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- Volume 12, Issue 1, 2021
Philosophy of Photography - Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2021
Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2021
- Editorial
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Editorial
This editorial introduces the contents of the double issue Philosophy of Photography 12.1&2, and outlines key thematic connections between the articles, artworks and interview published in it. The editorial also announces the themes and contents of two future issues of the journal.
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- Interview
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Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal: Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey
Authors: Shona Illingworth and Anthony DowneyCan we deploy creative practices to critically address the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies, neo-colonial expansionism, environmental degradation and the lethal threat of drone warfare? Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey examine these and other questions in relation to the recent publication of Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2022). Edited by Downey, the book includes discussion and documentation of two major bodies of work by Illingworth, including Topologies of Air (2021) and Lesions in the Landscape (2015), alongside an extended series of essays that analyse the psychological and environmental impact of military, industrial and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space. Employing interdisciplinary research and collaborative processes, Illingworth’s practice, as detailed in the discussion below, uses creative methodologies to visualize and interrogate this proliferating exploitation of airspace. The conversation between Illingworth and Downey also outlines the work of the Airspace Tribunal, an ongoing series of public hearings that brings together diverse disciplines, methodologies, knowledge and lived experiences to propose a new human right that will counter the colonization of the sky and, in time, protect individuals, communities and ecologies from ever-increasing threats from above.
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- Roundtable Discussion
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The promise of photography: Scale, measure and proportion in a conflicted visual milieu
Authors: Andrew Fisher, Anke Hennig, Bernd Behr, Daniel Rubinstein, Martin Charvát, Peter Szendy and Tomáš DvořákThis roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started out from the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood.
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- Articles
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One face, millions of faces: Computer vision as hyperobject
By Sheung YiuBorrowing Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobject, this article explores questions of network and scale in generative adversarial networks (GAN) images. In this context, the term network refers to the omnipresence of algorithmic images today and their significant impact on our lives. Such images are massively distributed in time and space beyond any sensible human-scale. Scale, in this context, denotes the relations between different operational layers of algorithmic images, such as the pictorial layer in contrast to the data layer. An algorithmic image is simultaneously a visual image, a symbol, a data point and part of a mass visual milieu. Its meaning is thus polymorphic and can, arguably, never be exhausted. The article explores these terms through analysis of the website www.thispersondoesnotexist.com.
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Jpegs: Thomas Ruff and the horror of digital photography
By Ian RothwellThis article analyses the aesthetics of digital compression as revealed in Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs series of photographs (2004–07). These images exhibit a poor standard of digital picture resolution fixed as large-scale, high-quality, lustrous C-type photographic prints. With reference to Vilém Flusser’s writing on photography, I argue that Ruff’s work discloses a ‘horror of digital photography’: a system of automated representation, which inverts our relationship to the photographic image.
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Afterimages and the synaesthesia of photography
More LessThis article takes as its focus the concept of the ‘afterimage’ and its relationship to memory, the synaesthetic experience of perception and the multisensory turn within the study of photographic images. Afterimages have consistently been described as phenomena of visual persistence where, optically, a recorded moment of the past leaks into the present and remains visible before us on our retinas. By recasting this originary understanding of an afterimage as simply a ghostly, optical occurrence and insisting that the phenomenon exceeds the visual and is rather an intersensorial occurrence, I seek to present how encounters with images stay with us in powerful ways and across many senses at once. As an intervention within the field of image theory and photography studies that builds upon the relatively recent turn away from prioritizing visuality and instead shifting towards multisensoriality – what we might also term as the ‘more-than visual’ – this piece proposes that if images exceed the visual and carry with them physical, haptic, sonic and affective qualities, then perhaps the afterimage is not something that we merely see but also what we can feel and hear and move-with. Perhaps the afterimage carries an intensity and an afterlife which lingers in our minds and can take hold of our entire body and our senses, composing and recomposing them over time. By pairing such inquiries alongside the narrative, literary and poetic works of Dionne Brand and Nathaniel Mackey – both of whom write of the intersensorial quality of photographs and afterimages with a particular kind of lively openness – I am hoping to intervene into the ongoing ‘more-than visual’ turn within the field of image theory by infusing it with a narrative-oriented synaesthetic vocabulary.
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Object-oriented photography: A speculative essay on the photography of essence
Authors: Bob Ryan and Alison PriceIn this article, we discuss the insights object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers in understanding the photographic process. Following Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena and Heidegger’s Geviert, Harman’s OOO focuses on the real versus sensory aspects of all objects of experience. In our analysis, we explore its implications for intentionality, signification and revelation in photography. OOO locates being within all objects and stands in opposition to the post-Cartesian correlationism influential in the continental tradition. In Heidegger’s terms, the still camera exhibits both presence and readiness at hand. However, this readiness at hand is so ubiquitous that it is easy to overlook what makes it unique amongst the tools at our disposal. We argue that in the field of visual experience, the camera does what Kant believed impossible. It has the potential to reduce epistemic loss and transform the phenomenology of conscious experience into the noumenology of non-conscious awareness of the real object.
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- Photowork
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Excerpts from Everything Is a Projection (2020–present): Digital photography and 3D photogrammetry
By Sheung YiuIn three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics, photography is treated not as the final product but as data to be extracted, information to be mapped onto and raw material to augment 3D models. Texture maps, normal maps and bump maps, created from photographic data, describe the reflectance properties of an object in a virtual scene. They give instructions to the render engine to calculate the correct pixel value, generating a near imperceptibly natural scene for the human eye. Computer graphics utilizes a network of images taken from different perspectives and at different scales to achieve photorealism. The project investigates one of many algorithmic visual systems that act as a backbone of virtual reality and gaming.
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- Book Reviews
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Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman (2021)
More LessReview of: Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman (2021)
London: Verso, 272 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78873-908-5, p/bk, £14.99
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Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi (eds) (2020)
More LessReview of: Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi (eds) (2020)
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 296 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78453-732-6, h/bk, £95.00
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Photography after Capitalism, Ben Burbridge (2020)
By Dan CommonsReview of: Photography after Capitalism, Ben Burbridge (2020)
London: Goldsmiths Press, 240 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-91268-599-8, h/bk, £34.00
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