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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
Philosophy of Photography - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
- Editorial
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- Articles
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The time(s) of the photographed
By Reza TavakolThe relationship between the photographic and optical images and time has been the subject of great deal of debate. Despite their differences, what many of these considerations have in common is their focus on the receiver, whether mechanical (the camera), biological (the eye–brain as the optical receiver), social or the memory and imagination of the observer. My aim here is to shift the emphasis from the receiver to the object or vista that is photographed or viewed and to explore how the constraints implied by our modern understanding of the Universe, concerning space and time, impact on the way we perceive photographic and optical images. Viewed from this perspective, photographs can be treated as light projections of sections of the four-dimensional observable world onto two-dimensional spatial photographic or viewing surfaces. I shall show that despite the severe reduction that such projections imply, these modern considerations have the important consequence of bestowing a complex temporality upon optical images, including photographs. This realization dramatically changes the way we view photographs. I give examples of this rich temporality through considerations of terrestrial images – and more significantly images of the Sky, where these temporal effects are far more pronounced.
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- Photowork
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Landscape as a twist of thought: A line of enquiry
More LessHow can an art practice based upon lens imaging help us to question landscape as a pictorial category fixed in space and time? This article proposes that we practise landscape as an ongoing process that always surpasses human spatial and temporal framing while enfolding the activity of the human within it. Starting with reference to a specific geographic, geological and environmental site, the article tracks a process of situated making using the smartphone camera as the fulcrum of a performative activity.
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- Encyclopaedia
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- Photowork
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- Articles
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Miki Kratsman and Shabtai Pinchevsky: The Anti-Mapping project
More LessThis article introduces an evolving project of visual mapping initiated by Israeli photographers Miki Kratsman and Shabtai Pinchevsky under the title of Anti-Mapping. Placing this critical project in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the article examines how Kratsman and Pinchevsky develop complex, strategic and critically sophisticated approaches to visualizing the conditions that produce victims of violence and that place Palestinian villages under threat of destruction. The article explores their strategic, technical and critical approaches to the difficulties of representing particular contested places in this geopolitical context.
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Between real and virtual, map and terrain: ScanLab Projects, Post-lenticular Landscapes
More LessLondon-based company ScanLab Projects is a multi-disciplinary commercial collaboration between architect, artist, coders and designers who utilize technologies surrounding 3D laser scanning in their practice. Inherent in the manner their projects are pitched is through reference to the photographic as technological process. Central to their engagement with the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanning apparatus is a consideration of the relationality between virtual or digital object and what could be determined as extrinsic or ‘real’ terrain. In Post-lenticular Landscapes, 2017, ScanLab created a series of LiDAR scans of Yosemite National Park. The landscape, presented as a stereoscopic film work where the spectator flies through an ephemeral black and white point cloud, is contextualized relationally to a certain photo-historical context and lineage: As Yosemite is synonymous with the advent of photographic process through the work of Muybridge, Watkins, Woods and Adams, the work revisits an archetypal image of the American sublime. In this text, I unpack ScanLab’s usage and conceptualization of LiDAR scans referentially to an understanding of the photographic. By considering how ScanLab frames our understanding of the project through the technological apparatus, the text attempts to problematize the scans by reading them through a particular art historic heritage. In this context, I posit alternate ways of reading the work, specifically through reference to the image of Yosemite that has proliferated across the desktops of Apple computers since 2014. Furthermore, through a reading of metonymy in the writing of Eelco Runia, the eerie as understood by Mark Fisher and in relation to Lev Manovich’s description of photorealism, I propose that the future of the mediation and understandings of machinic vision are to be thought with a reconsidered notion of the photographic.
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- Book Reviews
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Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019)
More LessReview of: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019)
London and New York: Verso, 656 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78873-571-1, p/bk, £30.00
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Performing Image, Isobel Harbison (2019)
More LessReview of: Performing Image, Isobel Harbison (2019)
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 256 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-26203-921-5, h/bk, £32.00
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Memory, Bernadette Mayer (2020)
By Louisa LeeReview of: Memory, Bernadette Mayer (2020)
New York: Siglio Press, 336 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-93822-125-5, h/bk, $45.00
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