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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Philosophy of Photography - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
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Between nature and culture: Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelten and how photography shapes our worlds
More LessAbstractThis article addresses traditional perceptions about photography's position between nature and culture and concomitant schools of thinking focusing pre-dominantly on the photographic image as a form of visual representation. Aiming to develop an alternative perspective it considers a biosemiotic approach and turns to Jakob von Uexküll's model of subjective sentient worlds (Umwelt) that critically dissolves the perceived dualism between nature and culture that has also underpinned most theoretical thinking about photography in the past. Today photography is largely embedded into social media platforms and their interlinked digital networks, which holds far-reaching consequences for a medium that in this current form can only be fully understood if it is considered as a form of embodied material practice. Aiming to understand some of the complex manifestations this technical evolution entails the article further considers the relevance of recent non-representational concepts arising out of cognition theory and cultural geography and uses the 'selfie' as a 'theoretical object'.
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Photographic art and technology in contemporary India
More LessAbstractThe algorithmic turn in photography raises the question of whether an algorithmically generated image is even a photograph at all. This paradox is abundant on India's urban streets, where the pedestrian or road user is met with giant photo saturated flex hoardings printed with political and community messages and photo-shopped portraits of gods, chief ministers and party workers. In this article, attention to photo-based political posters alongside art practices sharing common elements of digital capture and postproduction contextualizes a reading of technologically produced visual landscapes in the South Indian city of Bangalore. Informed by Vilèm Flusser, the techno-materiality of hoardings are interpreted as visual practices whose reliance on Microsoft and Adobe softwares reveal more than the semiotic information that is ostensibly transmitted; in so doing the extent to which photography is a useful entry point for assessing the visuality in which we're currently living and how this gets locally inflected in the case of India is explored.
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Adrian Piper's aesthetic agency: Photography as catalysis for resisting neo-liberal competitive paradigms
More LessAbstractContemporary neo-liberal society is ruled by the market. Davies, Chen and Lentin and Titley show that its objectification and categorization founds a competitive notion of agency that disables subjective construction of self and intersubjective understanding of the world. As the market's rules and norms are set by white patriarchy, its competitive paradigm structurally disadvantages others. Art too is objectified and categorized by neo-liberal institutions, equally embedded in white patriarchal market structures and severely limiting democratic public access to a diverse artistic field, argue hooks, Mercer and Piper. Yet, Piper's artwork shows, art holds emancipatory potential. Defined as transforming experience, its ambiguity provides a structure for constituting agentic subjectivity and intersubjective signification processes, defying objective/objectifying market workings. Photography's specific qualities allow Piper to democratize access to the paradigm she proposes. Her artistic choices may thus found the potential to publicly construct a notion of aesthetic agency as resistance to the neo-liberal market.
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Photographic manipulation in the health, clinical and biomedical sciences
Authors: Catherine Schneider, Sydney Hoffmann and Graham D. RowlesAbstractPhotography has become a pervasive component of contemporary communication. Recent technological advances in creating and manipulating images have provided renewed impetus to decades-long debates on use of photographs in science. With increase in the potential for inappropriate image manipulation, fears about misrepresentation have heightened concern among journal editors and scholars about the 'accuracy' of published images. We discuss how science has responded to growing concerns surrounding falsification and inaccuracy of photography. We document progress in implementing a variety of complementary approaches to addressing the problem. These include digital forensics, photo member checking and the implementation of codes of ethics to enhance the veracity of published photographs in science research. We conclude by acknowledging the irreducible conflict likely to remain between use of the photograph as a creative work of art and employment of this medium as a source of information in the progress of science.
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This misery of light – light as destruction in the work of Lina Selander
More LessAbstractIn this article I look at two works by Swedish video artist Lina Selander and explore how underlying visual patterns unfold in these works that are connected to certain worldly phenomena. Borrowing from Jacques Derrida, I describe the tendency of being en mal d'archive as an obsession to structure the world into particular recognizable patterns. I argue that Selander's works can be understood as the unfolding of such structures, the result being that the very impulse itself, the obsession Derrida speaks of, comes to the forefront. In several of Selander's works, light is explored both as a basis and prerequisite for photography and as a metaphor for this potentially destructive desire for all-encompassing knowledge and structure. As such, I argue, the unfolding that takes place in her works can be understood as paradoxically increasing the shadows – as a way of undoing the totalizing effect of light and articulating modes of not knowing or mystery in relation to the phenomena explored.
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Where is the photography of Non-Photography?
By Ed WhittakerAbstractFrançois Laruelle's writing on Non-Photography is examined from its ontological condition to its desired form of a unity derived from the work of Kant, discussing precisely how the logic of transcendence and the ontology of immanence central to Laruelle's theory impact on how the photographic image is incontrovertibly involved with Kant's paradox of appearance and reality. In a context of burgeoning technoscience, which lays bare the meaning of Non-Photography for the seemingly impossible reversion to actual photography, the article goes on to consider Photo-Fiction in the context of the Real of science now yoked to an economy of technical models. But by foreclosing the Kantian Real by fractal–virtual ratio, does not this science reify the Real of Identity and displace real photography with a photography in the Real? The article thus questions how Laruelle's' thesis hangs together in terms of its cause and the contingency of effect that infuses Laruelle's radical aesthetic.
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