John Tagg (2009) Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 392 pp., Hardback, ISBN 0816642877, 51.50, Paperback, ISBN 0816642885, 15.67

Becoming photographic Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time, Damian Sutton (2009) Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 296 pp., ISBN 9780816647392, Paperback, 15.50

The lure of the crime scene Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond (2009) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 256 pp., ISBN 0262013428, Hardback, 14

Re rereading Camera Lucida Photography Degree Zero, Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Geoffrey Batchen (ed.) (2009) Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 320, ISBN 026201358, Hardback, 22.95

Conference Report Humanising Photography, Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies (organized in partnership with Autograph ABP), 2527 September 2009